Travis Changed The Locks Before The First Restaurant Pickup Of Friday

The new padlock was bright enough to show my face. My old key went in halfway and stopped.

Inside the trailer, the fogger clicked on. Through the small window, I saw oyster mushrooms lifting their gray edges toward the air vent. They needed picking before lunch.

I was a short Filipino American woman of thirty-eight, with brown skin, a blunt black bob, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

That thumb had met a rack bracket while I built my first grow room. By then, I made my living growing mushrooms in three trailers on a vacant lot in Biloxi, Mississippi.

I checked humidity with the care other people gave family photographs. Each room had a paper chart held to a wire by a blue clothespin. I kept the old charts in dated sleeves at home.

That morning, the nearest chart hung crooked.

Travis came around the corner carrying coffee.

Travis Bledsoe was a broad white man of forty-five, with sandy hair, pink cheeks, and a soft belly above a brass belt buckle.

He smiled like I had come early for a cookout.

"We need a reset, Liza."

"Open the door."

"Let's talk first."

He owned the lot. I owned the equipment. We had formed a small partnership to sell what I grew. He handled orders and bills. I handled the living things.

That split had sounded fair two years earlier.

"Your key won't work," he said.

"I noticed."

"I've decided to run the place myself. You can invoice me for your last week."

Behind him, traffic moved along Pass Road. A gull stood on a power pole and screamed. I could hear the exhaust fan laboring inside Trailer Two.

"You can't invoice away a partnership," I said.

"You always make things sound complicated."

He said it gently. That was his way. When I asked about a late utility bill, he called me worried. When I asked about a missing deposit, he called me tired.

Now he called me finished.

My phone rang. Bernadette Tran's name filled the screen.

Bernadette was a Vietnamese American woman of forty-eight who bought produce for three restaurant kitchens along the Coast. She knew which cooks needed reminders and which growers needed prompt checks.

"Are you hurt?" she asked.

"No. Why?"

"Travis said your seasonal work ended. He said someone else would bring our order."

I looked at him. He lifted one hand, asking me to keep things friendly.

"I'm the grower," I told her. "I'm also his business partner. He changed the locks this morning. Your mushrooms haven't been picked."

"Can he care for them?"

"He can turn a switch. He doesn't know which flush is ready."

She was quiet, then said, "I can change a menu. I can't buy a story that changes every hour. Keep me informed."

Travis waited until I put the phone away.

"You could have let me handle that."

"You told her I was seasonal help."

"People understand staff changes. They don't need our whole history."

He wanted my work to become a shift that had ended. The trailers could stay, the orders could stay, and he could stand in my place.

"The lot doesn't own what sits on it," I said.

His smile thinned.

"Those trailers have been here two years. Everybody knows they're part of the farm."

"Everybody hasn't read our agreement."

He tapped his coffee lid. "There you go again. Paper."

I had paid $71,600 for the trailers and their fitted grow rooms before we joined forces. I had sold a small house inland and used part of the money. Travis had called that too cautious because I refused equipment debt.

He had also laughed when I insisted on a signed site-use agreement.

"We're friends," he had said.

"Then signing won't hurt."

The originals were at home in a flat bank envelope. I had never kept them in the lot office, where Travis left receipts under takeout menus.

I took pictures of each new lock, the three trailer number plates, and the time on my phone. I photographed the electric meter, too.

"Are you building a case?" he asked.

"I'm keeping a record."

He stepped aside when I walked to my car.

At home, I spread the envelope's contents across my kitchen table. Three titles. Three paid bills of sale. The equipment list. Our partnership agreement. The separate site agreement with every page initialed.

My hands stopped shaking when I reached the last page.

I called June Ellis, the lawyer who had prepared it. Her assistant found an opening that afternoon.

Before I could put the papers in order, an unknown number rang.

"Ms. Mercado?" a man asked. "I'm calling about the three grow trailers on Bledsoe's lot."

"What about them?"

"Our company has a pickup request from a lender. We were told you'd have the keys."