The Supply Boss Brought Me Eighteen Names And A Borrowed Pen

Nico Barrera put a fountain pen beside my lunch as if he had brought me a flower.

“One little favor, Rosalia. Then we can settle your account.”

He owed me $12,640 for ceramic fronts at the rain garden wall of a private cemetery above Hilo, on Hawaii Island. I had paid for the clay, glaze, power, and packing. My grocery money now sat inside his unpaid invoice.

I was a short, broad Italian American woman of sixty-eight, with a white braid, brown eyes, and bent fingers that always held a little clay.

I made cemetery ceramics. Some days that meant an urn. Other days it meant a name panel for a niche, the small space where a family placed an urn. I pressed a fern into the underside of every piece I made.

The fern left a shallow print. Even under a name, something could keep growing.

Nico was a trim Filipino American man of fifty-one, with smooth black hair, silver glasses, and shirts so crisp they seemed to stand away from his skin.

He ran Harbor Rest Supply. He also held the lease on the warehouse where I rented kiln space for $425 a month. People called him helpful. Funeral directors praised his credit terms. Families thanked him for taking care of things they could not bear to think about.

He moved my sandwich away from his paper.

“Eighteen installations,” he said. “Just certify that you inspected the finished work.”

I wiped my hands before I read it.

The form said I had seen eighteen sealed urns placed in eighteen niches. Below that, a line said each space was occupied and complete.

“I inspected the fronts,” I said. “I never saw the urns.”

“The fronts were installed.”

“That isn't what this says.”

He smiled. Outside, rain tapped the broad leaves beside the loading door. A coqui frog had somehow found a place behind our drainpipe and was calling in daylight.

“Grief makes people ask the same question many times,” he said. “This saves them trouble.”

I turned the page. Each family had paid $4,800 for an urn, permanent placement, and the ceramic front. Eighteen payments came to $86,400.

“Why is the maker certifying placement?”

His smile went flat.

“Because the maker wants her check.”

My kiln clicked as it cooled. I knew that sound better than I knew most voices.

The kiln had cost me years of saving. Moving it would mean finding another room with enough power, then paying people who knew how to lift it. Nico knew that. He had watched me count the cost of replacing a single heating element.

“Leave it,” I said. “I need my reading glasses.”

They hung on the cord against my chest. He looked at them, then at me.

“Tomorrow morning. I'll add $900 for the trouble.”

“Put that in writing too.”

His face warmed again, almost at once.

“There she is. My practical girl.”

He was seventeen years younger than I was.

After he left, I opened the drawer below my trimming wheel. Inside lay a yellow inventory signed when I moved in. It listed my kiln, my tools, and every master mold as my property. Nico had signed the bottom himself.

I laid his new form beside it.

He had never cared what I kept. He thought my records were an old woman's habit, like saving string.

I kept a photograph of every firing batch before packing. I needed those pictures when a glaze ran or a customer said a panel had arrived cracked. On each photograph, a board showed the batch number and date.

I also kept my numbered delivery molds. Each was a plaster cradle fitted to one curved front. The cradle protected the ceramic in transit and came back for reuse. A job card traveled in its side pocket.

The eighteen fronts on Nico's list had traveled in molds 900 through 917. I remembered them because he had ordered plain covers first and names later.

“Families change their minds,” he had told me.

Under my work contract, I made objects. I did not take custody of remains. I had written that sentence myself after a funeral director once tried to leave an urn beside my lunch bag.

I found the batch photographs. I found the pickup sheets. Then I opened an envelope I had saved from a woman who asked why her husband's niche was still covered with temporary paper.

Nico had told me she was confused.

Her name was June Pell.

The envelope held a copy of her receipt and a note: Please tell me what is behind his name.

I sat down.

Months earlier, an investigator had left his card after asking about another supplier. Elias Kealoha. I had liked that he waited while I finished lifting a hot shelf.

I put his card beside June's letter.

Before I could call, my phone rang.

“No need to fret over that form,” Nico said. “We already had your signature on file.”