The President Called Me A Thief Beside The New Lockers

Bernadette Crane held up an empty shipping sleeve like a flag.

"Seven parcels," she told the people in the lobby. "Gone since this woman put in her machine."

Her machine. My fault. She had made both sound settled.

I stood beside the lockers with my tool bag between my boots. Outside, wet snow slid down the glass doors. A bus hissed along Delaware Avenue. Inside, eighteen neighbors watched me stop moving.

That happened when someone challenged me. My hands went still first. Then my face. People sometimes mistook it for fear.

I was a Chinese American woman of twenty-six, with a short black bob, a round face, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

My name was Yuting Xu. I was the locksmith who had spent six days making those locker doors close without a slam.

"Which compartments?" I asked.

"You know perfectly well."

"I need the numbers."

Bernadette Crane was a white woman of sixty-seven, with silver hair rolled tight above a narrow face and a red wool cape over her suit.

She turned toward her audience before answering me.

"Listen to her. Already making us do her work."

Mrs. Bell from the third floor looked down. A man near the elevator folded his arms. Someone raised a phone.

The building was called Alder Court. Forty apartments, owned through a co-op, with a lobby that smelled of radiator heat and wet wool. Bernadette was its president. She had met every drill bit with a question and every answer with a sigh.

She laid a typed sheet on the mail table.

NOTICE OF CONTRACTOR DISMISSAL.

Under it sat a second page.

FINAL RELEASE: BALANCE WAIVED.

The balance was $6,840. Materials had already eaten most of the $7,360 deposit. That last check was my labor, my rent, and the payment on my van.

"Sign," she said. "Remove your things. We can spare everyone a police matter."

"Have you reported the parcels missing?"

"Don't test my patience, Miss Xu."

"Yuting," I said. "And I won't sign that."

Her eyebrows rose. She had expected a quick ending.

I unzipped my bag and took out three tiny tins. Blue held latch springs. Red held pin springs. Yellow held the short springs I used in older mortise locks. I set them in a line because my fingers wanted a task.

One blue lid made a soft tin click.

"This isn't a craft fair," Bernadette said.

"No. It's a job with a signed contract."

I took out my copy.

The locker bank had been installed, but its seven-day trial had not ended. A small tablet still sat in a locked test cradle inside the service room. A cable joined it to the locker controller through the wall.

The tablet had no internet connection. During commissioning, it collected the bank's signed event records: doors, times, and the unique number of every administrative credential used. It also kept the setup and handover records.

Bernadette had called it my toy.

I had put its serial number on Schedule B.

"Your installer card can open every box," she told the room.

"It could during setup. We disabled it together on Thursday. You signed the handover sheet."

"Then you made another."

That was a different claim. I watched two people accept it without noticing the change.

"Please preserve the locker records," I said. "And any parcels found outside the lockers."

"There are no parcels to preserve."

She said it too quickly.

Behind her, Ezra Mensah stood near a mop bucket. The porter had held the cabinet level while I drove the last anchor. Now his eyes moved from Bernadette to the service corridor.

I noticed. So did she.

"Ezra, take the old shelves down before Monday's collection. Everything in that service room goes."

"The whole room?" he asked.

"Did I stutter?"

He looked at me again.

I put the red and yellow tins away. The blue one stayed beside my contract, its lid tilted on one spring.

"I need access to retrieve my test equipment," I said.

"You have been dismissed. You aren't going anywhere near our locks."

I could have opened the service door. That was my trade. Doing it without permission would have handed her the story she wanted.

So I photographed the dismissal sheet on the table and left with my tools.

In my van, I wrote down who had been there and what had been said. I sent the co-op's published board address a short request to preserve records and arrange supervised collection of my tablet.

Then I checked my inbox.

Bernadette had copied me on an order to the building's waste contractor.

The subject line read: MONDAY CLEARANCE, INCLUDING ALL INSTALLER EQUIPMENT LEFT ON SITE.