My Uncle Offered Me Tape Boxes While He Sold Granddad's Songs

I was testing a repaired stenotype machine when my uncle called to tell me I had been cut out of my grandfather's will.

"Don't make a scene tomorrow, Aisha," Felix said. "Your grandfather had his reasons."

I lifted my hands from the keys.

"What reasons?"

"We'll discuss it at the studio. Wear something decent. There'll be business people."

He hung up before I could ask for a copy.

I was Aisha Bell, forty-one, a Black woman with deep brown skin, broad shoulders, and short twists threaded with gray at my temples.

I refurbished stenotype machines in a narrow shop on the south side of Des Moines. Court reporters brought me sticky key banks, worn contacts, and machines that dropped whole sounds when their owners pressed too fast.

People called them little typewriters. They weren't. Several keys went down together to make one stroke. A small fault could change what the record said.

After every repair, I tested the same childhood rhyme.

"Little tin train, bring the rain."

My grandfather Amos had made it up while I sat under his studio desk. I used it because it touched enough keys to catch a bad adjustment, and because I liked having one thing that stayed mine.

I finished the test before I closed the shop.

The next morning, I drove past the swollen Des Moines River to Granddad's old studio near the east side. He had been dead twelve days. His coffee cup still stood beside the mixing board.

Felix had put a white cloth over the folding table.

At sixty-seven, my uncle Felix was a Black man with a silver mustache, smooth brown skin, and a camel coat stretched tight across his round middle.

He had spent years promoting radio shows. In public, he spoke about the days when a voice could make a whole town stop washing dishes. In private, he counted the dishes.

"Dad built a sound that belonged to Iowa," he told two men by the window.

Then he saw me.

"There's our repairwoman."

One man held out his hand. "Milo Voss. Bracken Audio Ventures."

"Aisha Bell. Amos's granddaughter."

Felix moved between us.

"She works with keyboards. Nothing in the music side."

I looked at the shelves. Forty-eight numbered master reels sat in gray boxes. Granddad's local jingles sold furnaces, shoes, pie, and one long-closed roller rink. He wrote the tunes, sang most of them, and leased their use to local shops.

He had also kept contracts.

I knew that because I had spent three winters helping him sort them.

Felix tapped a thick envelope.

"The will leaves me the studio and everything in it. Specifically excludes you. I'm sorry."

He said that last part while watching Milo.

"May I read it?"

"My lawyer can send it. We're closing a catalog deal. Ninety-six thousand dollars. Dad would have loved knowing the songs were getting another life."

"Who's selling the rights?"

He laughed softly.

"I've got the masters, honey. That's who."

I thought about the blue fire safe behind my shop's parts cabinet. Inside were signed transfers, schedules of titles, and the record numbers I had checked twice before I locked it.

I did not mention the safe.

"A reel is a reel," I said.

"And a repairwoman is a repairwoman. Don't turn this into something ugly. You can have the empty tape boxes after the files are copied."

He slid a visitor sheet toward me.

Below the space for my name, small print said that visitors acknowledged Felix's sole ownership of the catalog.

I put the pen down.

"I don't sign words I haven't agreed to."

His smile went thin.

From the hall, a woman said, "Good. That pen's probably stolen too."

Nell Whitaker came in carrying a grocery sack of studio logs. She was seventy-two, white, and small enough to pass behind Felix without making him move. She had run Granddad's studio for twenty-six years.

"Amos's coffee tastes better cold than yours does fresh," she told Felix.

He folded the visitor sheet.

I asked again for the will. This time Milo looked interested, so Felix gave me a photocopy.

I read the sentence that excluded me. Then I reached the witness page.

Nell leaned over my arm.

Her mouth stopped moving.

"That's meant to be my signature."

"You witnessed it?" I asked.

"No."

She took out her phone and played an ad. Under a man's voice, Granddad sang the three bright notes he had written for a furnace shop.

"Recorded that this morning," Nell said. "Whoever bought your grandfather has already put him to work."

Then she pointed to the will.

"And I want the original of this."