“I don’t always sleep well,” I say. This is true, though I don’t know why I’m telling him.
“I have a feeling you’ll sleep well tonight.”
I close my eyes.
The house settles around us: a sound from the floor, the mournful creak of the boards in the heat.
He’s here. He fills the room completely and fits inside it completely, and I stopped arguing with that a long time ago. I just didn’t know it until tonight.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kragen
The Taproom on a Tuesday afternoon has a different quality than at any other time. No crowd expected, no prep urgency, just the expectant air of a room that knows what it’s for and is resting between purposes. The chairs are still on the tables from last night. The light coming through the front windows hits the stage at an angle it doesn’t hit at any other hour, and the stage looks back at it like it’s waiting for something. Which it always is.
I’ve been here since two. My shift starts at three.
The song is almost done. Has been almost done for three days, which is a specific kind of torment—like a word that won’t come but you can feel the shape of it. I know what it needs. I can hear the absence. Every time I play it through, I get to the same place and feel the gap where the ending should be and can’t find it, andthen I set the guitar down and walk around the bar and come back and try again.
I play it through now. The opening bars—the ones that came from the morning in her driveway, the creek and the wind in the oaks—and then the middle section that built itself in pieces over weeks. One section came after she told me about her grandmother at the creek. Another arrived the night I sat in a StillWater clearing and watched her receive a drum she’d never heard before like she’d been listening for it her whole life.
When I reach the end, the gap is still there.
For a while, I sit with it. Then I hear the side door. I don’t turn around. The footsteps are familiar—the weight and rhythm of someone who moves through the world as if he owns it and sees no reason to revise that assessment.
“The door was unlocked,” Grulk says.
“The door is always unlocked when I’m here.”
He comes in and settles onto a stool at the bar, which requires negotiation because Grulk doesn’t really fit on bar stools, but he refuses to acknowledge this. I hear him get situated. Then silence. Which, from Grulk, means he’s actually listening, which almost never happens.
I play the song through again. All the way to the gap.
I stop. Set the guitar on my thighs.
“What is that?” he says.
Not a question exactly. More like a statement that needs verifying.
“Something I’ve been working on.”
“I’ve heard you work on things. This is different.” He’s quiet, then, “Play it again.”
I do.
When I stop this time, the bar is very still. The afternoon light has moved two degrees while I was playing. There’s a glass on the rack behind the bar that catches it and throws a small bright shape on the wall that I’ve been watching between passes.
“That’s not a bar song,” Grulk says.
“No.”
“It’s not the old song either. The one from home.”
“No.”
He gets up, goes behind the bar, pours two Grim Darks, and returns to his seat. “Then what is it?” He sets both glasses down.
I think about deflecting. I’m good at deflecting—years of practice, a room full of people who love a version of me I’ve been carefully maintaining. The deflection is right there, available, and I don’t use it. I don’t know why. Maybe because Grulk islooking at me with the expression he gets when he’s decided to be patient, which is the most dangerous thing about him. Maybe because I’ve been carrying this for weeks and the weight of it has gotten to the point where the carrying is more effort than the saying.
