The kitchen holds nothing but the sound of crickets. This has been my house my entire life, generations of women lived in it before me, and I know it in every season and every light condition. This is early summer evening quiet, the windows open to the last of the warmth, the creek just audible if I stop moving.
I know this house. I know something in it feels different tonight.
I go into the living room.
Grandmother’s dulcimer is on the wall where it’s been my whole life. It’s been even more important since she brought it down and offered it to me and waited while I decided whether I was going to let my injury be the end of everything or just the end of one thing. Walnut, aged dark. The wood has a warmth to it in lamplight that it doesn’t have in full sun. I’ve played it so many times my hands settle onto it as if they’re returning somewhere.
I take it down.
Not to perform. Not to practice. Just—I need the quiet filled, and this is what I do when I don’t want to sit in silence. This is what she did. Every Sunday morning and most Sunday evenings and sometimes on Thursday nights when the week had been heavy. She played because it was what you did when the house was too still, and I play because she taught me, and that’s the whole explanation.
I bring the stool in from the kitchen because the living room chairs aren’t the right height and I sit down and I play “Shady Grove” because it’s the first thing she ever taught me and it comes out of my hands before I think about it. Then I play the tune that comes after “Shady Grove” which is “The Water Is Wide” and after that I play the one with no name that my grandmother made up and never wrote down and that I learned by hearing it so many times it went from her hands into mine through the air.
I play until I stop thinking about what I’m playing.
This is the whole point.
Outside the workshop windows, the dark comes up the hill slowly, the way it does in summer, the sky pale in the west while the yard goes to shadow. I observe it without really seeing it, my hands moving through a song I learned before I understood music, and the house settles around me the way old houses settle in the evening: a sound from the floor, the creak of the back door in the heat. Four generations of this house settling into summer evenings. I know all of it.
My phone buzzes on the table.
I don’t stop playing.
I play through to the end of the song, and then I pick it up.
Kragen:I pulled over twice on the way home. Just to look at it.
I read it again. Then a third time. I sit with it and then I set the phone down and pick up the dulcimer and play four bars of nothing in particular while I decide what I want to say.
I type a sentence. Delete it.
I type:Glad it’s home. And send it before I change my mind.
I put the phone face-down on the table.
Pick up the dulcimer.
I play until the west goes fully dark, and the lamplight is the only light in the room, and through the window the workshop is a dark shape against the darker oaks. I play the named songs and the unnamed ones and the one my grandmother made up, and when I run out of those I play random chords, something my hands arrive at on their own in the way that happens when you’ve been playing long enough that the music stops being a decision.
The creek is still running down the hill.
The phone stays face-down on the table.
I play.
Chapter Thirteen
Kragen
A cup of coffee in each hand and no story about why I’m here.
That’s the whole inventory. Two cups from the place in town that she probably knows and has opinions about, in a carrier so they don’t spill on the drive out, and twenty-three miles of Missouri two-lane between me and any reasonable explanation for what I’m doing.
The dulcimer is delivered. The commission is complete. There is no professional reason for this visit, and I have not invented one, which is either honest or inadvisable, and I’m about twelve miles from her driveway before I decide it’s probably both.
The obligation is present the way it’s been present since Monday. Not loud, just there, running underneath everythinglike a second melody in a key I haven’t named yet. I’ve been asking this question for four days: if there were no obligation, would I be in this car right now?
The answer arrives before I finish asking. I keep distrusting it. Not because the obligation came before the wanting, it didn’t. The wanting was there from the first visit. The obligation arrived weeks later, like a tenant moving into a house that was already occupied. But it moved in, and now it’s everywhere. I can’t look at the wanting without the obligation beside it, and I don’t know how to separate them anymore.
