By the fourth week, the napkin is still in the drawer. I’ve opened it eleven times that I’ve counted and three or four I probably haven’t. I know what the napkin looks like without taking it out. Five petals, slightly irregular, the way real flowers are irregular. A loose cluster on a forked stem. Drawn in under two minutes from a memory of a hillside on another world, left on my bench because he forgot to take it with him.
I can’t throw it away. But I can return it. He drew it. It’s his. Walk in on a weekday when there’s no stage, no crowd, hand it over, walk out. Clean. Logistical. A transaction that closes rather than abandons.
There is a moment, one Tuesday evening, sitting on the porch with the dulcimer in my lap and the oaks throwing their shadows down the hill, where it occurs to me I could text him that I’m coming.
No.
I take the napkin out of the drawer.
The pen lines are still dark and exact, the fivevelarablooming in their loose cluster just as he left them, just as he remembered them from a hillside he hasn’t stood on in eight years. He drew this in under two minutes. I burned them across an entire soundboard.
I fold the napkin carefully and put it in the front pocket of my bag. The pocket that closes. Not the one where things fall out.
He won’t be expecting me, and that’s the point. Twenty-three miles is twenty-three miles in either direction.
I go back out to the workshop and sand twelve more joints and pack ten more kits and the evening comes down the hill and the lamp burns and I do not examine the plan any further because the plan is made and that’s enough.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Honey
A script. Eleven miles on the two-lane to rehearse it. It is clean and logical, and I know exactly what I’m going to say and how I’m going to say it.
The Taproom’s front door is propped open. July in Missouri, the heat still in the air at four in the afternoon, the smell of it—cut grass and something blooming down the block—and underneath that, music. His dulcimer. I know the sound of it the way I know the sound of my own creek.
I cross the parking lot with the napkin in my bag and the script in my head and my hand on the door when the words arrive through the gap.
“Her great-grandmother’s fingers made the lace.”
My hand stays on the door.
I don’t breathe.
I am standing in a parking lot in Sunshine Valley, Missouri, in the July heat. I am not moving. The song coming through the open door of the bar is about the lace in my windows. The lace my great-grandmother made, that has been hanging in those windows since before my grandmother was born, that I have walked past every day of my life without thinking about it because it is simply there, the way the house is there, the way the creek is there.
He put it in a song.
I should go in. I know I should. The napkin is in my bag. I have a plan. Objectively, I have done all the preparation necessary for this interaction. I don’t move. I stand with my hand on the door and listen.
The next verse arrives.
Her mother wore the diner apron twenty years.
My mother. He put my mother in the song. My mother who worked doubles at Delia’s so I could train, who sat in that booth, who liked the people—she is in this song, in this male’s voice, coming out of that door, and I did not tell him most of this. I told him almost none of this. He got here from a one-sentence blurt over pie and whatever Delia said when she waved us to the booth.
He was paying that much attention.
I find the wall of the building with one hand. Not dramatically. Just because it’s there.
The next verse is about my grandmother. I know it before it fully arrives—I can hear where it’s going the way you hear a melody completing itself—and when it gets there, it is exactly what I knew it would be. The plate on the floor. The cleanup without comment.I’ve been meaning to teach you, child. I’ve been saving this for when you’d have the time.
Things I told him at the creek. Sitting on a quilt on a Sunday morning, thinking it was just conversation.
It was not just conversation. He was listening all the way down.
The song moves into the next verse, and I hear myself in it—the workshop lamp, the burning pen, the grain of the wood—and then the final verse begins.
The napkin is in my bag.
