My Partner Changed The Yard Lock Before The Theater Delivery

The new padlock hung at eye level, bright as a gold tooth. My old key stopped halfway into it.

Beyond the fence, frost lay on the molding tables. The replacement cornice for the Bellweather Theater sat under blue tarps. We had four days to get it ready for the truck.

I was fifty-one, a broad Dominican American man with brown skin, silver at my temples, and plaster caught in the lines of my hands.

I made architectural terra-cotta molds. Give me a broken leaf, a stone face with no nose, or a fingertip sketch in wet dust, and I could bring the missing shape back.

That morning, I could not get through my own gate.

Malcolm came out of the office holding a paper cup.

Malcolm Strake was a tall white man of fifty-three, with pale blue eyes, a soft chin, and silver hair swept back above a camel coat.

His coat cost more than my winter tires. I knew because he had left the $1,480 receipt on the company copier.

"We need to settle our roles," he said.

"Open the gate. The fit check starts at eight."

"I've spoken to a bookkeeper. Your contribution was manual labor."

I looked past him at the racks.

"Four years of manual labor?"

"You were paid."

Sometimes. In pieces. After the kiln bill, after his truck payment, after the lunch where he explained to an architect how he had saved a damaged egg-and-dart border.

I had saved that border with two fingers and a bent spoon.

He pushed an envelope through the fence.

Inside was a check for $3,200 and a release. The release called me a former shop worker. It gave him every claim to our designs, tools, patterns, and molds.

"Sign it today," he said. "You can collect your boots."

"My name is on the partnership agreement."

"Names aren't money, Dionisio. I brought the clients. I bought the molds."

Behind him, the office door opened. Greta Lind stepped onto the loading platform.

She was sixty-four, Swedish American, with a straight gray braid and the sort of stare that made crooked brickwork feel ashamed. She chaired the Bellweather preservation committee.

"You bought which molds?" she asked.

Malcolm turned too fast.

"This is an internal matter."

"My theater's facade is inside your internal matter."

She had come to approve the last glaze match. Buffalo's November light could turn cream terra-cotta gray. We needed to look at the samples outside.

"Dionisio is taking some time away," Malcolm said.

"Did he choose that?"

"Greta."

"I asked him."

"No," I said.

She walked down to the fence. Malcolm stayed on the platform, where people generally stood when he explained things to them.

"Can the order leave Friday?" she asked me.

"The fired pieces are here. They need checking against the templates, cleaning at the joints, and numbering. Then the crates need bracing."

"Can he do that?"

Malcolm laughed.

I watched a strip of tarp lift in the wind.

"He knows the names of the steps."

Greta did not laugh.

She wrote her number on the back of the release envelope.

"Call before you do anything expensive."

At home, I set the uncashed check beside my kitchen sink. My work boots left white tracks across the floor.

I had learned moldmaking from my uncle in a rented garage off Niagara Street. He taught me to scratch three small notches in the foot of each mold jacket. Not on the face, where they might mark the clay. On the edge only a maker would check.

One for what you made. One for what you lent. One for what came home.

I still used them.

Malcolm had called them my little chicken tracks.

I went to the hall closet and took down a flat steel box. Inside were freight receipts, old photographs, and inventories on thin yellow sheets.

I had kept them because molds traveled badly and memories traveled worse.

The top sheet was dated April 18, 2022. Ninety-four mold cases had moved from my old shop to our new yard near the Buffalo River.

The receiving signature leaned hard to the right.

Malcolm's.

Beneath it, above the list, were the words he had skimmed while answering his phone: Personal Pattern Library. Consigned For Shop Use. Title Retained By Dionisio Abreu.

His freight company had billed me $786.40. My bank record showed I had paid it.

I called Greta.

"He thinks he bought my hands and everything they ever touched," I said.

"Did he?"

"No."

"Then bring me the paper that says so."

As I put the sheets into a folder, my phone lit again. Malcolm had sent a photograph of my racks.

His message read: Sign by noon tomorrow, or the mold broker collects everything.