Robin Castagna

Robin Castagna is Alex Delaware’s partner, a working luthier whose careful attention to her craft sits alongside an easy, playful intimacy with him. Her brief appearances join the textures of domestic life to the disciplined, solitary concentration of making instruments.

Work and Presence

Robin Castagna has several large jobs backordered and spends time in the studio behind the house. The small, single-story building has high windows and an old burnished-pine door she rescued from a downtown demolition. Inside, she works at a bench on a guitar-shaped piece of Alaskan spruce, shaping its soundboard with a chisel. She taps the wood, pares it, runs her fingers along its inner edges, and pauses to consider the work before continuing.

Her concentration is so complete that she does not notice Alex Delaware enter or watch from ten or fifteen feet away. With her hair tied in a red silk scarf and gray denim overalls over a black T-shirt, she hunches over the bench, absorbed in a process that makes time and space seem to recede. Her wrists appear delicate beside the steel tool, yet she handles it with assurance. Wood shavings gather at her feet, where Spike sleeps; the focused labor and the dog’s comfort make the studio both a working space and part of the household.

Relationship with Alex Delaware

At home, Robin Castagna’s work and the couple’s obligations shape their ordinary rhythms. One morning, Alex Delaware finds the house quiet, with toast and coffee left out, the newspaper still folded on the kitchen counter, and no sign of Robin or Spike. They are in the studio, and the demands on both of them have left them talking little since getting up.

Their affection is direct and unceremonious. After joking about luthiery, Alex Delaware stands behind Robin Castagna, smells her hair, and tells her he loves her; she answers that she loves him too, laughs, and teases him for being such a guy. When he playfully calls her Professor Castagna and suggests she has been keeping a record of his declarations, she says no record is needed, that she is not complaining, and that he can always tell her he loves her. She finds his predictability cute: their banter makes his repeated reassurance a source of shared humor rather than distance.