“What will we do with all the eggs?”

            It was Ruby, gentle, eight-year-old Ruby, who finally dared to ask out loud what the rest of the Petersterns had been mulling throughout the funeral to distract themselves from Jim the Priest’s generic, droning eulogy. At the start of the service, it became clear that Jim the Priest had only met Leonie Peterstern once or twice in her decade of nominal membership at Our Lady of the Assumption, and while he spoke, he glanced repeatedly at the list of facts about Leonie that Ruby’s mother, Marlena, had written down in tight and tidy handwriting. Marlena had inherited the same fine-finger motor skills as Leonie; they could have been surgeons, probably, but instead one sister spent her best years writing out bank slips while the other sat hunched under a lamp in her basement, whisking a fine-pointed paintbrush over hollowed-out chicken eggs.

            As she asked about the eggs, Ruby held out a plate of red Jell-o cubes to her uncles, offering them a bite of her wiggly snack. Marlena noticed the dye on Ruby’s teeth and debated taking the Jell-o away from her, uneasy about the volume of food coloring and sugar her daughter had already inhaled in the form of cakes and cookies and Cool Whip casseroles. The congregation at Our Lady of the Assumption clearly felt some guilt over the fact that no one appeared to have known Leonie Peterstern at all, and their overcompensation would fill Marlena’s and her brothers’ freezers for two weeks.

            Marlena, Bert, Southerland, and Leonie. The Ferocious Four, Dad had dubbed them, and as children they always did seem to be moving in a sort of wild-yet-interwoven pack. Or maybe they’d been a flock, a squawking, squabbling, screeching flock of child limbs and tongues and droppings that murmurated through the house on Richter Street as destructively as the skein of migrating geese that pillaged the municipal lagoon like clockwork every spring.

            Ferocious. Marlena shook her head at the memory. No four children could have turned out less ferocious in adulthood than the Peterstern siblings. Marlena the bank teller. Bert the actuary. Southerland the dental hygienist. And Leonie, the egg painter. We really took the world by storm.

            Ruby stood waiting with her plate of Jell-o. When Bert realized Marlena was not going to answer her, he cleared his throat weakly in a halfhearted attempt to take charge.

            “Well now, Miss Ruby, that’s a mighty good question. A mighty, mighty good one. And your mom and uncles are going to get right after that, right on after it. Don’t you worry. Those eggs will go to good homes. Each and every one of them, you can bet on it.” He patted the space between her pigtails awkwardly and slurped a Jell-o cube down his throat.  

            Marlena and Southerland stared at Bert. Each and every one? He can’t be serious. Marlena pointed at the back door of the church, toward the playground fenced off from the parking lot.

            “Find your brothers and cousins, go on now, and leave that plate here for god’s, oh, for goodness’ sake. For goodness’ sake, I’m sick just looking at that slimy mess. Why did you take so much, Ruby? You shouldn’t always take so much.”

            Ruby set the Jell-o plate down dutifully on the paper-covered card table and went away. Gentle, good-natured Ruby. She loved her mother along with her daddy, and, on most days, she loved her brothers and cousins, too. But though she was always obedient toward her uncles, her real favorite had always been her mysterious Aunt Leonie.

Bert unlocked Leonie’s front door the day after the funeral and burial in the city cemetery. Leonie had left no will, and none of her siblings had ever thought to ask her about her preferences. So they did what they’d done for Mother and Dad, and Bert drew the short straw to function as Leonie’s executor of estate.

            There can’t really be that many of them, not as many as Marlena says. Bert flipped on the light switch in Leonie’s entryway and saw immediately that he was wrong. Incredibly wrong. The eggs were everywhere, absolutely everywhere. Bookshelves lined the walls of the front hallway and living room, with rows and rows of eggs standing smartly like glittered soldiers. The television was framed by a glass cabinet that protected dozens more. The end tables beside Mother’s frayed green couch supported a massive wicker basket filled, overfilled, with eggs. More baskets full were set on the floor underneath the picture window. Dad’s upright piano was almost entirely buried under baskets and little plastic discs that propped up individual eggs that Leonie had deemed worthy of specific display. There were too many all at once to make sense of any single one.  

            Bert curled himself up into an oblong ball on Mother’s couch. This was just one room, just the front room, which Mother always said should be kept cleaner and tidier than any other room in a house. This many eggs in the front room meant hundreds, maybe thousands more were in the house, bursting out of closets, peeking from under guest beds, towering in carton stacks along musty basement walls. Bert already knew that he would find a short bar stool in the middle of small clearing in Leonie’s basement studio, with a magnifying light bolted to her worktable. There, cocooned by baskets and cartons all around her, she had sat for hours with her tiny detailing brushes and painted egg after egg after egg after egg, forever and ever, amen.

