At about 7:40 she came into sight. When she saw him, her shoulders lifted and her head rocked back on her neck, her body language projecting surprise at seeing some Black dude sitting on the hood of her car. Her hand came up to her throat. Then she recognized him. “Ray?”
“Hi, Aunt Rochelle.”
“Oh my lord, you gave me a fright,” she said. She bounded forward and hugged him tightly. The hood of her car jammed into the back of his leg. “What are you doing here, sugar? You okay?”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d talk to me,” he said, hugging her back, breathing in her familiar perfume. “So I figured I’d just show up and say hello.”
“Not talk to you?” she said. “Why wouldn’t I talk to you? Because of all that foolishness with your violin?” She shook her head. “I don’t know where their heads are sometimes, and that’s the god’s truth. Of course I’ll talk to you. How are you? What’s been going on? It’s been forever since I’ve seen you. Except on TV.” She hugged him again.
He started telling her about the concerts, about playing all over the country, about the media interviews. She cut him off. “You know, I’m not going to stand out here in the cold and listen to my favorite nephew, who just happens to be a famous musician. We’re going for breakfast. Have you eaten?”
“Don’t you have to go to work?”
“Screw ’em,” she said cheerfully. “I feel a sudden sore throat coming on. Hold on a sec.” She pulled out her phone, tapped an email. “I got some sick days coming anyway. Where you want to go for breakfast? There’s a Bob Evans down the street that makes a mean sausage biscuit.”
Ray had forgotten Aunt Rochelle’s love of biscuits. “That sounds great,” he said.
She drove, her car immaculate, with a lemony air freshener that surprisingly did not smell like some kind of chemical spill. “Tell me everything,” she told him. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here with my world-famous musician nephew,” she said. She looked in the rearview mirror. “And a billion-dollar violin in the back seat.”
So he talked—in the car, and in Bob Evans, as they sat in the booth and ordered. It had been months, he realized, since he’d had a conversation with someone in his family, and family really was special; the relationships were unlike any other. Fraught and perilous much of the time, but sweet as well. He told her about touring, about Baton Rouge, about Kristoff, about performing in huge concert halls and in school gyms.
In the meantime they wolfed down eggs and biscuits with bacon and vegan sausage.
The waitress brought over more orange juice for Ray and refilled Rochelle’s coffee. She cleared their plates.
“You see this handsome man here,” Rochelle told her. “He’s a famous musician. He was on 60 Minutes last month.”
“Aww jeez, come on, Auntie,” Ray said, embarrassed.
The waitress, hands full with dirty plates, was properly appreciative.
After she left, Rochelle said, “Speaking of 60 Minutes, what’s going on with those people? The ones who said they used to own PopPop’s fiddle?”
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to meet you,” Ray said. “I had to hire a lawyer. To fight them and—well—the family.”
Up until now, neither had directly acknowledged the family’s lawsuit against Ray, of which Rochelle wasn’t part.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am about all this,” she said now. “It wasn’t my idea. I told them that Mama wanted you to have that violin and it was criminal to say otherwise. Mama would be turning over in her grave if she knew.”
“Yeah,” Ray agreed, “I think she would. It’s really rough. And now that they have this lawsuit, I can’t even talk to them. Which makes this next part harder. My lawyer asked me to see if I can get any information about how PopPop got the violin to begin with.”
Rochelle stared down at the tabletop, then up at Ray. “Mama’s the only one who really knew. But seances aren’t admissible in court,” she said with a laugh. “So getting an affidavit from Mama won’t really help.”
“I asked Gene and Rita,” Ray said, referring to distant cousins. “But they weren’t even born then and didn’t know anything. The thing is,” he went on, “I actually may have found something.” He told her about the big clasped envelope with the name Leon Marks scrawled across it that he’d found in his grandmother’s attic. “I remember where I found it—it was in a yellow dresser that was wedged under the roof, in the back right corner. I asked Aunt Joyce about it a couple months ago and she said she’d check in Grandma Nora’s other papers, but I never heard back from her. And now I can’t ask her directly. I’d really like to see what was inside that envelope.”