Scott carefully packed everything in the fresh book-pack moving box he’d brought, taped it up, addressed it to himself, and carried it downstairs.
There were polite good-byes all around and then, stuffed with fajitas and tacos, mellow with a Corona, he let his rental car drive him to the airport.
He was still distracted and disconnected when Betty picked him up in their ancient Reliant and brought him home from San Jose Airport to their two-bedroom ranch house in a cheap part of Mountain View. It had been built well over half a century ago, more for tight-budgeted junior officers from the old Navy field than for software executives. But even with the mortgage paid, the taxes were almost more than they could afford. The neighborhood was poor, but relaxed; people who had bought recently were poor from making payments, long-term residents had always been poor. The streets were lined with old, dented, gas-engined pick-ups, and the air was multicultural with outdoor cooking from everywhere around the planet.
Scott took his precious box into the garage through the rear door to his shop. There was, he realized, the same sense of neatness and order to his workbench as in his father’s photo album and the other things in that old carboard box. Carlo Valdez had not had much, but as Scott’s new relatives assured him, what he had was always in good order. So with his son.
Scott had taken two years of junior college physics, but didn’t go on. He’d really been more interested in music. His adoptive father died drunk in a car wreck and he’d gone to work after school to help make ends meet. That had been the end of good grades. He got his AA and did band gigs.
In ’95, the China War caught his reserve unit, and when he got back, Mom—she would always be Mom to him—had lost her job. He’d gone to work full time for the school then and played for money at night. When Mom passed, Betty, a simple woman from a good family whom he had thought of only as a friend on the job, had offered to help with the inheritance taxes in exchange for the spare room.
That had lasted two weeks, Scott remembered with a smile. A simple, determined woman, who’d seen something in him no one else had seen.
Staring at walls again, he reproached himself. Somehow, he would do something to make her right, something for Theresa and Carlo, something to close a wound half a century old. Back to work.
He spread paper towels on the workbench, opened the box, placed the broken halves of Don Giovanni gently on them, and stared. Somewhere, in the neat rows of boxes that lined the garage, was an old Girard turntable. He searched, found it, found connecting wires, found their old amp, used alligator clips to attach the speakers from the old boom box he had for companionship in the shop, and ran the ridges of his thumb under the stylus. Nothing.
Three hours later, he’d found the broken wire, soldered it, tested again and was rewarded by a hollow grating sound. Very good. Betty called him to go to bed.
After work the next day, he had disassembled, cleaned and lubed the turntable. Then he got it to play one of the unbroken records, after a fashion; it wowed as the needle went up and down the warped hills of the old disk. Nevertheless, progress.
Back to the recording of Don Giovanni. He blew the dust off and studied the broken edges again. With a dozen small clamps—you never have too many clamps, he thought—he managed to hold the edges back together. They fit. He got the Super Glue, carefully wet each edge and pressed them together, using large rubber bands around the clamp mounts to hold everything tight.
Two days later, he tried to play the record. But it broke again the first time the stylus hit the imperfect joint.
“What’s the matter, hon?” Betty asked as he crawled into bed. She levered herself up on an arm and looked at him with that motherly concern that falls full on the husband in a childless family. She’d never made any pretense at beauty; too strong-featured, too pear-shaped. But she ate sensibly, did physical work all day, and exercised those muscles that didn’t get what they needed that way. Her spare, big-boned figure wasn’t stylish; but it was pretty good for a woman in her forties.
“It broke again.”
“There’s got to be someone who can fix it.”
He stroked her gently with the back of his hand and she smiled. “Yeah. But they’re expensive.”
“It means a lot to you. I’d rather put money into recovering your Dad’s voice than another dinner out.” Scott laughed. “I’ll ask around.” Then he slid over to her and they began to make love. She was the only one he’d ever been with, and he was too grateful to be curious about others. She was heaven.
Afterward, they had the house turn the bedroom wall set on, and took a virtual trip over Pluto, courtesy of C-Span and NASA’s latest probe. It had vast areas of rolling, washboard-like hills, blown up dramatically to ten times their real scale by hype-desperate NASA publicists. Various geologists tried, without too much success, to explain the hills, and Scott wondered what they really looked like. Betty giggled as his fingers mimicked their eye’s virtual journey.
Scott’s thoughts drifted from Pluto’s valleys, to Clyde Tombaugh, and a meditation on persistence. When a chance to sing Don Giovanni had come along, his father, against all odds, had been ready for it. Never quit, Scott told himself. Never quit.
“Hmmm,” the Audion engineer muttered for the third time as he examined the broken record. Then finally, “Yes, I think we can do that. We’ll make rubber casts of each half, splice those together, and make a hard cast on that negative. That’s going to lose a little fidelity, but not too much. Then we’ll play it into the remastering system; you ought to get a pretty good CD out of it.”
Scott nodded, then asked the hard question.
“How much?”
“Not that much, really. Less than ten thousand, I’d guess. Our business people do the estimating though, so you’ll have to talk to them.”
Scott nodded again. “Well, thanks for your help,” he told the man with a confident sound in his voice, shook hands, and found his way out.
He didn’t stop by the business office and he didn’t let them see him cry.
Scott saw the garage sale on Calderon on his way home, and stopped because he was in the mood to buy something at a reasonable price. He noted some technical books on the card table next to a dirty laser-toaster. He shook his head; facing arrays of high-powered diode lasers, impossibly expensive twenty years ago, a top-of-the-line consumer product a decade ago, a piece of five-dollar junk now.
“Doesn’t work,” the heavyset dark haired woman in the lawn chair told him. He nodded.
There was more stuff in the back of the garage. Whoever had died had owned a microscope; a real one, not an educational toy. He took it out into the sunlight, pulled a hair from his beard and put it where a slide would go.
“Doesn’t work,” the woman rasped again. “The old jerk was always fooling around with scientific stuff that doesn’t work. He should have read his horoscope more; now I tell you that works! Predicted he was going to have a bad day the day he died, it did.”
But the microscope worked just fine. It was just a little old-fashioned; no built-in digital array, but the optics, the motion, the weight and steadiness spoke of a one-time top-of-the-line instrument.
“The little light doesn’t go on,” she added. That, he thought, would be the little light you used to backlight a sample slide. It probably needed a new bulb.
“How much?”
“Ten bucks.”
He bit his lip. It might be worth a thousand. He ought to say something. Then he thought; she didn’t give a damn about what the microscope meant, or she’d know what it was worth. The woman despised what it stood for. She had earned the fruits of her own carefully-nurtured ignorance, and he wouldn’t do the world any favor by subsidizing that worldview. So he rationalized.