The name on the offer sheet was Ray.
Lynettes husband. Dylans stepfather. The man who had driven my daughter to the convention that morning and was sitting beside her on the hill.
Lynette dropped her program because she had been sitting next to him for three days and he had not said a word.
Priscilla did not read the rest from the stage. She did not need to. She handed me the fiddle, right there in front of three thousand people, and I held it the way Willis used to hold it, by the neck with the body against my hip, and I walked down the steps and did not look back.
Ray found us at the truck. He did not try to lie, which was the one decent thing he did that summer. He had a note on his hauling business that was coming due and the bank had stopped returning his calls. He had looked up what an old fiddle like that might bring and the number had been bigger than he expected. He had told Dylan to take it from the museum case in March because it was in the family and nobody would mind, and he had told himself the boy would get it back once the note was paid.
He had not told Dylan the rest. Dylan found out on the stage with everybody else.
Lynette rode home with me that night, not with Ray. She did not say much on the drive. When we got to my house she carried the case in and set it on the kitchen table and sat down across from it like she was waiting for it to say something.
Willis had put the fiddle in a museum so that nobody in his own family could take it, and the only person who understood why was the boy who finally took it.
That is the part I did not expect. Dylan came by two days later. He stood on the porch for a long time before he knocked. He said he had not known about the offer sheet. He said that when Ray told him to get the fiddle, he had wanted to believe it was his, because he had nothing else that was.
Then he asked if he could learn it properly.
The fiddle went back to the museum. Priscilla had a new case built with a better lock and a plaque that says On loan from Alma, and under that, in smaller letters, Played by Willis every Saturday at the fire hall, not for money, just because.
But there is an arrangement now, in writing, with my name on it. On Saturday nights an old man named Clarence, who played beside Willis for forty years, checks the fiddle out of the museum and brings it to the fire hall, and Dylan plays it there, under Clarences eye, and Clarence brings it back Sunday morning. If Dylan ever misses a Saturday without calling, the arrangement ends.
He has not missed one.
He got a job at the furniture plant in October. Sewing cushions, same line I worked. He tells people at the Dollar General that his grandmother owns the fiddle and he gets to borrow it, which is the first true thing he has said about it.
Lynette and Ray are separated. She is in my spare room. She asked me if I was going to say I told you so, and I said I had never told her anything, which was the problem, and that I was done not arguing.
Willis would have liked that, I think. He was never one for arguing either. But he did put a tag in the lining, and that was his way of having the last word.