The Buyer Asked For A Signature My Boss Could Not Give

I put my phone on speaker and laid the agreement on my kitchen table.

"My name is on the notice because I'm the contracting party," I said.

The woman introduced herself as Mara Chen. She had come to Rutland to inspect an operating plant and attend its sale announcement.

"We were told Hemlock controlled twenty-four hundred dry tons a year," she said.

"They had permission to process that fiber under specific terms."

"Can you send those terms?"

"I'll ask the cooperative to send its signed copy. You'll have the same document from both sides."

There was a pause.

"That would help," Mara said.

I called Odette back. She proposed a meeting at the cooperative's rented office above a farm supply store west of town.

"Bring the whole agreement," she said. "People get mighty creative when page seven goes missing."

By noon I sat across from Mara at a scratched table. Odette Lavigne was a sixty-one-year-old white woman with a thick gray braid, square shoulders, and reading glasses hanging from a bootlace.

She set down three identical packets.

"One for you, one for Saira, one for the fellow arriving late because his car costs more than our office."

Quentin came in without knocking.

"This is an internal personnel dispute," he said.

"Then why are you in my office?" Odette asked.

Mara opened her packet.

The agreement priced clean fiber at $78 per dry ton. At the promised annual volume, the growers expected $187,200 in gross sales. They had arranged covered storage and bought a used baler based on that business.

Nobody at the table was playing with a small favor.

"Saira signed as our pilot coordinator," Quentin said.

"Read the first line," Odette told him.

Mara did. It named Crescent Valley Growers' Cooperative and Saira Qureshi, an individual.

"Before your employment?" she asked me.

"Eleven months before. Hemlock later became the approved processing site."

"And the company bought that right when it hired her," Quentin said.

I turned to the employment acknowledgment attached behind Schedule C.

His own signature sat beneath a short list of excluded property. The cooperative agreement was item two.

"Your attorney asked for this attachment," I said. "I wasn't selling a promise made by twenty-three growers."

Mara read it twice.

Quentin leaned back.

"Even so, she can't choke off supply to punish us."

Odette slid him a second sheet.

"The cooperative suspended releases. Your named chemist was removed. The contract requires a new approved supervisor and a safety review before another site designation. Same rule if she'd won the lottery and moved to Maine."

I had not canceled a truck or called a driver. Odette's notice stopped new dispatches at the growers' storage barns. Fiber already delivered remained Hemlock's property.

That distinction mattered. I wrote it on the meeting notes.

Mara tapped Schedule C.

"You also require an independent review before assignment. Our draft purchase agreement lists this supply contract as an asset being transferred at closing."

"It isn't theirs to transfer," Odette said.

Quentin looked at me.

"Tell her you'll sign."

"After the review, if the cooperative consents. Those are the terms."

"What do you want? Twenty thousand?"

"I want the soil tests you declined to authorize."

Mara stopped turning pages.

"What tests?"

I explained the proposed recovered wood flour. It was cheaper than our crop fiber, and I had not cleared it for pots that would break down in garden soil.

"It's only a possible cost improvement," Quentin said.

"Then there should be no problem testing it," Mara replied.

She called her office from the stair landing. When she returned, the four o'clock announcement had been postponed. The $600,000 acquisition deposit would remain in escrow under the existing agreement while her team checked the supply claims.

Quentin's face lost its pleasant shine.

"You're destroying eighteen million dollars over a sack of sawdust."

"The proposed price is eighteen point six," Mara said. "And we're discussing what we were promised."

He left his packet on the table.

Odette picked it up and squared its corners against the wood.

"Waste bothers me," she said.

After he left, I admitted I could not pay for a broad test program. My rent was due in nine days. I had $4,280 in checking and no job.

Mara said Alder Reach would fund an independent review as a condition of further talks. The cooperative would choose the lab. I could advise under a written, limited consulting agreement at $180 an hour.

"No promises about a sale," she said.

"No promises about a result," I answered.

Odette nodded.

Then Mara's phone chimed. She read the message and turned the screen toward us.

Hemlock's inventory sheet showed sixty-four thousand pots already made with the unapproved flour.