Two weeks after the letter, Laura came back with reinforcements.
Dr. Grace Nolan arrived at my gate with a rolling case, a headlamp she did not yet need, and the manner of a woman who has spent forty years being underestimated by auctioneers. She was the independent specialist β a bronze conservator whose opinion, Laura told me in the driveway, out of Grace's hearing, "is the one the insurance companies and the museums both call when the first two opinions fight."
Grace spent three hours on the Reader.
I have watched people work on cars, on roofs, on my own teeth, and I have never watched anybody work like that. She photographed the seams where the cast sections joined, running her fingers along them the way you read a line of Braille. She measured. She documented the surface wear β where fifty years of weather had polished the high points of the book and the girl's shoulder, where the bronze had gone dark green in the folds of the skirt and stayed brown on the lap where my mother's towel used to travel. She lay flat on my mulch, at her age, without being asked twice, and shone a flashlight up under the edge of the base, hunting for marks in the dark.
"There's something under here," she said to the ivy. "Corrosion's got most of it. I can get a third of it in a photograph. A foundry mark doesn't surrender to a flashlight and good intentions."
Then she came inside, washed her hands at my kitchen sink without asking permission β I liked her enormously by then β and asked the question that reorganized my attic.
"Does your family keep papers, Mr. Mercer? Anything connected to the sculpture. Receipts, letters, an estate inventory. Sculptors' bronzes travel with paper the way ships travel with manifests, and the paper is usually in a box nobody has opened since the Eisenhower administration."
She was off by one administration. My mother's attic boxes were labeled in her hand, in marker, with dates and a system of underlining understood by no living person. It took me two evenings. Box one: insurance. Box two: my father's service records and a truly heroic quantity of appliance manuals. Box three, under a strata of Christmas ornaments and my sister's report cards, contained my grandfather's things β and at the bottom of it, in a clothbound notebook swollen with humidity, I found him.
Most of the notebook is ruinously dull. Garden expenses. Paint. A ladder. Train fare. Then, in the same cramped hand, an entry dated October 1949:
Garden figure, bronze, seated reader β Whitmore estate β $190.
One hundred and ninety dollars. In 1949 that was real money; it was also, we now know, the art-market bargain of the twentieth century in the state of Georgia. My grandfather, who haggled over ladders, had walked into an estate sale, seen a girl reading a book in bronze, and paid $190 for her because β I choose to believe, and nothing in the record contradicts me β he simply liked her.
Folded into the back of the notebook, gone soft as cloth, was the receipt. Whitmore Estate Services. One line of description, in a clerk's fair hand: Bronze seated reader, M. Holloway.
I carried the notebook downstairs holding it like a communion tray and put it in front of Grace, who was drinking my coffee and annotating measurements at the kitchen table.
She read the entry. She unfolded the receipt with tweezers and the tips of her fingers, and read that. Then she sat back and looked at me for a long moment with an expression I can only describe as professionally restrained delight.
"This is very helpful," she said.
"Helpful like interesting?" I asked. "Or helpful like money?"
"Helpful," Grace said, "like stop leaving it completely unattended." She closed the notebook gently. "Documentary provenance is the spine of an attribution, Mr. Mercer. A photograph from 1950 is a witness. A receipt with the sculptor's name, from the estate, dated within living memory of the casting β that is a witness who signed a statement. Combined with what's under that base, when I can finally read all of itβ" She shook her head. "You don't have a garden ornament. You never did. Your mother had a tenant with paperwork."
That night I did two things I had never done in fifty years of living with the girl.
I went out after dark and looked at her for a long time, standing there in the fountain light with her book open and her head bent, fifty years of weather on her shoulders and $190 in her past.
And I locked the side gate.
It was not enough. I know that now. But it felt, that night, like the first responsible thing anyone in my family had ever done for her β and it was the night I stopped thinking of the Reader as an heirloom, and started thinking of her as something the rest of the world might come looking for.