The Waltz Dad Wrote for Mama

I knew that fiddle before the man behind the counter ever lifted it off the hook. I knew it the way you know your own mother’s handwriting on an old envelope, before you ever read the name.

It was hanging in the front window of the pawn shop on Main Street, the Tuesday before Christmas, a little after noon.

I had walked down from the pharmacy on my lunch break to look for a used deer stand for my husband.

I never got to the deer stands. I stood on the sidewalk in the cold with my sack lunch in my hand and stared at the dark brown fiddle with the worn spot on the top, right where my father’s chin had rested for sixty years.

There was a paper tag tied to the scroll with a piece of red yarn. I could read it through the glass. It said $520.

I went inside. The bell over the door rang, and Forrest looked up from behind the counter where he was sorting a box of fishing reels.

Forrest has run that shop since I was in grade school. He knew my father. Everybody in this end of the county knew my father.

“Erin,” he said. Then he saw where I was looking, and he set the reels down slow. “I figured somebody from your family would be in sooner or later.”

“Can I see it?” I asked. My voice did not sound like my own.

He brought it down off the hook and laid it on a folded quilt on the glass counter. I did not need to look, but I turned it over anyway.

Under the chinrest, scratched into the wood with the point of a pocketknife, was a little crooked letter E.

My father put that E there in 1968, the summer he married my mother. Her name was Eula.

He said a fiddle ought to carry the name of the person it was played for, and every note he ever played on it after that was for her.

“Who brought it in?” I asked, though I already knew. There was only one person who could have.

Forrest rubbed the back of his neck. “Your stepmother. Back the first week of October. She took a four hundred dollar loan on it. That’s thirty days on the ticket, and I gave her a good extra thirty on top because I knew whose it was. She never came back.”

“Did she say why?”

“She didn’t have to say much,” Forrest said quietly. “She looked like she hadn’t slept in a month. She said she was moving Orval into the memory care place that week.”

I put my hand flat on the top of the fiddle. The wood was cold from the window.

My father had played this instrument at every barn dance, church homecoming, and fish fry in three counties since before I was born.

“Why five twenty?” I asked.

“That’s what she’d have owed me to take it out,” Forrest said. “Loan, interest and the storage fee. I won’t make a dime off Orval Tolliver’s fiddle. I just can’t hold it forever.”