It can stay there.
I walk through the door.
He looks up. His gaze finds mine, and his face opens, one unguarded second before he pulls it back under the song. He doesn’t stop playing. He holds my gaze and finishes it.
I can’t help dreaming what I’ve got no right to wish
But Goddess, I hope she’ll let me help build a thing that looks like this.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kragen
Ed asked to hear the whole thing, which is how I ended up behind my own bar on a Tuesday afternoon playing a song I finished in my apartment at midnight about a woman who hasn’t answered my texts in a month.
It isn’t a bar song. I know that. It’s too quiet, too interior, the wrong register for a room that’s built for Friday nights and Grulk at full volume. But Ed asked, and Pete backed him up, and Walt had already gone to the office, so I pulled the dulcimer out of my back seat and started from the beginning. It turns out that playing something true in a quiet room to two men who aren’t going to analyze it is easier than I expected. They just listened. That was enough.
I’m in the final verse when she walks in.
I look up because the light changes—the door behind her, the afternoon coming through—and she’s standing just inside it with her hands at her sides and her face softer than I’ve ever seen it except when we shared her bed.
The words almost go.
I feel them start to dissolve—the melody holds, my hands hold, but the words simply leave me, because she is here, she is standing in my bar on a Tuesday with the July light behind her and I have spent a month building increasingly convinced arguments that she was not coming back, and every one of them evaporates in the second it takes to register that it’s her.
I don’t stop playing.
I don’t know why, except that I’m mid-sentence and the sentence is true and stopping would be a different kind of statement than finishing. So I hold her gaze—she lets me, she doesn’t look away—and I sing the last two lines of a song I wrote about her grandmother and her mother and the lace in her windows and what I want for the rest of my life, directly to her face, in my bar, in front of Ed and Pete who have the grace not to turn around.
I can’t help dreaming what I’ve got no right to wish
But Goddess, I hope she’ll let me help build a thing that looks like this.
The last note fades.
The room is very quiet.
She hasn’t moved. I haven’t moved. My hands are still on the dulcimer. Ed picks up his glass and takes a slow, deliberate sip, and sets it back down. Pete, to his eternal credit, says to his beer: “Don’t worry about us. If we need more, we’ll grab what we need and put the money on the bar.”
I set the dulcimer down.
She crosses the room.
Not running. The way she moves when she’s decided something—the compact, deliberate walk I know from her workshop, from the path down to her creek, from every time she’s made up her mind and is getting on with it. She comes around the end of the bar and I come around to meet her and her hand finds my arm before either of us speaks, and I read her face the way I read everything she gives me—carefully, all the way through—and what I find there is open in a way I have not seen it before. Not managed. Not held at the careful distance she usually holds things.
Just her.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” I say.
We stand here. There is a great deal that could be said and neither of us says it.
“There’s a creek,” I say finally. “Behind the building. Small one. I don’t think you’ve seen it.”
Something moves across her face—not quite a smile, the thing that lives just before one. “Show me,” she says.
We go out the back.
