"I thought we might go to the river," Richard said. "She liked the river."
Ethan agreed. They drove without music to the stretch of water where Claire had once insisted on teaching Ethan to skip stones badly while explaining that failure was just practice wearing a costume. The afternoon was mild. Other families picnicked at a distance. Richard and Ethan stood near the bank with the scratched violin case in the trunk of the car because Ethan had refused to leave the house without it, even for this.
"I don't know how to do this right," Richard admitted.
"There isn't a right," Ethan said. "There's just not pretending she didn't happen."
Richard exhaled. "I pretended for a while. I told myself I was protecting you from sadness. I was protecting myself from looking at what I'd lost and what I'd failed to hold while I still had it."
Ethan picked up a flat stone and failed to skip it. It sank with a single blunt sound.
"She made me promise," Ethan said, "near the end, that I wouldn't let the violin become a museum piece. She said instruments die of silence faster than of use. She made me promise I'd keep playing even if you got weird about it."