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“There you go. Walk into any damn gun shop or show and buy dozens. Not to mention private sales. Okay, thanks for your time. Let’s both take a break.”
—
Once home, I took the rear steps down to the garden, paused to feed the koi, and continued to Robin’s studio.
Usually she’s got several projects going, working on a mix of electric and acoustic instruments. For the past three weeks she’d been busy with one: restoring a hundred-and-fifty-year-old Antonio Torres classical guitar with a tissue-thin top and a history of ownership by several major composers and players. The challenge: alter as little as possible but do enough to resuscitate tone destroyed by wood-butchery in Barcelona.
Not her usual gig but the Swiss-born artisan in New York who used to take on that kind of thing had retired and forwarded clients to Robin.
If she found the assignment intimidating she didn’t let on. But hours spent in the studio had been stretching later than usual, the roar-and-buzz of power tools replaced by the click-clack of tweezers and scalpels.
I opened the door slowly and paused in the doorway to make sure I didn’t startle her.
Blanche had also gotten with the program. Instead of her usualjump off the couch followed by a heavy-breathing waddle toward me, she remained in place. Glancing at the workbench where Robin sat wearing magnifying goggles and holding a tiny tessera of inlay an inch above the Torres’s sound hole. Repairing the rosette, a masterpiece of inlay that had warped. Hundreds of snippets of dyed wood and ivory no larger than toothpick tips requiring painstaking reinstallation.
She smiled. “It’s okay, girlfriend, do your romantic thing. Same for you, darling.”
But both of us waited until she’d set the sliver.
Removing the thick specs, she breathed out, rolled her shoulders, knuckled her eyes, finally smiled.
“How’d it go, babe?”
The reunion you set up?
I kneeled and received slobbering affection from Blanche. “Interesting case.”
“That’s great.” Walking away from the bench, Robin untied her hair, shook it loose, removed her apron, dusted off black overalls.
I said, “Kicking off early?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe I’ll resume later. It’s a gorgeous little thing, isn’t it? Can’t wait to hear it once it’s playable.”
I stood, took her in my arms, held her and kissed her, breathing in perfume and sawdust and oddly aromatic sweat.
“You have lunch with Big Guy?”
“Italian.”
“Pizza the size of a manhole cover, you eat a slice or two, he demolishes the rest?”
“Pasta with black truffles.”
“Ooh,” she said. “Now I’m jealous.” She rubbed the back of my neck. “Looser than it’s been in a while, good for you. Not that it’ll stop me from guilt-tripping you as I pry open a can of tuna with aching fingers and pair it with dry crackers.”
She feigned coughing.
I cracked up.
“Glad someone thinks it’s funny.” Grinning.
I said, “How about dinner as atonement? Maybe the Bel-Air? Restaurant or bar, been a while.”
“That might partially compensate. If you toss in special devotion.”
“Dessert?”
“More like some serious calorie-burning afterward.”
