He plays in public. At a bar. In front of people he knows.
I stand over it from three feet away, then from two, then from the angle he’ll see it when I turn it toward him. The flowers look back at me with complete indifference.
“I ordered a plain dulcimer,” I imagine him saying. Politely. The way a seven-foot orc is polite when a craftsperson has lost her mind all over his instrument.
He didn’t order this. He ordered a plain commission with a wider neck and adjusted fret spacing. What he’s going to get is something that looks like a hillside in spring and will requirehim to explain it to everyone who sees him play it for the rest of his life. On Monday morning, he’ll drive twenty-three miles to pick up an instrument covered in flowers from his home world that he never once asked me to put there.
I could make him another one. A plain one. No charge, obviously—the flowers were my decision, my problem. I’d need three weeks, but I have the templates now, the calculations are done. It would be faster the second time. He ordered plain and I could still give him plain and everything that happened on this soundboard would be between me and the wood.
I pick up my coffee. Put it down. The crow up the hill is making its morning complaints at full volume. Through the open workshop door, gold light stretches across the oaks, and the creek smell drifts through the screen. The whole property settled into the kind of slow Missouri morning I grew up in and have never once gotten tired of.
His tires hit the gravel.
My stomach drops.
I hear the car slow and stop. The engine cut. The door. I have approximately forty-five seconds before he reaches the workshop door, and I have not decided what I’m going to say. Lead with the offer. Ishouldlead with the offer—get it on the table before he’s even seen it, give him the out before he has to find one himself, keep my dignity approximately intact. I practice the sentence in my head.
I want to show you something, and before you see it, I want you to know I can make you another one.
That’s reasonable. That’s professional. That’s a craftsperson taking responsibility for a decision she made without consulting her client.
His footsteps on the gravel path.
I went a little further than planned;I practice.The wood seemed to want it.No—that’s worse. That implies the wood made me do it. The wood did not make me do it.Imade me do it, and the wood complied enthusiastically and we are now both going to live with the consequences.
He ducks through the doorframe.
I open my mouth to sayI want to show you something,and what comes out instead is: “Hi.”
He looks at me. Then he looks at the bench. All forward motion stops as he gazes at it.
Not the polite attention of someone encountering a finished product. The other kind. Stillness settles over him, the same as when he studied the phlox photograph. The same focus that caught while he drew the napkin sketch. The unmistakable look of someone who reached somewhere unguarded.
He crosses the workshop in three steps and stops at the bench. For a long moment he just looks at the dulcimer, as though he’s not entirely convinced it’s real.
His hand comes up, then stops before he touches it.
He looks at me.
“May I?”
“It’s yours,” I say.
He picks it up. Both hands, careful, the same way he picked up the inherited dulcimer, only with more reverence. He turns it in the light from the west window, and thevelarashift and the grain moves underneath them, and it looks like what it is: something made for this specific person and no one else.
He doesn’t say anything.
“I owe you for the decoration,” he says finally.
“You don’t.”
“This is—” He looks at me. “Honey. This is weeks of work.”
“You didn’t ask for it. It was my decision.” I reach for the professional tone I practiced forty-five seconds ago when he was on the gravel path. “Which is why I want you to know—I can make you another one. Plain, no charge. Three weeks, maybe less now that I have the templates. If this isn’t—” I gesture at the soundboard. “If it’s not what you wanted.”
He glances at me. Then he looks back at the dulcimer. His thumb moves across the burned lines, following the curve of a petal theway his thumb moved across the repaired gouge in the inherited dulcimer, finding the edges of things.
“No,” he says.
