Grulk’s voice:Saying thank you and walking away is not receiving a gift.
What I owe her has a shape. I don’t know what it is yet. I know it has to come from having paid the same attention she paid me—which means I need to know her well enough for that to be possible, and I don’t, not yet, not the way this requires.
I have a reason to keep showing up.
The thought arrives with a clarity that feels like relief, and then immediately complicates itself. Is that the real reason? Was it ever just the dulcimer? The attraction came first; I had no idea who she was until I walked through her door. But the obligation arrived fast enough that I can’t fully separate them now.
My window is rolled down, and there’s a creek flowing somewhere down the hill and the breeze is moving through the oaks above the property and somewhere up the hill a bird is arguing with himself in the branches of a tree I don’t know the name of. It’s a warm morning. Missouri in early summer, the green of it, the smell of this specific place that I’ve been to precisely three times and somehow know.
The melody arrives.
Not built toward, not worked for—just there, fully formed, rising out of the sound of the creek and the wind in the oaks andthe bird doing its complicated thing overhead. Four bars. I hear them complete, start to finish, the intervals that make them feel like something older than I am, something that was waiting to exist in exactly this key.
I don’t move.
The melody holds when I run through it again in my head—every note, the rhythm of it, the quality that makes it feel tied to this property, to the creek and the oaks and the summer morning and the woman inside who makes coffee on pickup days and goes further than planned and apologizes for it.
As I pull out of her drive, the dulcimer rides beside me while the melody loops continuously through my mind. By the time I turn onto the highway, I understand that I am going to be spending a great deal of time on this property, for reasons I don’t entirely trust yet, looking for something I don’t have a name for.
I play the melody back in my head twice on the drive home to make sure I haven’t lost it.
I haven’t.
Chapter Twelve
Honey
His car goes around the curve in the drive and then disappears.
I stand in the workshop doorway for a moment after the sound of the engine fades. The property is bright in the sunlight, the oaks throwing their shadows west. Somewhere down the hill, the creek produces its tranquil background noise. Everything looks the same as it did when I walked out to the workshop.
I go back inside.
The bench where his dulcimer sat for weeks is empty. Not just empty in the way a workbench sits empty between projects. Empty the way a room feels after a presence has left it. The light falls across the bare wood, and there’s nothing for it to catch. I keep reaching for what isn’t there.
I put the woodburning kit away.
This takes a while because I do it properly—the pens arranged in the roll case by tip size, the temperature unit wrapped and shelved. No current orders that need it.
On the workbench, there are walnut shavings in the corner and fine sawdust along the back edge from the final sanding. I sweep them into my hand and throw them away. This takes less time than the woodburning kit.
I clean the tools next. Not because that needs doing either. I do it because my hands need something to do while my brain runs a loop I don’t want to be running. The loop goes approximately: it’s done, I made something, he took it, that’s how commissions work, I’ve done this dozens of times, the bench is empty because I finished a project and gave it to the client, which is the entire point.
The loop is not wrong. It is also not the whole picture.
The whole picture is that I burned those flowers freehand in the lamplight for hours and days. The whole picture is that the project started as a standard commission and turned into something else without my permission. The whole picture was that I’d spent weeks in this workshop with his dulcimer, and over those weeks the room had begun to feel differently occupied. Not better or worse, just changed in the quiet way rooms change when you’ve been living alongside someone else’s project. The whole picture is that this morning I offered him an out I did not want him to take and he didn’t take it and now thebench is empty and I’m cleaning tools that don’t need cleaning in a workshop gone still around me.
I know what this is. I’ve been here before. Not the same, different shape, different materials, but I know the feeling of not being ready for something to be over.
I put the tools away, sweep, organize my order binder, and do some updates on my website until I can call my workday done without guilt.
Inside, I make dinner. Not a real dinner, eggs and toast, which is what I make when I’m not actually thinking about food. I eat standing at the counter because sitting down feels like admitting the evening is going to be long.
No. It’s not going to be long. It’s going to be a normal evening. I’m going to eat my eggs and wash my plate and do whatever people do on evenings when they’ve finished a significant commission, and the client has driven away with it and the work is done.
I wash my plate.
I dry it.
