The volume level had increased in the house, so Ray was almost out the door before he heard Grandma Nora, who’d apparently been shouting in her tiny voice. “Hang on a minute! I have one more present to give out. Hang on!”
“One more? Wait, everyone,” Aunt Joyce bellowed. Ray looked back from the hallway.
With some difficulty, Grandma Nora was reaching under her chair. One of his cousins tried to help, and she gently swatted his hand away. She pulled out a long slender box wrapped in green-and-red-striped paper.
“What’s that?” Aunt Rochelle said.
“Don’t you worry about it. It’s for Ray.”
Everyone turned to stare at Ray, who stared back cluelessly.
“Mama has a gift for you, son.” Uncle Larry, standing behind him, elbowed Ray in the side. “Go get it. Game’s starting in two minutes.”
‘You didn’t have to get me anything.”
“I know, baby. But you earned this. Here.”
The paper peeled away. Beneath was an alligator-skin fiddle case, a dull blackish brown, gray with mildew. The handle was loose.
Aunt Joyce said from somewhere behind him, “Oh my god.”
Was this possible? Was this a joke? Grandma would never play a joke this cruel. Gently, impossibly, he laid the case on the floor and stared at it for a moment before looking up at her. She was smiling.
“How—？”
“Go ahead. Open it.” Her eyes were shining.
His aunts and uncles jockeyed for position.
He reached out with hands that did not seem to belong to him, popped the two clasps, folded the top back.
A fiddle lay there. PopPop’s fiddle. There, in front of him.
An excited babble of voices rang out. He heard only his mother: “Rayquan, that ain’t yours to keep.” Gently he leaned down again, picked up the fiddle, lifted it into the air. He was actually holding PopPop’s fiddle.
“How do you like your new fiddle, baby?”
“Grandma, this isn’t—”
“Hush, baby. It’s yours now.”
“Mama, you can’t give him that! Nope. That thing is not leaving this house.” The voices swirled around them, but right then there was only Ray and his grandmother. “I can’t take this. I just wanted to find it for you. I just wanted to play it for you.”
“I know you did. And now you will.”
“It’s yours,” he said. “It’s PopPop’s.”
“It’s yours now,” she told him. “He’d want you to have it. I want you to have it.”
“Mama,” Ray’s mother said, scowling, “what are you thinking?”
“Ray, baby,” Grandma Nora said, “take your fiddle and go into the kitchen, okay? I want you to play me that pretty song in a little while.”
No one spoke as he reverently closed the case, carried it out of the room. Out of sight he put his back to the wall, listened.
“Every one of you hush,” Grandma Nora was saying. “If anybody says a word I’m taking off my shoe and going upside your head with it. Your daddy and I tried to get every one of you to learn to play. All of you! Not a one of you would do it. It’s mine, and I will give it to anybody I please. None of you has anything to say about it.”
“He needs to get this music out of his head and start thinking about a real job,” his mother said. “He’s graduating from high school soon and he don’t know what he wants to do. He can’t make a living as a musician and he don’t need no encouragement from you.”
“It’s his life. He needs to start making his own decisions.”
“His own mistakes, more like.”
He couldn’t listen anymore. He left them arguing, set the case on the kitchen table. It didn’t matter what they decided: for this moment, the violin lay in front of him, connecting him to his grandmother and to his past and to a musical heritage he barely understood.
Grandma Nora had told him that she wanted him to play tonight for her, but he saw immediately that was impossible. The tailpiece was cracked. Two of the pegs had broken off. The bridge was badly warped and the sound post rattled around inside. Decades of mildew and built-up rosin coated the instrument in a whitish film. He rubbed at it, and his fingers came away black, but underneath was more caked-on rosin. There were more hairs lying inside the case than attached to the bow.
But the violin’s body was sound, not cracked or warped or eaten by insects. It could be fixed. He could take it to the music shop in the mall. Even if he couldn’t keep it, he could play for her when he visited. Her gift to him would be his gift to her.