“Esther, you play the trumpet?”
She points to a photo on the wall and I lean in to see a young dark-haired Esther, raising a trumpet to the sky, grinning, with her arm around a man with a saxophone. They’re on a stage, sweaty and exhilarated and obviously in love.
“Mr. Esther,” she tells us with a smile.
“He’s dead,” Fabi informs us solemnly. “Abuela says he rolls over in his grave when I eat spaghetti with my fingers.”
“Wanna hear me play?” Esther asks. “I’m a better musician than I am an artist.”
“I love your drawings, Esther!”
She waves one hand in the air and trots toward the trumpet. “I do the drawing class for something we elderly call ‘enrichment.’ And because Daniel would forget to charge anyone for the class if I wasn’t the registrar.”
She picks up the trumpet and turns to Fabi. “54321,” she tells him.
I think she’s telling him to count her down, but she jumps directly into playing, tearing into those first euphoric, jaunty notes of “My Favorite Things.”
“Five,” Fabi says. “Four.”
Esther’s fingers are curved and strong, her eyes closed. There’s a knot in my throat when she goes up an octave and trills.
“Three, two, one.”
Bang bang bang!A little dust falls from their light fixture when the upstairs neighbor stomps from above.
Esther tears off midnote and glares at her ceiling. Then she resumes the trumpet and finishes the phrase she’d been in the middle of. On principle, it seems.
She carefully lays the trumpet back in its case. “It’s not as bad as it seems,” she says. “I get two hours to play on Sunday afternoons while he’s playing pickleball at the Y.”
“Is two hours a week enough?” I ask her.
She shrugs.
“You want me to go up there and talk to him?” Vin asks.
When I glance at him, I double-take with a start. Esther glared at the ceiling, but Vin is trying to incinerate it with his gaze. His hands are on his hips and his eyes are narrowed darkly.
Esther’s mouth is dropped with glee. “Roz, your husband is flirting with me.”
That drops his eyes back to her, a little light returning to his gaze. “You should be allowed to play at least a little bit every day. He can’t expect you to be quiet at all hours.”
I glance up and see Fabi still lingering at the edge of the living room, his eyes returning and returning to Vin.
I elbow Vin and mutter out of the corner of my mouth, “Quit being intimidating.”
Vin’s hands drop from his hips so fast his arms nearly fall off. He folds them in front of him in an absurd attempt to look smaller. If I handed him a tutu right now, I’m positive he’d put it on.
“Hey, while you’re here, change a lightbulb for me,” Esther says, puttering past Vin and assuming (correctly) that he’ll immediately follow along in her wake.
“Fabi, wanna get dinner on the table with me?” I ask, and he scampers after me.
Esther’s kitchen is clean and dated. I’m positive that in thirty years, Fabi will see plates exactly like these ones in an antique shop and clutch them to his chest and shed tears for his wonderful, perfect Abuela who raised him so well.
He and I slap a salad together. “Cut up a peach for Abuela,” he tells me. “She likes an after-dinner peach.”
And then we get everything plated for the two of them, complete with ice in the water glasses.
“Well, looky here,” Esther says, coming back into the kitchen. Vin is wiping grease off his hands with a rag, so I’m assuming her list of while-you’re-here’s extended a bit past a lightbulb. “Somebody made me dinner.”
