Page 62 of When Alec Met Evie
The point is, this place is magical, and I love it with my whole entire heart.
Which helps because if I were leaving Juno for something I hated, I would have already quit by now.
Juno is doing great with Ruth.
I, on the other hand, have cried myself to work three days in a row. I’m fine when I leave the house, mostly because Alec makes me coffee every morning and takes care of Juno while I get ready, so I’m buoyed by his attentiveness. But when I leave Ruth’s all by myself, all that positivity seeps right out of my bones and into the floorboards.
I manage to pull myself together by the time I walk in, and after a while, I’m stable and ready to tackle the rest of the day. But for those first few minutes, I need every ounce of the patience Victoria seems to have in spades. She never had kids of her own, but she has this gentle nature that makes it seem like very little could rub her the wrong way.
As for the actualworkhappening in Victoria’s workshop, it’s a little more overwhelming than relaxing.
If only because there is still so much that I don’t know.
The walls are covered in tools. Planes and saws and reamers and shapers and clamps and a hundred other hand tools I couldn’t name. There is wood for repair and wood for original builds. Shelves full of glue and varnish and wax. Drawers full of bows and bridges and tailpieces. Boxes of strings and trays of hand carved tuning pegs and at least a dozen instruments in various states of deconstruction and repair.
I’m still nervous every time I touch something, though that’s slowly getting better as time goes by. I just know how delicate instruments can be. How a weirdly cut bridge or a misplaced sound post can alter or even ruin the sound an instrument can achieve. But hearing something is off is different than knowing how to fix it, so there’s definitely a learning curve.
“All right. Try it now,” Victoria says. She holds out the viola she’s been working on for the past twenty minutes.
When the viola first arrived, I was affronted that Victoria would be asked to repair such a cheaply made instrument. ButVictoria only smiled when she took it from the frazzled mom and promised she’d see what she could do.
I reach for the bow resting in the instrument’s case and tighten the hair, then take the viola from Victoria. It only takes a couple of notes for me to hear a difference.
All we did was replace the bridge and adjust the sound post, but it sounds like a different viola altogether.
I play a few more measures of a Mozart sonata before finally lowering the instrument from my chin. “That’s incredible.”
“The little things matter,” she says as she takes the viola and puts it back in its case.
“Does it not bother you to have people bringing in instruments that are so poorly made? Why not tell them to return it and get something from a more reputable source?”
She shrugs easily. “People do the best they can with the knowledge they have. And they often buy what they can afford. I’m happy to help because I’d rather they playsomethingthan nothing at all.” She closes the case and carries it to the front of the shop where she sets it with the completed repairs awaiting pick up. When she spins around to face me, her eyes are sparkling with new excitement. “Now that we’ve gotthatout of the way, I feel like doing something fun. Are you interested?”
“Always,” I say without even a hint of hesitation. Three days in, I completely trust this woman. If her idea of something fun involved packing a bag and crawling into the Volkswagen van parked outside of her house for a spontaneous road trip, I’d probably do it. Well, as long as Juno could come too.
Victoria smiles. “I was hoping you’d say that.” She walks to the corner of her shop and uses a key fob looped around her neck to unlock a heavy cabinet door.
I watch as she pulls out what looks like a very old violin case and sets it on the empty worktable behind her.
“Georg Winterling,” Victoria says reverently. “Made in 1905 and purchased by a German man who emigrated to the United States in 1950. He brought the instrument with him, but he was the only one in his family who played, so after he died, it went into the attic, where it sat for the next sixty-five years. Until his family sold the house and had an estate sale and did not think to evaluate the worth of their grandfather’s very old, very dusty violin.”
“Shut up,” I say, my voice reverent to match hers. “How much did you pay for it?”
She presses her lips together like she’s fighting a grin. “Two hundred dollars,” she says, and I gasp.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. I’d feel bad about it, but honestly, Evie, they kept calling it a ‘dusty old thing,’ like they couldn’t believe I had actual interest. I think they’d have thrown it away had I not bought it from them.” She opens the case and pulls out the violin. “It’s in terrible shape, but if we can restore it…”
Her words trail off as she slides a hand across the cracked body of the violin.
“It’ll be worth thousands,” I say, finishing her sentence.
She looks up, a gleam in her eye. “If I do it justice.”
Something sparks in my heart, a sense of purpose and excitement that soothes the ache I’ve been carrying in my heart since I left Juilliard. I love to play my violin. I love to be in a symphony, to feel the music, to be a part of something that is so much greater than the sum of its parts.
When I lumbered across the stage at my graduation, seven months pregnant, completely heartbroken, I thought I would never find that purpose again. The music scene in New York is cutthroat. If you aren’t all in, you are quickly ousted out. But I couldn’t be all in as a brand-new single mom.
