Honey
The gate went up in October.
Two posts of good Missouri oak, a crossbar, and iron letters hung from the center that spell out StillWater Place in a font I chose because it looked like it had always been there. Kragen helped me set the posts. He is, it turns out, extremely useful for post-setting, which is one of approximately forty things I’ve discovered about him in the months since a Tuesday afternoon changed the shape of everything.
The kit sale paid for it. He moved in the week after the hooks went up and found three hundred unfilled orders waiting on the bench and rolled up his sleeves without being asked. We spent two weeks at the workshop table together; his hands learning the kit sequence faster than I expected because his hands learneverything fast. I watched him work and thought: this is what it looks like. Not dramatic. Just a male at your workbench who knows where you keep the sandpaper.
We fixed the fence line too, and the soft spot on the workshop floor that I’d been stepping around for years. The rest went into a savings account I’ve named in my head, without saying it out loud, after something Kragen sang about in a final verse I heard through an open door.
From the kitchen window, when the morning light comes through the oaks at the right angle, I can see the gate at the end of the drive. StillWater Place. His clan, my land.
Behind me, in the living room, the piano produces a careful sequence of notes. He’s been at it for twenty minutes, working the same passage, his big hands finding the keys with the patience he brings to everything he decides to learn. The stool is holding. I reinforced the spindle mechanism with a bracket I fabricated in the workshop from a piece of flat stock, and it has now survived four months of daily use without complaint, which I consider one of my finer engineering achievements.
The napkin is above the piano. Matted in a piece of my grandmother’s lace, framed large, the fivevelarablooming in their loose cluster just as he drew them that first Thursday in my workshop, in under two minutes, from a memory of a hillside he hadn’t stood on in eight years. Beside it, also framed, the handwritten lyrics to a song called “Generations,” in his hand, on the paper he used the night it finished itself in his apartment.
He comes into the kitchen in the endearing way he comes into rooms—ducking the doorframe without looking, filling the space, completely at home in a house that was not built for him and has never once made him feel it.
“How does it sound?” he asks.
“Better than last week.”
“That’s not a high bar.”
“It’s an accurate one.”
He comes to stand behind me at the counter, holds me around the waist, and looks out the window at the gate.
“StillWater Place,” he says.
“StillWater Place,” I say.
Neither of us says anything else. Outside, the Missouri November is doing what it does: the oaks stripped of their leaves now, the light coming through differently, the creek still running down the hill the way it always runs. The turkeys came through the yard on Tuesday. He watched them from the kitchen window with a wariness I find disproportionate and endearing in equal measure.
His arms loosen as he straightens, and I turn around.
“We have a show tonight,” I say.
“We do.”
I look at the gate through the window one more time. “I shouldn’t be nervous.”
“No,” he agrees.
“I’m a little nervous.”
He looks at me with an indulgent expression. “You’ve been playing that dulcimer since you were seventeen. The room isn’t going to know what hit it.”
“The room knows you,” I say. “It doesn’t know me.”
“It will,” he says. Simple. Like a fact that has already happened and is just waiting on the calendar.
I pick up my coat from the chair.
The Taproom smells like another world.
Rhazgar arrived two hours before anyone else and took over the back corner with a cast-iron pot the size of a small planet and several covered dishes that have been filling the room with smells no one here has a name for. Now he’s standing beside his setup with his arms crossed and his face arranged into the careful neutrality of someone who has decided not to want things visibly. He is the most observant person I have ever met who is also the least interested in being observed.
“He always this quiet?” Walt asks me, appearing at my elbow.
