My Brother Claimed The Lanterns While I Packed My Shell Bowls

Declan put a price tag on Aunt Nora's green-glass channel lantern before we had cleared the funeral food from her freezer.

He tied it to the handle with white string. The tag said $6,400.

"That's an estimate," he told me. "Don't touch the glass."

I had carried that lantern through two storm warnings. Still, I set down my hand.

I was thirty-five, an Irish American woman with pale freckled skin, gray eyes, and thick auburn hair I kept in a loose braid.

My brother Declan Reilly was thirty-nine, with the same pale Irish skin, neat dark hair, and blue eyes that stayed friendly while his mouth went flat.

We stood in Nora's boathouse on the Dog River, south of downtown Mobile. Heat pressed through the screens. Outside, a mullet slapped the water beneath the dock.

I made oyster-shell mosaics for a living. Restaurant walls, porch numbers, little marsh scenes people bought for wedding gifts. My workbench had stood in this building for seven years.

My work orders said Aisling Reilly, Oyster-Shell Mosaics. Nora had saved the first one I printed, though she'd paid full price for her piece.

Declan tapped a stack of papers against his palm.

"The final will left everything to me. House, accounts, this place. Especially this place."

"You said we would read it together."

"We just did."

He hadn't let me hold it.

Nora had been dead for five weeks. Declan had received his court papers the week before. He kept calling himself the executor in the same voice he once used to call himself team captain.

"She knew you couldn't manage valuable things," he said. "You glue broken shells to boards, Ash. That's different from preservation."

I looked at the lower edge of the lantern. A small white card there bore my handwriting. I had copied Nora's notes onto clean inventory cards every winter.

He turned the tag so the price faced out.

"I'll give you $400 for the workbench. You can leave the bowls."

"The bowls are mine."

"Don't make this difficult."

I lifted my wide ceramic sorting bowl. One shell chip fell from its rim and rang against the bottom.

A clear note meant dense shell. A dull tick often meant a hidden crack. I sorted hundreds that way before I mixed grout. Nora used to sit beside me and listen.

"Your ears are better than a price guide," she'd said.

Declan heard only noise.

"Can you stop that?"

I wrapped the bowl in a towel.

Nora had collected eighteen navigational lanterns. Some had green glass. Some held thick clear lenses that bent daylight into bars. They came from workboats, river landings, and one old ferry. She cared who had cleaned them, who had carried them, and how they had reached her shelves.

Declan cared what a person might pay to carry them away.

On her last good afternoon, Nora had asked me to mend a shell edge on the sign by the door.

"Keep the pieces that don't fit yet," she'd said. "And ask Opal for the closed report. Read the pockets, too."

I had thought she meant the little sleeves where Opal kept old photographs.

That morning, after Declan told me to empty my bench, I had finally called Opal.

Now he spread his papers on the table where Nora had once made crab sandwiches. A thin photocopy slipped from the stack. I saw the word CODICIL before he covered it.

"What's that?"

"An abandoned idea."

"Let me read it."

"It was never the final plan."

He picked it up and fed it into Nora's small office shredder beside the table.

I stepped forward. He held up one finger, as though stopping a waiter.

The motor chewed for three seconds.

"Why would you destroy it?"

"Because loose copies confuse people. There isn't another one."

He sounded so sure that I studied the machine instead of his face. The narrow strips lay on top of old dock bills. I took a picture of the basket.

"Seriously?" he asked.

"I'm keeping track of what happened."

He laughed softly.

"That's the trouble with you. Every little scrap has to mean something."

My phone buzzed. A customer wanted to know if her $625 kitchen panel would be ready Friday. I typed yes. I needed that money.

Declan mistook my bent head for surrender.

"You have until Sunday. After that, I'll charge storage."

"For my own tools?"

"For space in my building."

I packed my tile nippers, paper patterns, and bags of washed shell. I left the bench where it stood. It was bolted to the wall, and I wasn't ready to take orders from a price tag.

At the door, I turned back.

"Give me a copy of what you filed. Every page."

"Ask the courthouse if you want to waste your day."

A car rolled over the crushed shell drive outside. Declan looked annoyed before anyone got out.

Opal Henson came through the screen door carrying a flat gray case. She ignored his outstretched hand and set it beside my wrapped bowl.

Across the case, in Nora's square blue handwriting, were six words.

For Aisling. Open With The Report.