The workshop smelled the way it had always smelled — sawdust, oil, the faint mineral tang of metal that had been worked. Elaine had not gone in for a month. Then she had gone in every day for two weeks, and now most of the things were sorted. The planer had gone to her son-in-law. The band saw, the jointer, the table saw — all collected by Marvin's nephew, who had a truck. The hand tools were arrayed on the bench in three rows: keep, give, sell.
There was one tool she could not identify.
It was the size of a large trowel, but it wasn't a trowel. The handle was wood, worn dark on one side where Marvin's right hand had sat for forty years. The shaft was cast brass, surprisingly heavy. At the end of the shaft, a curved blade — not curved like a knife, not curved like a sickle, but curved the way a wing might be if you flattened it. There was a small pin at the joint between blade and shaft, suggesting that the angle of the head could change, although it did not change when she tried to make it.
She had been turning it in her hands at intervals for three days.
On Thursday she put it in her bag and walked it down to the hardware store on Main. Carl, who had run the hardware store since before Marvin had retired, took it from her, weighed it in his palm, set it on the counter. He looked at it for a long time.
"Beats me, Elaine."
He called Pete, who came over from the feed store, and Pete didn't know. They called Wally, who had worked alongside Marvin for thirty years at the mill. Wally came down on his lunch break and looked at it and said, "Huh."
"Was it his?"
"It was on his bench."
"It must've been his, then."
"That's what I thought."
"But what is it for?"
Wally shook his head. "Looks like he made it."
This had not occurred to her. She held the thing up against the light and thought about it.
"He never showed it to you?" Carl asked.
"He didn't show me his tools."
"Right."
She took it home. She set it on the kitchen table, where she could see it from the chair where she ate her dinner. She thought about putting it in the box marked sell, and the thought made a small bright pain in her chest, so she did not. She put it in the drawer with the corkscrew and the pizza wheel.
The next morning she opened the drawer to get a teaspoon and saw it again, and took it out, and used it to lever up the warped board at the back of the porch where the snow had pried the nails loose. It worked very well. The angle of the head was almost correct for that kind of work, although she couldn't decide whether it had been made for it or whether she had simply found a use that fit.
She used it on Saturday to pry the lid off a jar of sun-dried tomatoes. On Sunday and Monday she used it to chip the ice from the bird bath. On Tuesday it was the one thing in the house that would unstick the upstairs window. By the end of the week she was reaching for it almost without thinking. The handle was wide enough that she could lean her weight on it; the brass shaft did not bend.
On the second Friday, she was using it to scrape lichen off the front step when Mrs. Ek came up the walk with a covered dish. Mrs. Ek had brought a covered dish twice a week for the last six weeks. This one was lentil soup.
"What is that?" Mrs. Ek said, gesturing at the tool.
Elaine looked at it. "I don't know."
"Did it come with the house?"
"No, it was Marvin's. I think he made it."
"What do you call it?"
Elaine had not thought of this before. She turned the tool in her hand. The wood where Marvin's hand had sat for forty years was darker than the rest, but a fainter, newer darkness was forming half an inch above it, where her own thumb pressed.
"His," she said.
Mrs. Ek nodded, and held out the soup.