The Claim Tag in My Husband’s Coat

We sat at the kitchen table. I set the case in front of Rachel. She did not touch it.

“I thought it was sold,” she said at last.

“Honey.”

“I knew Daddy said it would wait. Then in April there was the truck, and I whispered to Mama in the cab, with Daniel asleep on my lap, ‘Where is my fiddle?’ And Mama said, ‘Hush, Rachel, we have no room.’ And I thought, they sold it with the tractor and the hay rake, and I was selfish to ask.” She pressed her mouth hard. “I never asked again. Not when I was twelve or twenty or thirty. I played a school rental in Nebraska for a year and then I stopped. I was in my forties before I understood I stopped because I could not play without feeling the loss.”

“It is not silly,” said Tim from the stove, gruffly. He had not turned around.

I undid the latches. The lid went back. The green velvet, the honey wood, the pale worn shoulder. Rachel made a sound no louder than the creak of a door. She put out her hand and stopped it an inch short.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“The seam,” she whispered. “That is where the seat hit it.”

“It was glued from the inside by a good man named Mr. Harmon. He is eighty-eight. He took it down every March and wiped it and slacked the strings so it would keep. He said to tell you the glue held.”

She picked it up and turned it in her hands, and then she lifted it to her chin, and her eyes closed, and her whole face changed. I saw eleven years old come up through fifty-one like light coming up behind a window.

“It still fits,” she said.

“Look in the lid.”

She unfolded the note. She was a long time reading it, five times, I think, because I watched her eyes go back to the top of the page. Then she held it flat against her breastbone with both hands.

“A neighbor,” she said.

“It was my husband. I think you knew.”

“I knew.” Her forehead was wet. “I do not know how. I think I knew that day in church. He was the only man in the county who looked at a child as if she were worth something.”

Little Tasha came all the way into the kitchen and stood against her grandmother’s knee.

“Is that a real violin, Grandma?”

“It is a real violin, Tasha-bug.”

“Can you play it?”

Rachel looked at the instrument in her lap. “I do not know if I remember how.”

I took a small cake of rosin from the pocket of the case, wrapped in a bit of paper. Ellis must have tucked it in while I was at his counter. The paper said, in his careful hand, Try it.

Tim brought her a pitch pipe from the junk drawer, left over from his own school band days. She blew the note and listened. Slowly, with her fingers shaking, she turned each peg until the strings agreed. She stood. She tucked it under her chin. She took the bow.