Denise Sent Me To The Stockroom With Two Unfinished Sockets

Denise Kroll called the sockets finished because her screen said they were finished.

I could see both blanks through her office window. They sat on the stockroom's upper shelf, pale and rough, with no trim lines cut around the knees.

"Those are not ready for a person," I said.

"We're discussing billing, Ernesto. Not your craft table."

I was sixty-two, a Cuban American prosthetic-socket technician with brown skin, silver curls, thick glasses, and hands that had begun to curl at the knuckles.

My hands hurt most before rain. That morning, November rain had followed me across Fort Wayne, past the wet leaves caught along the St. Marys River.

Denise Kroll was a white woman of forty-six with a sharp blond bob, pale blue eyes, and cream jackets that never showed plaster dust.

She tapped a sheet marked MONTHLY COMPLETIONS.

Two rows carried charges of $9,240 and $9,220. Together, $18,460. Beside each amount sat a neat word: DELIVERED.

"One belongs to Priya Nair," I said. "Her check socket failed the pressure test. We stopped. The other one never reached a first fitting."

"Insurance terms can be confusing."

She spoke in the warm voice she used when telling someone their appointment had been cut from forty minutes to twenty.

"A socket goes between the person and the leg," I said. "That part isn't confusing."

Her smile thinned.

At our rehabilitation clinic, I made the hard cups that held a person's remaining limb. I shaped plaster, checked relief spots, and took edges down until skin could bear them. A small ridge in the wrong place could ruin someone's whole day.

Denise called patients units.

"We need six more units closed," she would say before lunch.

I called them by their names.

On my bench sat a clay wren, smaller than my thumb. I made birds from leftover modeling clay while plaster set. Patients sometimes chose one to carry home. A bird was a thing you could hold without being measured.

Denise picked up the wren.

"You have time for this."

"While the cast dries."

She put it down on its side.

"Starting Monday, you'll handle stock. Your hands have become a concern. We have to protect you."

"Have you asked my supervisor about my work?"

"I'm the director."

She pushed over a reassignment notice. My bench rate would drop from $28 to $19 an hour. The notice said I had struggled to adjust to modern records.

"I asked about two invoices."

"And now we're finding a better fit."

She always liked that phrase. In our trade, a bad fit left marks.

I signed only the line that said I had received the notice. Beside my name, I wrote that I disputed its reason. Denise watched the slow work of my fingers as if it proved her point.

What she did not watch was where I put the carbon copy.

I folded it into my lunch bag, beside the small notebook where I kept my hours and pay. I had learned long ago that anger passed through a room quickly. Dates stayed.

Before leaving my bench, I checked the green production ledger.

Every plaster cast had a number pressed into its base. That number followed the clear check socket, the corrections, and the finished socket. Our old owner had made me custodian of that record. Denise had never changed the written assignment.

The ledger also listed the fitting photographs patients had authorized for their care. Those pictures lived in the clinic's approved archive. I had kept their dates and links beside each cast number, even after Denise stopped reading the book.

"We have summaries now," she had told me in August.

"A summary needs something underneath it," I had said.

I closed the book. Under the cover lay the signed record policy, with the archive's backup schedule stapled behind it.

Then I stood both unfinished blanks upright on their shelf. B-314. B-287.

I could not stop the pain in my hands. I could still read two numbers.

Monday came with a cold wind off the rivers. I wore the brown stock apron someone had left on a hook. My old bench had a new monitor and no room for clay birds.

At ten, Priya Nair appeared in the stockroom doorway, leaning on her cane. She was thirty-eight, an Indian American bridge engineer who remembered measurements the way other people remembered songs.

"They told me you were back here," she said.

"They found a better fit."

She looked at the apron, then at my empty bench through the glass.

"My insurer says you gave me a new socket last month."

"I didn't."

"I know."

She laid an envelope on a carton of cotton sleeves.

"There's another claim in our family packet," she said. "It says my husband got one, too."

Her finger rested on a man's printed name.

"Arun died before you could fit him."