Out of the corner of his eye Ray saw Aunt Rochelle hesitating, one foot inside the shop. He thought she would come up, say something, but she didn’t—she just waited as the clerk’s words poured over him.
But her presence was enough for him to lift his chin high, square his shoulders, and pack up the violin. As he left the store, he said, “Merry Christmas.” Neither Eric nor the older lady replied.
Outside in the mall, Aunt Rochelle put her arm around his shoulders. “Asshole,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, his heart still beating hard. “But I got it fixed. I can play it for Grandma today.”
“You really love that old thing, don’t you?”
“Which old thing, the violin or Grandma?”
They both laughed. Ray’s was forced, but he tried to pretend he didn’t care about what had just happened.
“The violin,” she said. “Everybody loves Mama.”
“I really do love it,” he confessed. Perhaps it was the incident at the music store, but he found himself talking to her more than he ever had in the past. “I didn’t want it for me, before. I just wanted to find it and play it for Grandma. But if she’s given it to me—well, that just means so much. It means I won’t have to play with the crappy school instruments anymore. I’m the only kid of all the juniors and seniors who doesn’t have his own instrument.”
“You are?”
“Yeah. And all the other kids get private lessons, too. But that’s okay, I know my mom doesn’t get it.”
“Your mom’s a good person,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said without enthusiasm. “She doesn’t like my playing, though.”
“Well, if you love doing it, don’t let nobody stop you, you hear me?”
“You sound like Grandma,” he said.
She stopped in the parking lot and gave him a two-armed hug, shopping bags swinging against his back. “I want to hear you play, too.” She didn’t let him go. “You’re a good boy, you know that?”
He didn’t know what to say, so he just hugged her. Why had he never noticed Aunt Rochelle before? He’d always just lumped her in with the rest of his aunts and uncles—but now he realized that she was a pretty cool lady. She saw him as something more than a babysitter for his younger cousins. He wanted to spend more time with her.
When Ray and Aunt Rochelle got back to the house, Grandma Nora was sitting in her recliner in the living room. “Hey, baby. You get it fixed?”
He took it from its case, showed her the repaired instrument.
“Looks just like I remember,” she said. “All that white stuff. My PopPop used to say it was good luck, all that white stuff. He called it ‘Good Luck Dust.’？” She chuckled quietly to herself, marveling. “I’d forgotten that.”
Ray tucked the violin beneath his jaw and looked across the tailpiece, over the bridge, and past the fingerboard to the scroll. His own violin. His. Heavily coated with an extra thick coat of Good Luck Dust—which was his, too.
With his right hand he touched the bow to the string, rose into an A, and tuned the instrument, keenly making sure the A was a perfect 440. He pulled the bow from frog to tip and the note sang out clean, surprisingly piercing. Somehow the act of playing that one note had cemented his ownership of the violin; and he could feel the muscles in his arm vibrate almost as if they were adjusting themselves to its sound.
“You know what, baby? You look just like my PopPop, standing up there. I have chills. Look.” She showed him her arm, where a prickle of gooseflesh rose on her thin skin. “I could swear he was standing up there. Sure brings back some sweet memories.” She smiled up at him.
He played an F-major scale to warm up, and his grandma applauded. “That was just a scale,” he told her. “Nothing to clap for.”
“I just love hearing you play. Wait a minute. Larry, Rochelle, Joyce, Thurston, y’all come in here. Ray is going to play for us on PopPop’s fiddle,” she shouted. His aunts and uncles came in from other parts of the house.
“Oh lord. Mama, please,” Ray’s mom said, edging back down the hall.
“Girl, you stand right there. This won’t take long. Ray is gonna play.”
Ray closed his eyes as he lifted the violin more tightly to his jaw. He’d have to get a shoulder rest sometime soon. A nice one. No sponge for PopPop’s violin. But that would wait. He touched the bow to the E string and began L’Inverno. No written music—he should have gotten his music!—but he knew the notes, the correct fingerings were effortless, and he switched smoothly from third to fifth, then back to first position.