“I want you to know the option—”
“No.” He looks up. “This is mine.” He looks back at the dulcimer. His thumb stills on the wood. “I’m not taking another one. And I’m not paying you for a plain instrument I didn’t get.” He looks back at the flowers. “What do I owe you for this?”
“You don’t owe me anything. I made a decision without asking you, and the least I can do is stand behind it without charging you for it.” I pick up my coffee because I need something to do with my hands. “I hope you’re extremely secure in your masculinity.”
Something shifts in his face. “Why?”
I nod at the soundboard.
He looks down at the pale pinkvelaracovering every inch of it and then back at me and then he laughs—the real one, the one that doesn’t perform, the one that just comes out. “It’s pink,” he says.
“It’s very pink.”
“It’s the most pink thing I’ve ever owned.”
“In my defense,” I say, “they wereyourflowers.”
His smile hasn’t left. He looks at the dulcimer again, at his thumb on the burned lines, and the smile goes from laughing to private, turned inward. “They were,” he says. “They really were.”
He tries twice more to pay me. I decline twice more. He accepts this the way he accepts low doorframes, without making it anyone else’s problem, which is its own kind of statement. We talk for twenty minutes about the instrument, the wider neck, how the fret spacing feels under his hand when he reaches for the upper positions. He plays a few notes, listens, then plays them again. The sound that comes out of it is warm and low and rich, the dulcimer finding its voice under his fingers for the first time. I stand in my workshop, listening to it and feel the deep satisfaction of something made right.
When he leaves, he carries it like it’s already been his for years.
I stand in the doorway and watch him settle the dulcimer on the passenger seat. He glances up, waves. Then he’s gone, and the property is gold and green around me, and the crow has stopped complaining, and the workshop behind me smells of char and varnish and the ghost of the finish I applied three days ago.
Well,I think.
I go inside and make more coffee.
Chapter Eleven
Kragen
The dulcimer is on the passenger seat because I can’t put it in the back.
That’s what I tell myself. The back seat has my jacket on it, and I’d have to move things around, and the instrument is better off where I can see it. That’s why it’s on the passenger seat instead of the back. That’s the reason.
I’m still in her driveway. Haven’t started the car.
I look up and see her standing in the doorway.
Starting the car, I pull around the curve in her driveway and stop.
I look at thevelaracovering the soundboard—pale pink in the Monday morning light coming through the windshield, the burned lines giving each petal depth, the whole thing looking like it grew there because that’s what pyrography does. She explained it to me once: the design becomes part of the instrument rather than something applied to the surface. My flowers are burned into the wood. Painted the color I described. She covered the entire soundboard and didn’t charge me for it, and when I tried to pay her, she said, “You didn’t ask for this,” like that settled the question.
It does not settle the question.
I look at the dulcimer.
She was nervous when I walked in. She hid it well—her professional composure was in place, the coffee in her hand, the offer ready before I’d even seen it. “I can make you another one.” She said it before I could form a reaction, gave me the exit before I needed one, stood there with her chin up waiting for me to reject this dulcimer.
I couldn’t say no fast enough.
I said it before I fully knew what I was saying. “No, this is mine.” The instrument was only part of what I meant. I still don’t entirely know what else I was claiming.
Or’nok.The word arrives the way it always lived in me, without being called, already there. The perfect gift. The one that could only come from someone who was truly, completely paying attention.
I said thank you three times. Tried to pay her, and she refused. Then carried the instrument to my car like it had always been mine.
