My Stepbrother Announced The Auction Beside Our Father's Empty Chair

Russell put the auction flyer where Dad's breakfast plate used to sit.

Three engines filled the picture. I had rebuilt every one. He had picked a photo from winter, when their covers made them look like trash bags on wheels.

"Friday," he said. "We need the yard clear before buyers tour the restaurant."

Dad had died in a Rockford rehab center nine days earlier.

I was Micah Whitecloud, thirty-nine, a Native American man with brown skin, a long black braid, and a pale scar across my right thumb. I worked as the miniature-railway mechanic at Dad's roadside restaurant outside Rockford, Illinois. Some days I also cleaned the grease trap. A job was a job.

Russell Hale was forty-five, a white man with clipped sandy hair, a pink scalp showing through, and a silver watch that slid over his shirt cuff.

He tapped that watch now.

"You could help for once."

Outside, rain dotted the windows of Gordon's Milepost. Beyond the gravel lot, our fifteen-inch tracks curved through four acres of cottonwoods. Dad had laid the first loop before he met Russell's mother.

I kept a brass whistle in my pocket. Dad had given it to me when I started working there. I never blew it indoors.

My thumb found its smooth mouthpiece.

"Who said you could sell the engines?" I asked.

Russell unfolded a will.

"Dad did."

He wasn't my blood brother. Our parents had married when I was seventeen. After his mother died, Dad had still called him his boy.

I had no trouble with that. I had trouble with the yellow stickers Russell had put on my tool drawers.

"You get your hand tools," he said. "I get the business and everything left over. Read it."

The will was dated March 8. Dad's lawyer had witnessed it. The page Russell held out did leave me the tools.

It left Russell the restaurant and the rest of Dad's estate.

"There," Russell said. "No mystery."

I read the words about property owned at death twice.

Dad had once made me crawl under a switch stand while he moved its handle above me.

"Don't trust what the lever says," he'd told me. "Check what it's joined to."

I hadn't thought that lesson would apply to a will.

"The railway has a separate tax bill," I said.

"For accounting."

"And a separate deed."

"Micah. You fix little trains. Let people who understand money handle this."

He slid over the auction list.

Cedar Number Two. Switcher Seven. Atlas Nine.

Beside each name, someone had typed: NONWORKING DISPLAY. SALVAGE VALUE ONLY.

"These run," I said.

"They haven't carried a customer this year."

"Because Dad got sick."

"Which cost money."

I asked to see the bills. Russell gathered the pages instead.

"You missed every dinner where we discussed this. Now you want a vote?"

I had missed dinners. I had spent those evenings changing Dad's bed sheets at rehab, then coming back to keep rain out of the engine shed.

I didn't give Russell that list. He already knew.

"Who valued them?"

"A collector. He's doing us a favor."

The flyer named an auctioneer, but all three engines had a small P beside their lot numbers.

"What's P?"

"Pending."

"Before the auction?"

His watch hit the table.

"You always catch on one little thing and stop the whole machine."

That was often the right way to fix a machine.

I took a flyer. Russell let me, perhaps because he thought paper couldn't hurt him in my hands.

In the shed, I hung a blue flag on Cedar's front coupler.

Our rule was simple. A blue flag meant someone was working on the engine. Nobody moved it until the person who hung the flag took it down.

Dad had enforced that rule even when a whole bus waited for rides.

I checked the other engines. Switcher Seven's side panel had fresh scratches around the screws. Its motor controller was gone.

Atlas Nine's was gone too.

Those boxes cost $3,200 each.

I photographed the empty mounts, the stickers, and the lock on the shed door. Then I went to Dad's desk.

Under a switch diagram lay a bank card with three words in Dad's block print.

ASK LEONA FIRST.

He had shown me that card in May.

"If somebody tells you the whole place is one thing, take this in," he'd said.

I'd thought he meant the loan.

At Prairie Ledger Bank, the receptionist called upstairs. A woman came down holding an envelope against her gray jacket.

"I'm Leona Ortiz," she said. "Your father asked us to retain an original for you."

She placed it on the desk between us.

Through its window, I could read the first line.

AMENDMENT TO THE WHITE CLOUD RAILWAY TRUST.