My Uncle Read His New Will Beside The Broken Humidifier

My uncle set his folder on the packing table before we had put away the food from my grandmother's funeral.

"Mai wanted me to keep the farm," he said. "There is a newer will."

The fan above him clicked every fourth turn. I knew which bearing had failed. I also knew the west room had reached ninety-four percent humidity at six that morning. Neither fact seemed worth saying while everyone watched his folder.

I was Thai Vue, thirty-three, a Hmong American mushroom cultivation technician who repaired equipment in silence and kept humidity readings in his head. I was a lean man with brown skin, close-cut black hair, and a pale burn mark across my left wrist.

Grandma had paid me $19 an hour to grow oyster mushrooms beneath a limestone slope outside Bowling Green, Kentucky. I had changed filters, mixed growing blocks, and driven boxes into town before the heat rose off Scottsville Road.

For nine years, I had also kept her company.

Neng Vang was fifty-eight, Hmong American, and my mother's older brother. He had a broad, smooth face, silver hair swept back from his forehead, and a gold tie clip shaped like a horse.

He could make a late bill sound like an invitation to supper.

"Your grandmother was proud of your work," he told me. "But wages are wages. You were her hired hand."

My aunt Bao looked down at her paper plate.

"Thai took her to every appointment," she said.

"And she paid him," Neng said gently. "Let's honor what she signed."

He passed Bao a napkin before she could reach for one. He always noticed small needs when a room was watching. When Grandma's drain backed up at midnight, he let his phone ring.

I kept my work boots under my chair. There was straw in the laces. I wanted to tell them about the nights she had waited upstairs until I finished, saving half her soup for me.

Instead, I asked him to turn the page.

He lifted a page dated June 3. Grandma had died June 19. Her name sloped across the bottom, loose and shaky, as it had in her final months.

The paper gave him the growing parcel, the business, and every room under the hill. It named him to handle the estate.

"She could hardly hold a fork," Bao said.

"Which explains the signature." He smiled at me. "Nobody can argue with a shake like that."

I watched a drop gather on the humidifier hose.

Grandma had taught me to draw a blue square around any reading I had checked twice. A number without a square could be a guess. A square meant I had stood there and looked.

There were twelve years of those squares in the office cabinet.

There was also a sealed envelope in my toolbox at home. Maribel Santos, Grandma's estate attorney, had told me to keep it flat and dry. Grandma had told me when to open it.

"When someone tells you what I wanted," she had said, "ask them to let me finish."

I had never told Neng about it.

"May I have a copy?" I asked.

He slid one across the table.

"Of course. Nothing hidden here."

The two witness names were Dana Price and Leon Burke. Dana had once helped Grandma with invoices. Leon sold insurance and ate breakfast with Neng.

I folded nothing. I put the pages between two clean pieces of cardboard.

"You'll still have work," Neng said. "At least until I decide what to do with the lower rooms."

"The mushrooms need air tonight."

"See?" He opened his hands toward the family. "A good worker."

I went down the stairs. Behind me, he began talking about taxes and all the burdens he had accepted.

The underground rooms were built from an old farm cellar, with poured walls added long before my time. They were work rooms, not tourist caves. Water lines ran overhead. Plastic curtains held each crop's air apart.

I shut off the humidifier, changed the bearing, and wrote ninety-one in the log when the air settled.

Then I put a blue square around it.

At home, I called Maribel.

"He has a June will," I said.

"Send me every page. Do you still have the packet?"

"Sealed."

"Bring it tomorrow morning. Don't write on it."

For the first time all day, I sat down.

"Does her shaky signature prove it's real?"

"It proves that someone put a shaky signature on a page," she said. "We need to find out how it got there."

At seven the next morning, I stopped at the farm before her office. A white pickup blocked the service door. A woman in work boots stood beside it, holding a rolled floor plan.

"Thai Vue?" she asked. "I'm Ada Holt. Your uncle said you'd be expecting me."

"What inspection?"

She kept one hand on the rolled plan and took a receipt from her pocket.

"Ask your uncle," she said. "I already gave him $18,000."