My Aunt Changed The Greenhouse Locks Before The Soil Was Cold

My aunt set Grandma's house key beside a bag of used sample trays.

"Take those," she said. "You should have something to remember her by."

I was thirty-two, and I had spent eight years as a seed-potato laboratory technician in Moscow, Idaho. I washed trays, but I also ran virus screens, tracked clean plant lines, and knew which tiny mistake could ruin a season.

I was a short Korean American woman with straight black hair cut at my jaw, brown eyes, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

Sora Han was sixty-one, a Korean American woman with a silver bob, neat red nails, and pearl earrings she touched whenever she wanted the last word.

That morning, she touched both earrings.

"The nursery belongs to me now, Eunji. All of it."

Grandma Mira had been buried eleven days earlier. Snow still sat along the shaded fence. Beyond the greenhouse, the Palouse hills looked like a rumpled brown blanket.

Inside, forty-eight trays held twelve families of potato plants. Grandma had crossed the parent plants, grown the seed, and selected these lines over six years. Last fall, I had moved clean shoots into culture. These were the living copies we needed for this year's trials.

There was no catalog where I could order them again.

"Keep your voice down," I said. "I'm checking the heat alarm."

"You aren't checking anything."

She pulled a folded document from her purse. Across the top were the words LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.

"She left the nursery to me. The land, buildings, plants, equipment. I filed it yesterday."

I read the first page without taking it from her hand.

The date was February 14. On February 14, Grandma had been in a hospital bed, asking me whether the greenhouse vents were shut.

That did not make a will false. Sick people could still make choices.

But it made me read slower.

"May I see the signature page?"

Sora folded it shut.

"You don't need to inspect your grandmother's wishes."

Behind her, a locksmith waited beside his van. He looked at me, then at the glass door.

"Is there a problem with ownership?" he asked.

"A family problem," Sora said. "She's having trouble accepting things."

I kept my hand on the bench. Under it, a notebook lay open to a leaf with a curled tip. I sketched every unfamiliar leaf. Until I knew what caused its shape, I put a little pencil square around the drawing.

Grandma called those squares my waiting rooms.

The notebook held years of them. It also held dates, tray numbers, and copies of old delivery records. I did not throw away a record just because someone called it unimportant.

"The greenhouse has a different parcel number," I said.

Sora sighed.

"You washed her trays. Please don't pretend that taught you about property."

Three years earlier, Grandma and I had sat at a county counter while a clerk stamped two sheets. One was a deed. The other was an easement for water and access. A survey lay between us, its red line running behind the boiler shed.

My copies were at home in a flat blue envelope.

"This building isn't part of the nursery estate," I said.

"Everything inside that fence is mine."

"A fence isn't a deed."

She gave the locksmith a tight smile.

"Change it. I'll accept responsibility."

I asked him to note that I disputed her right to order the work. He wrote something on his pad. Then I packed my notebook, my thumb drive, and the day's sample tubes into a cooler.

I could have stood in the doorway. I could have made him step around me.

Instead, I photographed the temperature display. Seventy degrees. I photographed every tray label and the water valve, then sent Sora a text.

The plants require heat and water. Do not move them. I dispute your claim to this parcel. Please preserve all estate records.

Her phone chimed.

"Threatening your own aunt?"

"Writing down what I said."

She picked up the bag of dirty trays.

"You've always made simple things exhausting."

Grandma had paid Sora to handle appointments and bills during her last illness. Sora called those months a sacrifice whenever anyone else entered the room.

I took the bag. The trays would still need washing.

At home, I put them in my bathtub and opened the blue envelope on the kitchen table. The recording stamp was clear. So was my full name.

I called a local lawyer whose office handled property disputes. The receptionist gave me an appointment for the next morning.

Then I called the title office named on Grandma's closing receipt.

"Wyatt Bell," a man answered.

I told him the parcel number.

He went quiet long enough that I heard a drawer close.

"Ms. Han, I was about to call you. Your aunt has signed a sale agreement."

"For the nursery?"

"For both parcels. The price is nine hundred forty thousand dollars."