The house seemed exactly the same: left gutter pulled away from the siding, rust stains oozing like acne down the white vinyl, new weeds elbowing their way through the old ones along the walkway. It felt so routine—like he was just returning from a trip to the grocery store—and so alien, like perhaps the grocery store had been on Mars.
He knocked. For a few minutes nobody answered, and he felt sick. He was stupid for not having called first. Ever since the twins finished elementary school, his mother’s schedule had become erratic. It was the middle of the day, though: she should be home. He knocked again, hopeless now.
Then he felt the slight rattle of footsteps, and a moment later his mother stood in the doorway. “Well, look who comes crawling back,” she said. “Not so high and mighty now, are you?”
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Now that you lost your fiddle, guess you’re wanting me to help you out, huh?” She eyed him. “Well you might as well come in.” She sauntered back in, leaving the door ajar.
The living room looked just the same—faded couch, beaded lampshade, scuffed carpet, glass-topped coffee table—but what hit him hardest was the familiar smell, the slightly musty mix of old upholstery, unwashed sneakers, and nail polish remover. His mother sat grandly in her chair in front of the TV, gestured for him to sit across from her. He sat.
“You stopped sending money,” she observed. “You could have at least told me.”
“Nice to see you, too. You got all the money in the settlement. I’m going to be paying you off for the rest of my life. Plus I haven’t been performing lately, I’ve been practicing.”
“Seems by now you should have gotten good enough to stop practicing.”
He held his breath a moment, let it out. “I have a big competition coming up. In Moscow. It’s one of the biggest competitions in the world. It’s a pretty big deal.”
“Well, whoop-dee-freakin’-do,” she said, studying her nails, which were very white and glowed. “Shouldn’t you be ‘practicing’ then? Everybody else has been coming by, asking me where I was, did I know what happened to your fiddle. They got some kind of court order to look at my bank account, you know that? And not one word of apology from my son. Not one.”
“Why would I apologize?” he said. “The fiddle was stolen. The police were just doing their jobs, trying to get it back.”
“You should have known it would have inconvenienced me.” She said the word like it was something she’d heard someone else say, then practiced in front of a mirror. “I was very inconvenienced. All these people coming by, asking can they talk to me, scaring the twins? You know your sister didn’t even want to let them in? You know that?”
“You and the family are the prime suspects,” he reminded her. “Because of the money.”
“You think nobody else mentioned that, genius?”
She was looking down at her chair, fumbling for her phone, which had chimed, so he was staring at the top of her head. “Do you know who took it, Mom? Did Uncle Thurston? Uncle Larry? Because if it’s about the money I’ll figure out how to get it to you. I just want the fiddle back. I don’t care about the money.”
“You don’t care about five million dollars?” she said. “Sure you don’t.” She was still groping in the chair for her phone, which she found, lifted to her face.
“Mom,” he said again, trying to be patient, “just listen to me. If you know anybody who could have taken it, can you tell them to be in touch with me? I’ll start crowdfunding. I’ll get you the money.”
“How would I know where it is?” she said. “You got a lot of nerve, barging in here and accusing your mother of stealing that fiddle! You got some nerve, that’s all I can say.”
“So you don’t know where it is? And nobody else in the family knows anything?”
“You are getting on my nerves with this. Will you stop pestering me? I told you I didn’t know nothing. Seems to me that those fancy white folks that’re suing you would be the people you’d be thinking about right now, not the mother who fed you and clothed you.”
“The Marks family, you mean? Yeah, the detectives are looking into them, too. But I wanted to talk to you myself.”
She picked up her phone. “You know something, you gotta leave.” She stared into the depths of the phone screen, which looked blank from Ray’s angle. “You need to go. Accusing your own mother. After all I did for you.”