“They’re average-sized turkeys.”
“I was told Missouri was peaceful.”
“Missouri is peaceful,” I say. “You just met its welcome committee.”
He picks up the thermos he set down at some point during the turkey incident, and hands it back to me. “Where’s the creek?” he asks, like a male eager to change the subject.
“This way,” I say. What I don’t say: I’m going to think about those dimples for a long time.
The creek runs through a low spot at the south end of the property, shaded by a double row of old oaks that my grandmother’s grandmother planted, and which have been doing what they want ever since. The water is clear and low this time of year, running over the limestone shelf that surfaces here and there along the bank. It smells like water and shade and green things, which is a smell I have had in the back of my mind since I was small enough that my grandmother held my hand on this path.
I spread the quilt on a flat spot above the bank, level enough, dry, the roots of the nearest oak making a low natural backrest. Kragen folds himself down onto it with the economy of a very large person who has learned to manage his dimensions, ending up propped on his elbows with his legs extended, easy and unhurried, like he’s been sitting by this creek his whole life.
I sit. The hip registers the ground, notes it, and subsides. I don’t let it show. I’ve had almost ten years of practice at not letting it show.
The person I was with when it happened left about six months into my recovery. He said it wasn’t about the injury. I knew it was.
We pass the thermos back and forth. The creek moves over the limestone in the low bell-like sound it makes in summer when it’s running clear. Somewhere in the oaks, a woodpecker works with patient, rhythmic focus.
“The dulcimer on the wall,” he says. “Your grandmother’s. You told me about the injury, but you didn’t say how she came into it, or how you did.”
I look at the water. He already knows the outline of it; I told him the morning he brought coffee. He doesn’t know the worst parts.
“It wasn’t right away,” I say. “After the injury, I was in a lot of pain for a while… not just physical. One afternoon I was feeling particularly sorry for myself, which I’d earned, I think, even if I was tired of it. I still couldn’t see past that week. Couldn’t see any future at all, just the same day repeating over and over with no improvement in sight.”
I focus on the cattails on the far bank for a moment, then admit, “I threw a plate with food on it against the wall. Not at anyone, not dramatically. I was alone in my room and I just… threw it. Hard.”
I can feel him go still. Not the turkey stillness, not the startled stillness. The kind that means the story landed somewhere unprotected.
“My grandmother came in. She saw the plate on the floor, pottery shards, mashed potatoes, and gravy. She picked it up. Put the pieces into the wastebasket. Didn’t say anything about the throwing or the wall or what it meant that I’d thrown it. Just cleaned it up.” I pause. “And then she sat down on the edge of the bed, and she said, ‘I’ve been meaning to teach you the dulcimer for years. I thought you might want to learn now’.”
The creek runs. The grass rustles.
“She’d been waiting,” I say. “All those years while I was training, she’d been waiting for when I’d have time. She never pushed it. She just… waited. And then the minute I had nothing but time and nowhere to put myself, there she was with the thing she’d been holding for me.”
I stop talking. The story is finished. I’ve never told it that way before, all the way through, without stopping to manage how it lands. I focus on the tiny spill of white water over the rocks.
Kragen hasn’t moved. He’s propped on his elbows, looking at the creek, and he’s as still as I’ve ever seen him. Not polite still. Not waiting still. The other kind. He received the story the way a good instrument receives a note, fully, all the way through the body, resonating in places you didn’t know were open.
After a moment, he says, quietly, “She knew exactly what she was doing.”
“She always did,” I say. “She never made me feel managed.”
“That’s harder than it sounds.”
“Yes,” I say. “It is.” I pause, deciding what to tell him about my mom, then add, “My mother wasn’t a maker of things. She made me instead. Thought that was enough, and she was right.”
We sit with it for a while. The light through the oaks shifts the way it shifts when the morning is becoming afternoon, and at some point, I don’t mark when, I’ve shifted too. My shoulder finds his arm, and he moves to make room without comment,without making it a thing. His arm comes around me slowly and I let myself settle against his side.
He’s warm. He’s warm. Not like a summer day, but like a banked fire, steady and radiating outward. I can feel it through his shirt, the fabric soft and worn nearly past recognition, and I can hear him breathing. The slow rhythm of it, unhurried, like everything about him.
His hand finds my hair. Not reaching for it, just there, at the back of my head, and the calluses register as their own texture against my scalp. His thumb moves once in a slow arc. I close my eyes without deciding to. A tension I’ve been carrying carefully for a long time loosens one degree.
I think:I could stay here for a considerable amount of time.
I think:that is probably important information.
At some point, I’ve turned slightly toward him, my cheek against his chest, and when I tip my face up, he’s already looking down at me, not with the easy smile, not with the managed warmth. Just that look he has that doesn’t perform anything.
