She’s on the stepstool in the living room with the hammer in her hand. She turns when she hears me, and I stop in the doorway and look at the wall.
My grandmother’s dulcimer,she said once,has been on that wall since before I can remember.It’s there now, in the center, where it’s always been. But centered on a piece of good walnut are three plain iron hooks—her grandmother’s dulcimer hanging between two empty ones.
I look at her.
She looks back at me from the stepstool with the hammer in her hand, and her expression is the one she gets when she’s done something she considers obvious and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
I look at the wall again. Two extra hooks. Her grandmother’s dulcimer between them.
I turn around and go out the back door at a pace that is not quite running.
The gravel drive is not comfortable under bare feet. I don’t care. My car is where I left it last night—her driveway, the oaks throwing their morning shadows west—and I get the dulcimer and guitar from the back seat and I am back across the gravel and through the kitchen door in under two minutes, slightly out of breath, ducking the frame, a towel and two instruments and nothing else.
She’s still on the stepstool.
She is, I notice, trying not to smile.
I hand her the dulcimer first—velaraflowers and all, the most pink thing I’ve ever owned, which she made me and which is therefore hers as much as it’s mine—and she hangs it on the left hook with the care she gives all instruments, both hands, checking the weight of it. Then I hand her the guitar.
She hangs it on the right.
She steps down from the stool, and we both look at the wall.
Her grandmother’s dulcimer in the center. Myvelaradulcimer on the left, guitar on the right. Three instruments on a wall in a house that has been in her family for four generations, hung on hooks made from workshop scrap and plain iron, which is not beautiful and is also exactly right.
“Gerald looks good there,” she says. “Like he belongs.”
I put my hand on the back of her neck.
She leans into it.
“The stool,” I say.
She looks up at me.
“For the piano. I want to learn it. But I’m going to need you to look at the stool first.”
She looks at the stool. She looks at me. She does the math.
“Workshop,” she says.
“I thought so.”
“After coffee.”
“Absolutely, after coffee.”
She’s still looking at the wall. Then, without turning around, “You should talk to Walt about the bar.”
I go still.
“You know what you want,” she says. “He knows it too. He’s just waiting for you to say it out loud.”
She goes to the kitchen. I look at the wall one more time: the three instruments, the walnut scrap, the plain iron hooks she made in the early morning while I was sleeping in her grandmother’s bed. And I think of the wordzhorgul, which has no English equivalent, a StillWater word for the moment you understand that a place has decided to keep you.
I follow her to the kitchen.
Epilogue