My Nephew Introduced Me To The Buyer Beside The Nursery Tanks

My nephew, Renji Morita, called me the old caretaker while my sister's chair was still turned toward the water.

He said it beside tank four, where a million young oysters were settling onto crushed shell. His buyer wore loafers without socks. Neither man looked into the tank.

"Uncle Mas kept things running," Renji said. "We're grateful."

At sixty-four, I was a lean Japanese American man with brown skin, silver hair cut close, and a pale scar across my left eyebrow. On the company forms, my name was Masahiro Ueda. Everyone at the hatchery called me Mas. My job was caretaker at Marsh Lantern Oyster Hatchery, outside Biloxi, Mississippi. I had kept its pumps running through three hurricanes.

I had also kept its books when my sister, Emi, got too tired.

Renji was a trim Japanese American man with smooth black hair, a sharp side part, and shoes he checked for dust before sitting down.

He was thirty-nine. That morning, he had checked those shoes twice.

"This is Nolan Pike," he said. "He buys working properties."

"I buy equipment," Nolan said. "The land deal comes later."

That was a useful correction. I remembered it.

Beyond the screen door, brown bay water slapped the pilings. A shrimp boat moved toward Back Bay, its rigging black against a thin morning sky.

I put down my brush.

Every morning, I painted a tide mark on a card no bigger than a business card. One blue stroke for the water, one brown stroke for the mud. On the back, I wrote salinity, wind, and the time.

Emi had called them my little receipts from the sea.

She had died at home in Biloxi eleven days before.

"We found a newer will," Renji said.

He took a folder from under his arm and placed it on my feed scale.

"Everything connected to the hatchery comes to me. It makes the estate much simpler."

"Where did you find it?"

"Mother's desk."

I had cleared that desk with him. I had found her glasses, a bag of peppermints, and three unpaid light bills.

"Which drawer?"

"Does it matter?"

"It might."

He opened the folder before I could ask again.

The will was dated May 6, 2025. Two witness names sat below Emi's signature. Behind it was a sworn page bearing the seal of Vera Cates, a local notary who had died that January.

"You can have a copy," Renji said. "My lawyer has filed it. I'll handle the estate."

"Have you been appointed?"

"It's underway."

Nolan watched a pipe drip into a floor drain.

"We need the tanks clear by Tuesday," he said. "My crew starts taking out the nursery then."

It was Thursday.

"There are live animals here."

"We allowed a relocation payment," Renji said.

He slid another sheet toward me. It offered $1,500 if I signed away any claim to wages, property, or equipment and surrendered the keys by Monday evening.

I turned it over. The back was blank.

"A generous way to close things," he said.

"Close what?"

"This stage of your life."

I looked toward the locked cabinet beneath our old wall calendar. Its bottom drawer held a bank envelope with my name on it. Emi and I had signed those papers after the third storm, when repairs cost more than her savings.

I had never needed to wave them at anyone.

"You should read the company agreement," I said.

"Mother owned this place."

"She owned an interest in it."

Renji gave Nolan a small, patient smile.

"Grief makes people hold on to details."

Nolan handed me his card. His price, printed on the attached offer, was $286,000 for the hatchery's equipment. Someone had drawn a line through the condition requiring company approval.

"Who crossed that out?" I asked.

"Our business people," Renji said. "Don't make this harder."

I took pictures of every page with my phone. Then I asked them to leave while I checked the screens.

Renji tapped the $1,500 offer.

"Monday. After that, I can't protect you."

When their car had gone, I checked the oxygen line. The larvae still turned in the slow current. Nothing in their small world had changed yet.

I called Inez Baptiste.

She had spent thirty years keeping courthouse records before retiring. Once, she had returned a church raffle ticket because its date was wrong.

"I've got a will," I told her.

"Everybody's got a will after somebody dies," she said. "What have you got that can be checked?"

"Maybe a box."

In February, I had helped clear Vera Cates's office for her estate sale. I bought her box of paper stock for $28 because it held good watercolor cards.

I carried it down from my kitchen shelf.

Under the cards lay a folded invoice for a replacement notary seal.

The date at the top was September 18, 2025.