            After an hour, maybe longer, Bert summoned the strength to pull his phone from his pocket. He thought about calling Marlena but couldn’t bear the inevitable I told you so. Not yet. Instead, he called his wife.

            “Tell me what to do,” he whimpered into the phone. “How do I get rid of so much sadness?”

Southerland pulled his white Ford F150 into Leonie’s driveway behind Bert’s decrepit Honda sedan. He let the engine of his big truck idle long enough for Marlena to pull the lace curtains back from the picture window in the front room and shake her head. He puckered his lips in an exaggerated kiss and turned off the truck. It was a lease, but his siblings didn’t need to know that.

            Marlena didn’t let him linger in the living room with Bert, who sat oddly on the couch on the edge of a cushion like he might melt into the tan carpeting at any moment. Always an inspiration, Big Brother, Southerland thought as they shook hands. Marlena gave him the tour of the bedrooms-turned-storage-spaces and then they made their way to the basement, which was packed so full of eggs that they had to move cartons onto the stairs to clear a goat trail for themselves back into Leonie’s studio. Southerland thought of the pack of cigarettes and lighter in his jeans pocket. One spark, and all the gray, recycled-pulp cartons would light the house up like one of the illegal fireworks Dad had occasionally relented and allowed Southerland to buy and set off over the lake during their annual summer family pilgrimages up north. 

            Marlena and Southerland took stock. Leonie’s eggs were painted with a whole array of themes. Some cartons were populated with eerily accurate cartoon characters or pop culture figures, while others were adorned with elaborate scenes from nature. One set of eggs was painted like a solar system. Countless were tiled with precision in geometric designs. Glitter, tiny beads, sequins, and other small metal bits and barbs were attached to many eggs. All were threaded with a thin strip of ribbon through the pinprick holes at either end.

            As a boy, Southerland always looked up to Leonie, never Bert, for her wildness, her skill at challenging Dad, her fearless provoking of Mother’s fiercest tears. My cowboy brother, Leonie sometimes called him when they were kids, and she revived the nickname in adulthood on those rare times when the two of them ended up as guests at Marlena’s Thanksgiving table. Southerland usually ate the year’s big meal with a girlfriend’s family, but sometimes, some years, he’d find himself single and in need of a place to go. Southerland despised being alone, and he refused to tolerate being so for more than two hours in a row.

            Leonie typically celebrated, if one could call it that, with a group of ice bathers who converted ice-fishing shacks into portable saunas and carted them deep into logging-owned woods up north. Then they’d sit naked in the sauna until they were too hot to stand it and burst themselves free of the shack to jump into a nearby lake or stream, whooping and shrieking, and reemerge within seconds, their pink skin raw and rejuvenated. But occasionally she opted out of her own tradition for reasons she never gave, and then Leonie and Southerland would find themselves temporary if uneasy allies at their sister’s court, coconspirators on the outer passing loop of cranberry sauce and deep-fried turkey. My cowboy brother, yippee ki-yay.

            “Let’s sell them,” he said to Marlena. “Like on Etsy or whatever. I used to date a girl who liked to knit and sold off scarves to make money for kids in Ecuador, can you imagine that?” He took one of Leonie’s unfinished eggs into his hand. Leonie had coated the egg in pastel blue acrylic, and on her worktable she’d set out trays with lines of gold and silver glitter she’d intended to dab into thin lines of transparent glue, encircling the egg with her signature, intricate latticework.

            The depth of his sister’s solitude was discomfiting to Southerland, and he crushed the blue egg in his palm. Bits of paint flecked off the broken edges and clung to his hands, but he shook off most of the mess onto Leonie’s worktable, scattering the glitter lines into the dusty air. Later, both he and Marlena would find glitter in their hair and underneath their fingernails.

Sell, break, keep. Fuck, marry, kill. Marlena sat on Leonie’s back porch with a glass of rosé from an opened bottle she found in the fridge. She’d bummed a cigarette from Southerland and called Bert’s wife to run through their options for the eggs. But her mind kept drifting away from Leonie’s house toward Mother and Dad’s, to the pink bedroom she and Leonie had shared until Leonie packed Dad’s army reserve duffel and disappeared in South America for eight years, drifting from country to country without any clear source of income or legal visa. Occasionally a map would show up in their parents’ mailbox with highways highlighted and small villages starred with a red felt pen. But mostly there was nothing, and Marlena watched those years etch themselves into a different sort of map on Mother’s face. Leonie left for a thousand reasons, but she came back for only one: to see Dad before he died, coughing and wheezing too hard to talk about any of the things Leonie had wanted him to say.

