My Uncle Set Auction Tags On The Stars I Taught

My uncle put a yellow auction tag on the projector before he took the cover off. He tied it around the power cord, tight enough to bend it.

"Lot twelve," he said. "Try to keep up, Xiomara."

I loosened the string. A pinched cord could fail halfway through a school show, leaving thirty children in a black dome.

At thirty-two, I was a short Puerto Rican woman with brown skin, thick black curls, and a pale scar across my left eyebrow. I worked as a traveling astronomy educator, which meant I drove long stretches of Nevada to make gym ceilings feel like space.

I also drew constellations on my brown lunch bags. That morning, the Little Dipper sat beside a grease spot from an egg sandwich.

Uncle Esteban looked at the bag instead of my face.

"You still packing those?"

"Lunch costs money."

"So do lawyers. Remember that."

At fifty-eight, Esteban Mercado was a broad Puerto Rican man with silver hair combed flat, a neat gray mustache, and shirts pressed sharp at the cuffs. He wore the same brown belt at every family meal. That day, he had pulled it one hole tighter.

He stood in my grandmother's rented storage bay outside Ely. Beyond the open door, wind pushed grit across the pavement. A truck groaned along the highway. Snow still held in thin white lines on the distant mountains.

Inside, her traveling planetarium lay in pieces that meant something to me.

The folded dome filled two blue tubs. Its blower sat beside the repair kit. The star projector, mounted in its padded case, could cast a whole sky through tiny holes in a dark shell.

Grandma Ines had called the rig Pocket Night.

"Even a small room deserves a large sky," she used to tell school secretaries.

Esteban had called it equipment.

Now he called it an estate problem.

"Storage is $210 a month," he said. "The trailer needs tires. Nobody benefits from letting this stuff rot."

"I can use it."

"With what business money? You work by the season."

I had $1,146 in checking and an unpaid $480 teaching invoice. He knew about the seasonal work because Grandma had worried about my winter hours. He said it now as if low wages were proof of low judgment.

He handed me a copy of her will.

March 8, 2025. I had seen it after her funeral in February.

It named him executor. It left me her costume jewelry. After bills and a few small gifts, the rest went to him.

"Your grandmother was clear," he said. "You get the little box. I handle the heavy things."

He nodded toward a cardboard carton marked XIO.

Inside were glass beads, clip earrings, and the fake pearl necklace Grandma wore when she taught the phases of Venus. She had liked to dress for a planet.

I lifted the necklace.

Under it lay a lunch bag I had drawn for her years before. Seven dots. One crooked handle. The Little Dipper.

She had kept everything.

Not everything had stayed in that box, though.

Four months before she died, Grandma had handed me a sealed envelope after a school show in McGill.

"Keep the original where he can't sort it," she had said.

I had read it with her that night. I had kept it flat, dry, and away from the road gear ever since.

"The auction is Tuesday," Esteban said. "Come if you need closure. Don't make a scene."

"Has anything already been sold?"

His thumb stopped moving against his belt.

"People have asked questions. That's what buyers do."

A white pickup sat outside the bay. A man in a clean canvas jacket watched us from its cab. When I looked at him, he lowered his eyes to his phone.

"Who's that?"

"A serious person. Someone with capital."

I set the necklace back in the carton.

"Don't touch the lens plate," I said. "Skin oil can block the small stars."

"Listen to yourself. You're worried about little dots."

I folded my lunch bag along its old crease. Grandma had taught me that the North Star looked still because the whole sky appeared to turn around it.

Still did not mean weak.

I took the jewelry carton and drove to my motel. At the desk, I opened the hard document sleeve beneath my lesson plans.

The paper inside carried Grandma's handwriting, her full signature, and a date seven months after the will he kept waving at me.

Below the date sat a notary's seal.

I laid it beside the auction flyer and called the number for a probate lawyer.