My Uncle Put Auction Tags On The Shelves I Came To Count

The first thing I saw in Grandma's studio was a price tag on her coffee cup.

It said twelve dollars. The dried ring inside it was still hers.

I set my tool bag beside the door. I was Wesley Bracken, thirty-seven, a commercial kiln repairman. I spent most months fixing the big electric kilns that schools and pottery shops used.

I was a white man with pale gray eyes, a crooked nose, and brown hair worn short above a white burn scar on my left ear.

Grandma used to say I looked like someone had dropped me before the clay set.

She had been dead nineteen days.

My uncle stood at her workbench, tying string through auction tags.

Ansel Bracken was a tall white American man of sixty-three, with silver hair combed straight back, pink cheeks, and a thin mustache he smoothed when he named a price.

He had run antiques auctions in Wyoming for thirty years. Every memory he told ended with what something might fetch.

"Wes. You made good time from wherever."

"Riverton. Where are her sample jars?"

"Good morning to you, too."

The studio sat behind Grandma's house in Thermopolis. Through its window, I could see the brown ridge above town. My van still held the cold smell of the canyon drive beside the Bighorn River.

Inside, the room smelled of dust and wet string.

Grandma Iona had kept two hundred sixteen small glaze jars here. Each jar wore the glaze it recorded. A tied test tile showed the same mix on a flat face. Folded notes went inside.

Thirty-eight years of work. Iron reds. Ash greens. Browns that turned gold if the kiln cooled slowly enough.

Now a whole stretch of the numbered rack stood empty.

"They're being photographed," Ansel said.

"Who's photographing them?"

"People who know their value."

He had put a framed picture of Grandma beside his auction notice. In the picture, her hands were covered in clay. Under it, his notice called her collection a final opportunity.

"The estate needs settling," he said. "Her will gives me authority."

"Can I see it?"

"The lawyer has it."

"Which lawyer?"

He pulled the string tight enough to bend a tag.

"You've been gone a long time. There's been a lot to handle."

I had heard that sentence since I started working on the road. It meant I missed birthdays. It also meant, in Ansel's mind, that I missed everything else.

I touched the flat blue folder inside my coat.

On August twelfth, Grandma had made me sit at this bench and sign three places. Her lawyer had brought a separate inventory. I had kept my copies between furnace wiring charts all through a month of service calls.

Ansel watched my hand.

"Something wrong?"

"I'm checking what I came to check."

I took jar 041 down. Under its foot was a tiny blue comma, fired beneath clear glaze.

Grandma marked all her archive jars that way. When I was small, I had asked why she used a comma instead of a full stop.

"Because I wasn't finished," she'd said.

I turned the jar over again. Its tied tile was gone.

"Don't fuss with the lots," Ansel said. "They're arranged."

"The tile belongs with it."

"People bid on the pretty thing. They don't need every little scrap."

I opened my tool bag and took out a small paper packet. Inside lay a broken kiln shelf chip from a school in Lander.

Ansel laughed.

"Still bringing home souvenirs?"

"Test pieces. That shelf failed. I need to find out why."

I pocketed broken ceramic bits to test them. I had never seen much use in saving something without knowing what it told me.

The back door opened.

Fenella Price came in carrying a grocery sack and wearing the same red wool hat she had worn every winter since I was twelve. She had helped Grandma in this studio for twenty-six years.

She was a white American woman of seventy, with white curls escaping her hat and a stare that could shame a crooked shelf straight.

"Take that tag off her cup," she told Ansel.

"Everything has to be accounted for."

"Then account for the eighteen jars missing from that rack."

He picked up his phone.

"Photography," he said again.

Fenella set her sack down. "I brought you lunch, Wesley. Figured somebody here should remember you eat."

When Ansel stepped outside, she leaned toward me.

"Don't give him your papers."

"I wasn't planning to."

"And don't let him tell you I approved that list."

"What list?"

She reached under Grandma's cup and pulled out a folded sheet.

It was headed Estate Contents Inventory, Revised August 19. It listed all two hundred sixteen jars as property held by Grandma until her death.

At the bottom was Fenella's name in neat black writing.

"That's not my hand," she said.

Outside, Ansel's truck started. Fenella turned the sheet over.

On its back was a freight order for eighteen jars, already collected.