The Auction Notice Appeared While My Aunt’s Flowers Were Still Fresh

My uncle taped the auction notice to the workshop door with the funeral flowers still in his truck.

“Saturday,” Rocco said. “People have cash on Saturdays.”

I stood beside him with Aunt Celia’s shop keys pressed into my palm. She had died six days before, on May 14. The lilies on her grave had not gone brown.

“You could give her a week,” I said.

“She’s had sixty-nine years.”

Rocco Moretti was fifty-eight, an Italian American used-equipment dealer and my mother’s younger brother. Celia was their oldest sister. His lot stood outside Sandusky. Every sale was a show. Every pause meant someone else might get his money.

Rocco had a broad face, silver hair brushed straight back, and a heavy gold ring that clicked against every table he touched.

He clicked that ring on the glass now.

“The lawyer read the will. You heard it.”

I had. The 2018 will left Celia’s workshop and its contents to him. He got the rest of her estate as well. Her husband was long dead. She had no children.

But I had worked beside her for thirteen years.

I was thirty-three, an Italian American woman with dark curls cut at my chin, brown eyes, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

That scar came from a gouge that slipped while I was carving a flying mane. I made carousel horses for a living. I knew how basswood changed under a sharp tool, how a cracked leg sounded when tapped, and how much glue a joint could hold before it failed.

Rocco knew what a forklift might bring at auction.

“I have customer jobs inside,” I said. “And my own tools.”

“Make a list.”

“We need an inventory before anything moves.”

He gave a large sigh for the two men unloading folding tables behind him.

“My niece played with wooden horses. Now she thinks she runs a factory.”

One man looked down. The other kept walking.

I unlocked the door.

Lake Erie air followed us inside. Celia had fought that damp for years. The shop smelled of wood dust, hide glue, and the orange peels she left beside her tea.

Unfinished horses stood on their bench pins. Patterns hung flat against the wall. Their thin outlines held years of hard choices: how far a neck could bend, where a rider’s boot would clear a flank.

Rocco pointed at them.

“Packing material. Those can go first.”

“Those are patterns.”

“They’re old cardboard.”

Some were hardboard. Some were linen-backed paper. I did not explain. He was already counting shelves.

“Eight thousand for the lot, maybe twelve if we get two bidders.”

“There’s more than that in the wood rack.”

“Then bid.”

My cousin Enzo Bellini stood in the loading doorway. At thirty-five, he still wore the same worried look he had worn when our mothers argued over Christmas dinner. He repaired delivery trucks and drove when someone called in sick.

“Dad,” he said. “Maybe slow down.”

“Fix the ramp. It catches.”

Enzo went outside.

I walked to the horse nearest my bench. It was a small bay mare for a family in Huron. Under each finished saddle, I carved a tiny spiral. You had to crouch and look to find it.

Celia called it my quiet signature.

“A person should leave proof of her work,” she used to say.

That winter, while teaching me to set the drawer’s humidity gauge, she had said something else.

“If anybody tells you these patterns are worthless, open the bottom sleeve.”

I had thought she meant a rare drawing. Then her illness had filled our days with pills, rides, and things neither of us wanted to name.

Now I looked toward the long metal template drawer beneath the north bench. Its little gauge read forty-six percent. A thin green line marked the safe range.

Rocco followed my gaze.

“That cabinet might sell. Empty it tomorrow.”

“I’ll sort the customer work first.”

“You have until Friday.”

He left with his ring clicking against his keys. Through the window, I watched him stop Enzo beside the truck. Their words did not reach me. Enzo shook his head once.

I went to the back room to photograph the collection.

There should have been seven finished antique horses. Celia’s old inventory hung on a clipboard beside the light switch. I counted six.

The empty space belonged to Dawn, the oldest horse, a white jumper with one blue glass eye. Its oak cradle had two felt pads shaped by decades of weight.

Fresh black grit lay across one pad.

I touched the clipboard. Dawn’s last note was in my writing: left shoulder stable, May 2.

Behind me, a truck engine started.

I took pictures of the empty cradle. Then I went back to the template drawer and slid out the bottom sleeve.

Inside it, beneath a pattern for a curled tail, was an envelope addressed to me in Celia’s hand.