“I can do fifty dollars, sweetheart, and I’m being generous.” Wayne Grier said it with a rehearsed smile, the kind of smile that didn’t reach his small, watery eyes. He picked up my violin by its neck, holding it out like it was a greasy iron skillet he’d found in a barn.
He didn’t even bother to wipe his hands, which were still dirty from rummaging through Arthur’s old metal toolboxes in the basement. I stood by the drafty hall window of my Grand Rapids home, watching him. The afternoon winter light was gray and thin, casting long, tired shadows across the worn Oriental rug in the hallway. To men like Wayne, a seventy-one-year-old widow in a large Victorian house is just a fish in a shallow barrel.
He had spent the last two hours walking through my rooms, his heavy work boots leaving faint, dusty prints on my clean hardwood floors.
He smelled of cold wind, stale cigarettes, and a cheap, heavy cologne that seemed designed to crowd out the scent of old wood and lavender. He’d already gone through my mother’s Spode china, tossing the delicate teacups into a cardboard box with a careless clatter that made my jaw lock. “Nobody wants these anymore, dear,” he’d muttered, not looking at me. “The grandkids these days just want paper plates. I can probably get you fifteen dollars for the box if I’m lucky.”
I didn’t say anything. I could hear my own pulse in my ears, a steady, quiet thrumming that kept me grounded. I just watched him. Wayne didn’t ask about my life, because men like Wayne never ask. They assume they already know everything that matters about a woman who lives alone with a faded floral sofa and a cupboard full of old tea tins. He didn’t care to know that I had spent thirty-one years playing first-chair violin for the regional symphony. He didn’t know about the calluses on my fingertips that had only recently begun to soften, or the quiet hours of practice that had filled this big house while my husband, Arthur, sat in his favorite green armchair.
That violin wasn’t just a piece of wood to me. It was an 1892 Raffaele Fiorini, crafted in Bologna, Italy, during a time when Grover Cleveland was president. Arthur and I bought it back in the summer of 1974. At the time, Arthur was working sixty hours a week at the old Kelvinator appliance plant on South Division Avenue. We lived on cabbage soup, day-old bread from the outlet store, and sheer hope. We saved every single penny we could find, keeping the bills tucked inside an old metal Band-Aid tin in the pantry. When we finally took the Greyhound bus down to Chicago to buy it from a specialty luthier, Arthur had cried.
