“Nothing.” I move to check the taps. When I come back, he hasn’t moved. “It’s nothing, Grulk.”
“Is it the dulcimer?”
I definitely shouldn’t have opened my mouth about that.
“It’s a commission,” I say. “I needed a wider neck. It’s being built.”
“By who?”
“A luthier.”
Something happens in his eyes that I don’t like. “A luthier,” he repeats, in the tone of a male filing a location for later use. “And is this luthier—”
“A craftsperson. Who is building me an instrument. That’s the complete story.”
He drinks his beer and looks away when he sets it down. That’s how he does it, backs off just enough to come at things from a different direction.
“The dulcimer is a beautiful instrument,” he says. “It has a particular sound. Very—” he searches for the word. “Still. It doesn’t perform. It just is what it is.”
“I know what a dulcimer sounds like.”
“I’m saying it suits you. Not the bar version of you.” He lifts his glass to encompass the room, the empty stage, the chairs on the tables. “The other version.”
I look at him.
“Go home, Grulk.”
“Of course.” He finishes the last of his Grim Dark and sets the glass in the rack himself, which he only does when he knows he’s pushed as far as he’s getting. “Tell the luthier I said hello.”
“I’m not telling anyone anything.”
He smiles and lets himself out. I lock the door behind him and stand in the empty bar.
Walt built this room, and I’ve been building it alongside him for eight years. It shows in the way the place holds itself after close, not empty, just resting. I do a final walk-through out of habit: pull the taps, check the back door, turn off the light over the stage.
I pick up the guitar case from behind the bar where it spent the evening and shrug it onto my back.
The walk home is seven minutes. I take ten.
Monday is in four days.
Chapter Ten
Honey
Monday morning, I make coffee, carry it to the workshop, and sit on the stool by the door, wanting to be in the space without working in it. The dulcimer is on the bench where I left it Friday, angled perfectly to catch the morning light. I tell myself I left it there on purpose. I don’t examine what that means.
Local pickups are one of my favorite things about this work. Most of what I build goes into a box and gets shipped somewhere I’ll never see, to hands I’ll never meet. When someone drives out, when I get to stand in the workshop and watch a person encounter the thing I made, that’s the part of this job that doesn’t feel like a job. I always make good coffee on local pickup days.
I drink my coffee. The dulcimer is on the bench.
It looks fine, better than fine. A custom mountain dulcimer with a wider neck and adjusted fret spacing, built for specific hands, decorated with the flower from another world that its future owner described to me once in enough detail that I was apparently able to reproduce it across an entire soundboard.
Across an entire soundboard.
I set my coffee down.
From across the workshop, it reads as pink. Not aggressively pink—pale, warm, the color I mixed carefully from his description, darker at the centers and lighter at the edges the way he said they were. Thevelaracover the soundboard completely, each burned line giving the petals depth, the whole design sitting inside the wood rather than on top of it. It is, technically speaking, the best decorative work I’ve ever done. It is also, technically speaking, pink. Very.
