The napkin is at the edge of the bench where I left it after Kragen left, propped against the base of the tool rack. I’ve moved it twice already this morning, once when I needed the space and once for no reason I could name. Both times I put it back in approximately the same place.
There’s no reason to keep a napkin sketch from a customer I’ve met once. I pick it up to throw it away, then stand there with it in my hand for several seconds, apparently waiting for myself to become a more reasonable person.
I don’t.
I open the shallow drawer under the bench, the one where I keep things I haven’t decided about yet, and put it inside.
For a while, I do what I came out here to do.
The filler is ready to blend. I work the edges carefully, matching the grain direction, taking my time with the color. This is the part that means nothing while you’re doing it, and then suddenly looks like something. The gouge is disappearing. By the time I finish and apply the final coat of varnish, you’ll only see it up close if you know where to look. From across the room, it will be gone.
That should be satisfying enough to keep my attention. It usually would be.
What I keep coming back to isn’t the drawing. It’s his face when he talked about them.
Kragen does not seem like a male who loses track of himself easily. He came into my workshop with that easy smile and that voice, filling the space without claiming it. Then he looked at the phlox photograph, and something in him stopped.
His voice changed when he described thevelara, and his eyes went somewhere that wasn’t my workshop. For thirty seconds, he was somewhere else entirely.
I have seen people talk around what they miss. I’ve seen customers bring in instruments that belonged to dead parents, dead spouses, dead grandparents, and make practical requests because practical requests are easier than saying what the object actually is.
That wasn’t what this was. Not exactly.
He didn’t make the flowers sad. He didn’t make them precious. He just described them like they still existed somewhere in him, whole and intact, waiting behind a door he didn’t open very often.
I should file it under interesting customer detail and move on.
I do not.
I clean my brushes. The inherited dulcimer sits there with a hundred years of Sunday mornings in it and a granddaughter who wants to make it look like that never happened. Then I stop thinking about that because it isn’t my business what people do with their grief.
The workshop settles after the repair is finished. No pen hiss, no brush against wood, no small decisions waiting for my hands. The next commission sits on the bench, but I don’t reach for it yet.
I put the repaired dulcimer aside to cure, then pull a scrap piece of spruce to the center of the bench. Not for anything. Just to have wood under my hands while I think.
It’s a good scrap. Too small for a soundboard, too clean to throw away, pale and straight-grained and already sanded smooth because apparently at some point I had plans for it and then forgot them. That happens. Wood waits better than people do.
I turn it once under my hand.
Except I’ve already picked up the burning pen.
I tell myself I’m just testing a temperature setting I’ve been meaning to check; the pen has been running slightly cool, and the quilt-pattern commission needs clean, even lines. A test on scrap wood is practical. It’s what you’re supposed to do.
I press the pen to the wood and draw a petal.
The line goes down clean and dark, the wood giving off that faint, dry whisper it makes when the pen is at the right temperature. That sharp smell of controlled burning rises, char and heat and spruce, so familiar to me it barely registers anymore. I draw a second petal. A third. The flower that emerges from the grain is small and five-petaled with a slightly irregular shape, just as real flowers are slightly irregular, the center marked with a few fine lines suggesting depth.
It looks like his drawing.
I do another one, for calibration. Then another. By the fourth, the lie has worn thin, and by the fifth I’ve stopped pretending I’m testing the pen at all.
Fivevelara.A loose cluster, forked stems, five uneven petals.
They look right. Not like his drawing. Like what his drawing remembered.
I sit back on the stool and look at them.
There is no reason for this to feel like anything. They are practice marks on scrap wood. I make practice marks all the time: vines, diamonds, leaves, borders, small test blooms for other commissions when I don’t trust my hand yet.This is not different in any practical sense.