“And to Kragen,” he says, undeterred, “who is StillWater in all the ways he doesn’t know and some of the ways he does.”
He drinks. I wipe down the bar. The doors open at seven and the room fills up. Between sets, Grulk holds court at the bar with the joyful volume of a male who has decided things are going well in the universe and intends to notify the universe accordingly.
I want to evaporate. I do not evaporate. I play the second set.
At 12:30, after close, I text her.
It takes me longer than it should to write something I’ve been thinking about since I woke up. The problem is that everything I compose sounds like more than I’m ready to put in a text or less than what last night actually was, and I’m standing in a closed bar with a guitar at my side and a phone in my hand trying to find the register that is neither too much nor too little. It turns out that register is harder to find in a text box than it is in a song.
I send:I keep thinking about last night.
I put the phone in my pocket. Finish locking up. Walk to the car, put the guitar in the passenger seat, and am standing at the driver’s door when the phone buzzes.
I glance at the message for a moment, the brevity of it, the way it says exactly what it says and nothing it doesn’t, and my chest shifts in a way I’ve been feeling for two weeks and haven’t found the word for.
Me too.
I sit in the car for a while with the phone in my hand and the Missouri dark around me and I think about a woman who builds things for strangers in Auckland and plays her grandmother’s songs in lamplit rooms and kissed me last night like she meant it.
I think:I know what the song is.
I think:I don’t know what to do with that yet.
I put the car in drive.
Chapter Seventeen
Honey
He texts Saturday night, after close.
Haven’t seen your property yet. Would you show me sometime?
I read it standing in my kitchen in my socks. The workshop lamp is off, and the house is quiet and the clock on the stove says 12:13, and I know what the text is and he knows what the text is and neither of us is saying so.
I type:Tomorrow works if you’re free.
I send it before I think about it too hard. His reply comes in under two minutes.
What time?
We settle on ten. I put my phone down and look at the kitchen and think about the fact that I just invited a seven-foot orc to walk my property at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning. I feel a flicker of nerves, or whatever sits adjacent to nerves, that I’m not going to name in my kitchen at midnight.
I go to bed. I don’t think about it.
I think about it.
He arrives at five past ten in the same car he always drives. He’s in jeans and a Henley the color of old wood, and the overall effect is unfair enough that I set the thought aside immediately. “Good morning,” he says, coming up the porch steps.
“Morning.” I have coffee in a thermos and the old quilt from the cedar chest over one arm because the ground near the creek stays damp and I’ve been doing this long enough to know my hip and damp ground are not friends. “Ready?”
He looks at the quilt. Then at me. “You planned this.”
“I planned coffee and something to sit on,” I say. “Don’t read into it.”
He almost smiles. Takes the thermos and quilt. We go.
The property unfolds the way it always does when I walk it, familiar in the way things are when they’ve been in you long enough to stop being scenery and start being just the way theworld looks. The ridge to the east catches the morning light first. Coneflowers and black-eyed Susans along the fence line have come in thick this year; they crowd toward the path in a way I’ve been meaning to cut back and haven’t. The old apple trees are past their bloom, but still green and full. The creek runs clear, and the grass is long enough to bend in whatever breeze comes off the hills.