            Brad Pitt, Susan Sarandon, Donald Trump were Marlena’s picks during the reception after Dad’s funeral. Che Guevara, Roberto Bolaño, all beneficiaries of the petrostate were Leonie’s.

            After she came back north for good, Leonie had moved in with Bert and his wife for almost a year. Then she moved into the house Marlena rented with a high school friend as they went through the motions of community college, but that arrangement held only for six weeks. The pink bedroom was by then wholly vacant at Mother’s, but Leonie managed to make it through only one night there and then she fled to California for six months.

            Europe was Mother’s idea, Mother’s dream. She gave Leonie the name of a second cousin in Salzburg and the crumbling family Bible printed in German. She probably gave Leonie a plane ticket, too, though Mother would never admit it to Marlena. Leonie came and went from Austria, sometimes for long stints and sometimes for short ones, up until the day she died. Marlena found a stack of grocery lists written in German on post-it notes on the kitchen counter, but the only word she knew was Eier. Eggs. One egg, Ei.

            They paint them for Easter, millions of them each year, can you imagine that? Her first time back from Austria, Leonie brought a carry-on bag full of egg cartons and short mailing tubes with painted eggs placed end to end. She’d thrown away all her clothes to make room for more eggs, and she gave two to every Peterstern and sold a few others to a novelty shop downtown. Later, Leonie regretted those “lost children.” Nobody appreciated them like I would have. I wasted them on all you heathens. One of the eggs Marlena received was white and Christmas-themed, with a pleasant-enough Saint Nicholas figure in purple robes. He carried a gold-glittered staff and looked like a vintage Santa Claus, a politely pseudo-religious egg, with a few silver-glitter snowflakes swirling around his head.

            But the second egg was something else. It was painted black, with an ugly red demon that glared out at Marlena, fierce and angry. The demon’s yellow forked tongue spiraled around the top of the egg, and his white horns were flecked with glitter. It was the worst present anyone had ever given Marlena, but Leonie insisted that the two eggs belonged as a pair and that the Saint Nicholas egg could not, under any circumstances, be hung on a Christmas tree without the Krampus egg nearby. Repulsed, Marlena nestled both eggs in a warped plastic advent wreath and set it on top of a pile of broken Christmas tree lights that she’d shoved in the corner of a closet in the rental house. If the eggs could survive in such conditions, they were probably still there.

            It wasn’t long after that, after Leonie presented the demon egg to Marlena as if she’d just smuggled a crown jewel out of a royal museum, that the painting started in earnest.

            “Maybe Leonie is famous among egg people, if there are egg people out there.” Marlena blew smoke into the phone as Bert’s wife waited patiently on the other end. “Some collector somewhere might snap all these up and put them in some goofy gallery or auction them off. Some of them are actually pretty. Not all of them, but I’ll be honest, she was getting good. Man, I wish. I could send Ruby to that marching band camp at Disney World, wouldn’t that be nice?”

            Marlena’s husband brought pizza to the house, and the Petersterns moved baskets of eggs off Mother and Dad’s stained-oak dining table and sat down together like in the old days. Ruby opened the small drawer in the long side of the table, and it was, of course, filled with eggs; these were painted green with leaf-like patterns. In between the leaves, Leonie had painted dozens of tiny red birds, each with a thin yellow triangle for a beak.

            As Ruby pulled the birds-in-a-bush eggs out of the dining table drawer, Southerland let out a groan.

            “Remember when we’d hide vegetables in there that we didn’t want to eat? As if Mother and Dad didn’t notice? I mean, hell, we even put meatballs in there once, didn’t we, Marley? Yes, we definitely did, don’t you lie just to look good in front of your girl. We were terrible; just think how gross that must have been for them to find days or weeks later, all that rotting food in there. It must have been putrid.”

            Marlena shook her head. “No, you idiot, we never, not once, found old food in the drawer whenever we opened it up. Why do you think that was? Because Mother cleaned it out after every single meal. Every time. God, you were such a terror as a kid. Oh, who are we kidding? You’re still a terror.” She nudged the pizza box closer to Southerland, encouraging him to take the last slice. “You put that crust in the drawer, buddy, and I will definitely kill you.”

            The Peterstern siblings laughed, but gentle Ruby looked worried as she filled her sweatshirt pockets with as many of the little red bird eggs as she could save.

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