Preston Took My Paintbrush In Front Of The Waiting Room

Preston set a mop bucket beside my chair while I was mixing a brown iris.

I had three drops of amber on the glass. I was humming the same six notes I always hummed, the little tune my mother had never finished teaching me.

“Put that down, Salma,” he said.

Beyond our open workroom door, six patients waited beneath a map of Mobile Bay. My young coworker, Nell, stopped polishing a shell.

“We need to discuss the returns,” Preston said, loud enough for the room beyond us.

I was a short Lebanese American woman of sixty-seven, with silver curls pinned above my brown face and thick blue glasses on a cord.

For thirty-eight years, I had been an ocularist. I shaped artificial eyes, painted the tiny threads of an iris, and helped people face a mirror again.

Preston Cade was a tall white man of forty-four, with sandy hair combed flat, a narrow pink face, and spotless tan shoes.

He looked at the paint on my thumb as if it were dirt.

“Seven defective eyes in six weeks,” he said. “Your eyesight has become a problem.”

“My eye exam was last month. You have the work clearance.”

“An exam doesn't stop age.”

One patient lowered her magazine.

“The finish has been turning cloudy after delivery,” I said. “That isn't an iris color problem. I asked you to hold the new blanks.”

“You asked for more expensive stock.”

“I asked for the stock listed on our work orders.”

He picked up my smallest brush. Its handle had a dent where my finger rested.

“Nell will take your bench. You'll clean equipment until we make a retirement plan.”

Nell looked at me. She was twenty-six and still asked me to check her pupil centers.

“I haven't agreed to retire,” I said.

“Let's keep our patients comfortable.”

He said that while a woman near the door pressed a tissue to her sore socket.

Bay Lantern Ocular had once occupied three rooms near Government Street. Preston bought it four years earlier. Now a drawing of a second office in west Mobile covered the break room wall.

He had written OPEN BY FALL across it in red.

When I asked for another hour with a nervous patient, he pointed at that drawing. When a shipment came late, he pointed at the rent estimate beneath it.

“Your pay changes Monday,” he said. “Twenty dollars an hour.”

The staff schedule still listed me as Salma Khoury, Senior Ocularist. He had drawn a line through my title in red pen.

I had earned thirty-four.

“Please give me that in writing.”

His smile tightened. “Of course you want paper.”

I did. Paper did not grow quiet when a man raised his voice.

After he left, Nell put my brush beside the glass.

“I won't pretend those were your mistakes,” she whispered.

“Keep doing good work. And don't sign a check you didn't make.”

I cleaned the polishing hood that afternoon. I wiped each switch and coil of cord. Outside, rain hit the pavement hard enough to bounce. A delivery truck rolled toward the port with its lights on.

At four, I walked to the records room.

A gray cabinet stood between the supply shelves. Each drawer held numbered quality packets: authorized reference photographs, finish notes, and supplier lot tags. Patient names stayed in the separate clinical files.

Every shell I painted had a packet.

Preston had signed the policy himself when a large benefit plan required traceable materials. He had named me quality records custodian. My duty included asking for an outside review when product records did not match.

I kept the signed policy inside the first drawer.

That cabinet was clinic property. The patients' photographs were private. I had no right to carry them home, and no need to. The permission forms allowed quality review, and the packets stayed where they belonged.

I checked the log and wrote the time.

Then I added a note about my unanswered request to hold the latest shipment.

Preston appeared in the doorway.

“Those old pictures won't fix your hands.”

“They show what left this bench.”

“We need that space for the new scanner.”

“Then we need an approved place for the records.”

He glanced at the cabinet, bored already.

“Make a list,” he said.

He thought I held on to paper because I couldn't keep up. He had forgotten whose name he had put beside the word custodian.

I locked the drawer and returned the key to its numbered hook in the locked records room.

At closing, I was rinsing a bucket when the front bell rang.

Keisha Dunbar stood in the doorway in her bus depot supervisor's jacket. She was forty-one, a Black woman with close braids and a calm voice that made drivers listen.

Three years earlier, I had painted her first eye. Six weeks earlier, I had made her replacement.

She held a small white container in both hands.

“I heard what he said about you,” she told me. “I brought something back.”