“Those flowers,” he says.
“Phlox. I took that when I was apprenticing in North Carolina.”
“They remind me of…” He stops. An expression crosses his face, there and gone, and I recognize it because I’ve felt it myself in smaller ways: that disorienting vertigo of something from a former life showing up somewhere it has no business.
“Back home we had a flower calledvelara,” he says. “Covered whole hillsides in the spring. You’d come over a ridge and thewhole slope would just be…” He pauses, searching. “Pink. Pale pink. But not flat. Each bloom had variation in it, darker toward the center, lighter at the edges. Bigger than those.” He nods at the phlox. “But that density. That’s what it looked like from a distance.”
I glance at the print and then back at him. “What did they smell like?”
He considers this seriously. “Sweet. Not heavy, just present. If you walked through a field of them, the smell would stay on your clothes.”
“Could you draw one?”
He looks at me, a little surprised, then reaches for the stack of napkins near my coffee pot and pulls a pen from his jacket pocket. His hand moves with careful precision. It takes him maybe ninety seconds.
He sets the napkin on the bench, and I look at it.
Five petals, slightly irregular, the center marked with a few careful lines suggesting the color variation he described. Growing in a loose cluster on a forked stem. Someone drawing from memory that hasn’t faded.
“That’s exactly what you described,” I say.
“It’s a pretty flower.” He says it without embarrassment, as if beauty is simply a thing worth noticing. “I don’t think abouthome much. But some things.” He shrugs one shoulder, and the moment closes the way he opened it: easily, without drama.
We walk to the door. He ducks through ahead of me, turns on the step, and extends his hand.
I take it because that’s how transactions end. I’ve shaken dozens of hands in this doorway.
His hand covers mine. Not aggressively, just completely, my hand disappearing inside his, and neither of us moves. His grip is careful. Deliberate. He’s aware of the size difference. I’m aware that he’s aware.
The handshake lasts two or three seconds.
Then he releases and steps back. “I’ll expect to hear from you in six weeks or so.”
“Six to eight,” I say. “I’ll email when I have a start date.”
He nods and walks to his car, a sensible sedan he folds himself into with the same easy economy he used on the doorframe.
I go back inside.
The napkin is on the workbench where he left it.
I pick it up.
The lines are confident: no second-guessing in the marks, no scratching over. Someone who knew what he was drawing.
Outside the window, his car disappears around the curve in the drive.
I’m still holding the napkin.
Chapter Four
Kragen
Friday night, the bar fills up the way it always does; by seven it’s loud and warm and every stool is taken. I’m behind the bar doing four things at once, as I have for eight years, and none of it requires my full attention anymore. That’s the thing about building something over enough time. It starts to run itself and you just show up and keep the wheels on.
Walt is at his usual spot at the far end, the one he’s occupied so long I’ve stopped thinking of it as a stool and started thinking of it as Walt’s stool, which is its own kind of landmark. He nurses his coffee and watches the room, and occasionally says something to a regular that I can’t hear over the noise, and the regular laughs. I file that away as something I’ll ask him about later and probably never do.
I play my first set at eight. The crowd is good: responsive without being loud about it, the kind of audience that listens. I do an hour: some originals, some covers rearranged enough to feel like mine, one song from my world that I dust off occasionally when the room feels right for it. When I play the song from home, the room goes quiet in a slightly different way than it goes quiet for everything else. I’ve never been able to fully explain that difference. Something in the intervals, maybe. A frequency the ear recognizes as old without knowing why.
