My Cousin Brought A Will And Ordered The Grinding To Stop

Esteban laid Aunt Ines's will beside my polishing stand, where one splash of red slurry could have stained it.

"Stop," he said. "That mirror belongs to my building now."

I lifted my hands off the glass.

At fifty, I was a broad Puerto Rican man with brown skin, close gray curls, and one white eyebrow scar from a slipped wrench.

My cousin was forty-seven. We had grown up sharing a bedroom in our grandmother's house before our families came west.

Esteban was a slim Puerto Rican man with smooth brown skin, swept black hair, and a neat beard that made his tight smile look drawn with a ruler.

He wore pale shoes on my wet shop floor.

"She paid me to finish this," I said.

"She paid you to grind glass. She's gone. Circumstances changed."

I made telescope mirrors for a living. At my bench below Aunt Ines's hilltop observatory outside Moab, I shaped glass until starlight could meet at one point. Some weeks I earned less than a plumber earned in a day.

Esteban had called that a failure to scale.

"You can't make a business out of one man's wrists," he liked to say.

Ines had answered him once.

"You can make something worth keeping."

Now she had been dead eleven days, and he had her keys.

I rinsed the eighteen-inch blank. The replacement mirror had been her last order. A failed roof seal had let rusty water pit the old mirror's coating and glass. She had sent me $3,400, half my price, before she went into the hospital.

I had nearly reached the final figure.

"Read page four," Esteban said.

The will was dated three years earlier. It left him the observatory, its four acres, and the service road. It named him to handle her estate.

"Your tools are yours," he added. "I'll give you until Friday."

Through the shop window, I could see the white dome above the red slope. Beyond it, the La Sal Mountains still held snow. Down on US 191, trucks carried bikes toward town.

"Public night is Saturday," I said.

"Canceled."

"Forty people signed up."

"Then forty people can buy binoculars."

I dried my hands. My throat had begun making the first few notes of the lullaby our grandmother used to hum. I did that when I tested a mirror. The tune kept my breathing slow while I watched the bands of light cross the glass.

Esteban looked toward my test stand.

"Still doing that song?"

"Still helps."

"You were always easy to keep busy."

He pushed a second sheet across the bench. It was a proposed sale summary. The price was $1,350,000. The buyer was Cairn Lantern Holdings. Its plan called for six luxury rooms and a roof deck where the dome stood.

"There isn't a sale yet," I said.

"There will be. I got the estate paperwork started yesterday."

I asked for copies. He seemed pleased by that, as if I had finally asked for instructions I could follow.

I put them in a clean drawer.

Ines had taught me that trick. Never let paper live beside an open bucket.

She had taught me another thing a month before she died.

We had stood under the telescope while I checked its balance. She had tapped the removable counterweight with her cane.

"You know what's inside that service sleeve," she had said.

"The sealed envelope."

"Keep it sealed while I'm alive. Afterward, take it to a lawyer. If somebody gets loud, don't get loud back."

"You could put it in a bank box."

"Then you'd need permission to reach it. You service this telescope. You already have the right key."

I had thought she was settling unpaid bills. The envelope was marked for me, but I had never opened it.

Now I remembered the way she had checked that I heard her.

Esteban picked up a handful of my test sheets.

"How many hours does one mirror take?"

"Enough to get it right."

He dropped the sheets.

"That's why you never got anywhere."

I put them back in order. Each sheet had a date, a temperature, and measurements taken across the mirror. On the oldest sheet, Ines had drawn a little square beside the word balance.

I had drawn the same square on the service sleeve after we closed it.

Esteban mistook my silence for agreement. He took a call while I covered the mirror with a clean cotton cloth.

"Yes," he said into his phone. "He's shutting down."

He walked outside to wave someone up the road.

I stayed by the window, counting the lullaby's four slow notes.

A black pickup stopped beneath the dome. A man stepped out with a rolling measure and a hard yellow case.

Esteban opened the gate for him.

The man called uphill, "Show me which walls come down first."