My Cousin Promised Away The Growing Rooms Before The Funeral Flowers Dried

I gave two low whistles and one high note before I opened the first growing room. The sound came back from the limestone wall, soft, soft, sharp. After forty years under that Dubuque bluff, I knew how an empty aisle answered.

That morning, the last note came back wrong.

I stopped beside a rack of lion's mane mushrooms. Their white teeth hung over the blocks like small frozen waterfalls. The fresh air fan hummed. Water ticked into the floor drain.

Something beyond Room Four had changed.

At seventy-one, I was a short Haitian American woman with dark brown skin, silver braids pinned beneath a blue scarf, and wide hands marked by pale work scars.

Those hands had cut mushrooms since 1986. I grew shiitake and lion's mane in chambers beneath my aunt's house, then packed them for cooks along the Mississippi. Some people saw a woman carrying crates. My customers saw the person who could tell them exactly when a cap would open.

I set down my harvest knife.

Then tires crunched above the front entrance.

“Solange!” Lucien called. “Come meet your future.”

My cousin stood beside a man wearing clean boots. Behind them, the river showed between bare branches. A barge moved past the low rooftops below the bluff.

Lucien was a tall Haitian American man with copper-brown skin, a smooth bald head, and a thin mustache above a smile that never reached his eyes.

He was fifty-four. His card said property broker. Mostly, he found land somebody else owned and talked about what it might become.

“This is Dean Vale,” he said. “Rook Hollow Storage.”

Dean shook my hand with two fingers.

“Your aunt had quite a site,” he said.

“She did.”

Aunt Mireille had died six weeks earlier. There were still white flowers drying in a vase upstairs.

Lucien spread a drawing across my loading table. It showed glass doors cut into the bluff and neat rows of private storage rooms.

My harvest table had become a lobby.

“Six hundred forty thousand dollars,” he said. “House, grounds, underground space. This town needs secure storage for serious collectors.”

“These rooms grow food.”

“They'll earn real money now.”

I moved a wet crate off the corner of his drawing.

“What did you sign?”

“A purchase agreement. Subject to probate approval. Thirty-five thousand already in escrow.” He tapped his chest. “Aunt named me in her will.”

“Named you what?”

“The person handling things.”

He lifted a plastic folder. I saw a court stamp on the front page and a date from the year before. He showed me the page that left him everything, then shut it before I could read the witness lines.

“She wanted you comfortable,” he said. “I'll give you two thousand for moving costs.”

“Moving what?”

“Whatever farm equipment you own.”

Dean glanced toward the growing rooms.

“We'll need them clear by December first.”

I looked at the black trays stacked beside my scale. A week's crop stood on those shelves. Another six weeks of blocks waited behind them. My last restaurant invoice had been for $486. My power bill had been $319.

Neither man asked about any of that.

“Did your title search include the lower parcel?” I asked.

Lucien laughed.

“It's a basement, Solange. A basement goes with the house.”

“These are growing chambers.”

“Call them whatever helps. You worked for Aunt. Forty years doesn't turn an elderly farmhand into an owner.”

Dean folded the drawing.

“Our survey crew will mark the entrances tomorrow.”

“Entrances?” I asked.

He looked at Lucien. Lucien looked at his phone.

“Ways in and out,” Dean said.

They drove away without taking any mushrooms.

I went into my little office, where a heater kept my labels dry. Behind the lot records and supplier bills sat a flat gray box.

Mireille had given it to me in 2004.

“Work should leave you something you can hold,” she had said.

I had paid her $28,000 in installments. She had paid the surveyor herself.

Inside the box lay my recorded deed, the survey, and twenty-two years of separate tax receipts. A blue pencil line on the survey ran beneath the house without including it.

I touched the raised seal on the certified copy.

Then I called Esther Noel.

“Lucien came with a buyer,” I said.

“Of course he did.”

Esther had run my packing table before her knees made her retire. At seventy-three, she still lived across the narrow road and watched trucks with the care other people gave birds.

“They talked about entrances,” I said.

She went quiet.

“Solange, did you send a truck to the east side last Thursday?”

“No.”

“White box truck. Left rear lamp out. It came at eleven seventeen.”

I looked toward Room Four.

The second passage had been closed for years.

Before I could answer, someone pushed a folded notice beneath my office door.

Across the top, in heavy black letters, it said NOTICE TO VACATE.