My Cousin Claimed The Foundry Beside The Silent Casting Pit

Solomon set his leather folder on the bench where Aunt Selam had once checked bell clappers. He moved my oil rag aside with two fingers.

"You can finish the clock," he told me. "After that, I need your keys."

I was a thin Ethiopian American man of sixty-one, with brown skin, gray curls, and round glasses that left pale dents beside my nose. I restored tower clocks. My work orders read Girma Kebede, Tower-Clock Restoration. I could spend six hours setting one worn tooth right and consider it a good day.

My cousin measured good days by closing prices.

Solomon was a broad Ethiopian American man of fifty-seven, with smooth brown skin, a silver mustache, and sharp creases in his cream trousers.

He had worn those trousers to a shuttered bell foundry in Lewiston, Maine. Fine gray dust covered everything else.

"What keys?" I asked.

He opened the folder.

"She left me the property. All contents included."

Outside, a truck crossed the bridge toward Auburn. Its sound rolled through the empty casting room. The Androscoggin smelled muddy through the cracked window.

Selam had died seventeen days earlier. Her blue coat still hung beside the door.

I lowered the brass gear I was holding onto a piece of felt.

"She told me there were instructions."

"There are." Solomon slid out three pages. "These."

The first page named him as the sole heir. The second named him as the person who would handle the estate. The last held Selam's name, two witness names, and a notary block.

April 16. Ten twenty in the morning.

I read that line twice.

"You look surprised," he said.

"I am."

"She was kind to you. That wasn't a deed."

We had both come to Maine as boys. Our aunt had made room for both of us. Later, she and her husband had bought the failing foundry. After he died, she had kept its repair bench open until her own hands failed.

I had spent the past winter upstairs, repairing a tower movement from a closed school. I had also driven her to treatment and learned which soup she could keep down.

Solomon had sent flowers. He had sent a buyer, too.

"You were a hired clock fixer who mistook hospitality for inheritance," he said.

I let one full breath pass.

When I worked, I hummed the beat a mechanism ought to make. Three light notes, a rest, then the next three. Selam had picked it up. She used to tap that beat on my bench before asking for tea.

That morning I hummed it without meaning to.

"Please don't do that," Solomon said. "This is business."

I looked again at the notary block. Ruth Vale. I knew Ruth. I had repaired the clock over her workroom door.

Before a shoulder operation, she had asked me to scan her old appointment books. She planned to retire and wanted clean copies. One journal remained in my locked tool chest. I had her signed receipt for the loan.

A clock restorer learned to keep the old parts until the new ones worked.

"May I have a copy?"

"I'll email one."

"All three pages, please."

He gave a small laugh.

"A stamp doesn't become false because you dislike the result. The woman who signed it can't come back and argue."

I took my phone out and photographed each page with his permission. Then I photographed the envelope he said had held them.

"What's the building worth?" I asked.

"A buyer offered $185,000 as it stands. Better than letting your clocks eat the roof."

There was a clean rectangle on the wall behind him. Until spring, a tall cabinet had stood there. Selam had kept wooden bell patterns inside: smooth curves used to shape molds, each one marked in her small black writing.

"Where's the pattern cabinet?"

"Storage. It's junk until somebody pays to move it."

"Which storage?"

"I'll include that in the inventory."

He had not yet filed an inventory. I knew because I had called the probate office that morning to ask whether any will had arrived.

I put my tools away. I did not hand him my keys. There was no court paper giving him the right to take them.

"Don't make this expensive," he said.

"Send the copy."

At home, I opened the chest under my workbench. Ruth's journal had a plain green cover. The receipt was tucked inside a clear sleeve. Her April 16 appointments filled one narrow page.

I laid my photograph beside it and stopped humming.

My phone rang before I turned the page.

"Girma? Ingrid Pike. I saw your message about Selam's will."

Ingrid had been her visiting nurse.

"It says April 16," I told her. "Ten twenty."

There was a sharp breath on the line.

"Then get a pencil," she said. "At ten twenty, your aunt was in surgery. I was holding her blue coat."