My Brother Read The Will Beside Our Aunt's Covered Carvings

Curtis put Aunt Elinor's will on my clean work towel, right beside the limestone angel whose broken finger I had spent three days setting.

"Pack your little brushes," he said. "This place is mine now."

The funeral dirt was still damp on his shoes. We had buried our aunt that morning outside Bedford, Indiana. By four, my brother had brought a padlock to her old cutting shed.

I was fifty, a white woman with a blunt gray braid, freckled hands, and a pale scar across my chin. I worked as a cemetery monument conservator. Families hired me to clean headstones, reset bases, and mend stone without grinding away the names.

Curtis was fifty-three, a broad white man with a red neck, close-cut brown hair, and a mouth that looked pressed flat. He sold aggregate. If a thing could go across a truck scale, he could tell you its worth.

"That's a repair," I said, pointing at my towel. "Move the paper."

He smiled and left it there.

The shed stood above a water-filled quarry west of town. Its tall windows were clouded with white dust. Beyond the door, sumac had turned red along the old rail bed. Twenty-three covered carvings stood on wood blocks inside. A bare patch marked one more place.

Elinor had paid me $28 an hour to stabilize them. She had never let me photograph their backs.

"When the repairs are done," she had promised, "we'll turn them together."

Then her heart had failed.

Curtis tapped the paper.

"March twelfth. Last year. Quarry, buildings, contents, all to me. You get her household things. Take the spoons if you want."

"Can I have a copy?"

"Why? Going to sue over a rock pile?"

I held out my hand until he passed me a second copy. He had brought extras. He wanted the words to spread.

The document had two witness names and a signature that looked almost like Elinor's. Almost mattered in my work. A seam filled with the wrong mortar could look sound until the first freeze.

"When did she give you this?"

"She trusted the person who could keep the place earning."

I folded the copy along its printed lines.

My coat hung on a nail behind him. In its inside pocket was a tiny glass vial. I kept one from each restoration, filled with loose dust that would otherwise be swept away. I never labeled them. The records for my work had names, dates, and photographs. The vials were only for me.

That day's dust had come from beneath the angel's broken hand.

"These aren't waste stone," I said.

"Everything here is stone."

He pulled a yellow quote from his folder. A mobile crusher would cost $4,800 to bring in. He expected roughly $19,000 from the first loads of aggregate, before hauling costs.

"You're crushing the figures?"

"They're too awkward to stack. Nobody buys women holding lunch pails."

I looked toward the covered row. One figure held a pail. Another held a square. The angel on my bench had heavy work shoes under her robe.

"Give me two weeks to document them."

"You have until Friday. Equipment arrives at seven."

It was Tuesday.

He took my work key from the bench and threaded his new padlock through the door hasp. I had to carry my tools outside while he waited.

"You clean dead people's names, Cecily," he said. "Let somebody alive handle a business."

I put my soft brushes in their canvas roll. Then I picked up the angel's repair log. Curtis watched the tools. He did not ask about the log or the paper tucked behind its cover.

Three months before she died, Elinor had given me a flat brown envelope.

"Your mother had a copy once," she had said. "You keep this original. Don't leave it here."

I had read enough to see my name. Then a hospital call had cut short our talk, and fear had done the rest. I had put the envelope in my fire box at home.

Inside were a signed property schedule and an old deed bearing the county recorder's stamp. Both named a family trust. The schedule listed the quarry and the cutting shed. It also listed carved works, tools, and related records.

Curtis had never asked what Elinor gave me.

At home, I set the little vial beside my unpaid electric bill and opened the fire box. The trust schedule lay under my marriage certificate. My married name was Langford, but the page also gave my birth name, Cecily Whitcomb.

Below it was a name and an old phone number: Dalia Osman, successor trustee.

I dialed. A woman answered on the fourth ring.

"Elinor died," I said. "My brother says he's crushing the shed carvings Friday."

For a moment, I heard only her breathing.

Then she said, "Read me the recording number on that deed."