She waited for the lot to pass. Then she stood up out of that folding chair, smoothed her skirt, walked up the center aisle to the front where the microphone stood, and she did not touch it.
She asked the auctioneer, out loud, without it, who had bought lot two fourteen.
A man in the back row put his hand up. Retired shop teacher out of Dresden, name of Elwood Sisk, five dollars.
My mother asked him if he would do her the kindness of opening the first volume to the front page.
He did it standing up. Then he read it to that room, because everybody had gone quiet enough that he might as well.
Volume one, 1984. The formulas in this book are Ilene’s. I turn the pots. If anybody ever gets hold of these and does not know that, then let it be written down here: she made every color that ever came out of this shop, and I only ever made the shape.
Forty years of glazes in my father’s handwriting because his hand was steady and hers was not. Every formula in those books has her initials beside it, and the last forty pages, after his stroke in 2019, are in her hand and nobody else’s.
The dealer from Columbus had spent the afternoon calling her husband a garage potter. He had held up a book of my mother’s chemistry and offered it as kindling.
He did not say anything. He put the microphone down on the table and went and stood by the door for the rest of it.
Mr. Sisk would not keep those books. He walked them up the aisle, put them in my mother’s hands, would not take the five dollars back, and told her he had taught school thirty-two years and knew a lesson plan when he saw one.
Here is what nobody in that room knew, including me.
Three of her glazes are in the Ohio Designer Craftsmen registry under her name from the nineties. Two have been in the museum collection in Zanesville since 2003. She never mentioned it at home, because Dad was the one who liked being looked at and she let him be.
The museum called her in February. There is a show up right now, her glazes on his forms, and the wall card says both their names in the same size letters, which she made them do twice before she was satisfied.
She has taught two workshops. She is seventy-one and she has a waiting list and she complains about it constantly.
The dealer sent a letter in the spring. It was not a good letter. But he bought a piece out of that show at the asking price and did not ask for a discount, and my mother says that counts more than the letter did.
The books are in a bank box now. She had the front page of volume one photographed and blown up and it hangs in her kitchen where the phone used to be.
A man with a microphone told a room that a woman’s life work was flea market filler. Her husband had already answered him in 1984, on the first page, in pencil, and then handed the book to whoever might someday need to hear it.