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“Sure,” Alba says. She gets up and stretches, cracking her back loudly. “I’ll make it.” She putters around in the kitchen and eventually returns with two mugs of coffee. I leave mine to cool a little. She holds her hands above her mug, letting the steam collect on her palms, while she watches me scissoring the linen into squares. I hand her my extra pair of scissors and we sit there cutting up the fabric in companionable silence.

After a while Alba says, “I wanted to write something, but I can’t. Why is it so hard?”

“What did you want to write?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I have the urge, but when I sit down and try I go blank.”

“Where’s your violin?”

Alba shrugs. “In my bedroom.”

“You always have ideas when you’re playing. Maybe the ideas aren’t entirely in your head; maybe you need to involve your hands.”

“I was working on something in the Yellow House on the piano. That was better because I don’t worry about playing well.”

I wonder whether anything in my own studio practice is relevant to Alba’s struggles. “In drawing, sometimes it’s important to just go ahead and spoil the page. Make a mark, any kind of mark. Then you’re free, you can proceed.”

Alba draws a squiggly line around the edge of the page. Then she draws a treble clef on the first staff. “Huh.”

“You need to give yourself some limitations. What key is it in?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pick something randomly.”

“D.” She writes two sharps after the treble clef.

“Okay. What instruments are you writing for?”

“Violin?”

“Just violin?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Okay. Maybe it shouldn’t be too long? Give me most of that paper.”

Alba peels three sheets off the stack and hands me the rest. I hear Beck coming in the front door, a few soft thuds as she drops her shopping bags in the entryway and the funny growl she makes to encourage herself as she pulls off her shoes. “In here,” I call.

“Hey,” Beck says, rubbing her hands as she enters the dining room. “What are y’all up to?”

“Alba’s working on a short violin piece in D.”

“Excellent.” Beck peers over Alba’s shoulder. “Very short.”

“I made coffee,” Alba says. Beck vanishes into the kitchen. “It sounded more real when you said that,” Alba says to me.

“Well, you see what I’m doing. I’m making the job smaller, more manageable. So instead of saying, now I’m going to write something, and then blanking because there are too many possibilities, you make a choice: D, and you’ve eliminated all the other keys. And then you decide that it’s going to be for violin, and you’ve opened up all the things violins can do but you’ve nixed pianos and French horns. Et cetera.”

“You make it sound easy,” Alba says, resentfully.

“It’s not easy,” I say. “But you have to ask questions. If you wait for inspiration you’re going to get mighty sick of waiting. Your grandfather always said, ‘When you keep failing to solve the problem, it’s time to rephrase the problem.’”

Beck comes in with her mug and the coffeepot, pours for herself and gives us warm-ups. She says, “You’re a champion improviser, Alba. Why are you sitting here trying to think up a piece of music? Go noodle around, something will come to you.”

“I wanted to compose a piece, not noodle.”

“Artists have to noodle, that’s how we get ideas,” Beck says. “When I’m coding, I noodle. When your mama draws, she noodles. Or, you can do some boring thing, like washing the car, or vacuuming.”