My Uncle Put A Price On The View After The Funeral

My uncle brought an appraisal to my mother's funeral lunch in Duluth. He kept it under his plate until the last guest left, as if grief had a closing time.

Outside, wet leaves stuck to the church steps. Lake Superior was the color of a dirty spoon.

Her heart had failed after years of trouble. I had known she was sick. Knowing had done nothing to prepare me for her empty chair.

I was forty-two, a broad-shouldered man with brown skin, close black curls going gray at the temples, and my Swedish mother's pale green eyes.

My father's family was Black. His mother had taught me to cook for a crowd. My mother's Swedish parents had taught me to leave my boots by the door. That afternoon, I could manage neither food nor good manners.

"Take your things out by Sunday," Roland said.

I set down my coffee.

"Which things?"

"Your van supplies. Your folding chairs. Whatever you keep up there."

Up there meant the observatory my mother had built beside the lake, twenty miles northeast of town.

I guided aurora tours along the North Shore. I drove visitors away from Duluth's lights, checked cloud cover, and taught them to dim their phones. I remembered people by the constellations they asked about. Orion from Ohio. Cassiopeia from Oregon. The shy girl who wanted to find Cygnus for her father.

Roland remembered square footage.

At sixty-five, Roland was a white man with a smooth pink face, silver hair combed straight back, and a camel coat that never seemed to wrinkle.

He had retired from selling property. His grief still arrived with an appraisal.

"It's worth six hundred eighty thousand dollars," he said. "Possibly more without that old building."

"That old building was her observatory."

"I know what it was called."

He slid a stapled document across the table.

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF LINNEA MERCER.

The date was September 28. Eleven days before she died.

"She changed her plans," he said. "I'm the beneficiary. I handle the estate."

I read the first page. Then the second.

My mother had left her remaining estate to her brother. That much seemed plain. It hurt, though she had warned me her final papers might look uneven to anyone who counted only the last page.

"She wanted me provided for," Roland said.

"You have three rental houses."

"And you drive people around looking at the weather. We each made choices."

I put the will flat on the table.

"An executor still has to be appointed, doesn't he?"

"Don't make this difficult. You were good company for her. You never understood the value of what she had."

My mother's last tour lamp sat in my coat pocket. Its red lens had a chipped corner. She had used red light so people could read a chart without losing their night vision.

When I was little, I thought it made every paper look wounded.

I closed my hand around it.

"I'll have someone read this," I said.

Roland smiled as if I had finally asked permission.

He left his appraisal with the will.

That evening, I drove to the observatory. A northeast wind shook the bare birches. Waves struck the rock shelf below the dome, slow and heavy.

I checked the door, the heat, and the roof motor. The same checks I made before every tour.

Mother's wool hat still hung beside the switch box.

I let myself touch it once.

Then I opened the van's document case. Behind my commercial insurance renewal and passenger forms was a blue envelope. Mother had told me to keep it there four years earlier.

"You check that folder every month," she had said. "Better than putting it somewhere sacred and forgetting where sacred is."

Inside was a copy of a recorded deed, with the county's stamp across its first page. Beneath it lay the receipt for a separate equipment gift.

I had not forgotten either document. I had only hoped I would not need them so soon.

Before I took them out, my phone rang.

"Julian?" Astrid Nyberg said. "Did he show you a will?"

Astrid was seventy-two, a white woman and a former notary. She had known my mother since they worked together in a school office. She was gentle with people and unforgiving about dates.

"Dated September twenty-eighth," I said.

"That sounds right. Don't tear it up."

"I wasn't planning to."

"People do surprising things when they hurt. Bring everything tomorrow. Especially the blue envelope."

Through the dome window, I could see one clear patch over the lake. No green curtain. Just a few cold stars.

I packed the deed beside my insurance papers again.

On the drive home, an email arrived from a man I did not know.

He thanked me for agreeing to let his crew enter on Friday.

Attached was a purchase order for my mother's telescope: $48,000, with a $9,600 deposit already paid to Roland Mercer.