Felicity Put Me Behind The Stockroom Door And Kept My Name

The first person Felicity blamed me in front of was wearing an eye I had painted while she told me about her garden.

Mrs. Bell stood at our counter with a bill for $1,840.

“Eamon's custom work can make the charges hard to follow,” Felicity said. “Let me sort this out for you.”

She put one hand over Mrs. Bell's hand. With the other, she turned the bill facedown.

I was thirty-four, an Irish American man with pale skin, a narrow face, copper-brown hair, and a beard that grew lighter at the chin.

My job was ocular prosthetist. I made and fitted artificial eyes at Lantern Ocular Studio, in a brick building off Grand River in Detroit. I painted minute iris fibers with a single-hair brush.

I knew what I had made for Mrs. Bell. One custom eye. Two fit checks. One polish included in the price.

“Her work order was closed in March,” I said.

Felicity smiled without looking at me.

“We'll discuss your records later.”

Felicity Ward was a white woman of fifty with a smooth blond bob, pearl earrings, and soft pink jackets that never showed a crease.

She could calm a scared client in three sentences. If a payment came late, she could make a grown employee afraid to open an envelope.

After Mrs. Bell left, she called me into the stockroom.

Boxes of clear acrylic sat beside polishing pads and unopened gloves. My work stool had been moved between two shelves.

“You're handling inventory now,” she said.

“For how long?”

“Until I can trust your custom records.”

She handed me a sheet. My hourly pay had dropped from $34 to $23. The reason line said Documentation Failures Affecting Billing.

“I don't enter charges.”

“You enter descriptions. Those become charges.”

“I describe what I make.”

Her voice lost its soft edge.

“My income pays your wages. Don't act as if they're separate things.”

She wanted my signature beneath the statement. I wrote Received, Not Agreed, added the date, and asked for a copy.

“Always so careful,” she said.

That was the first true thing she had said all morning.

My father had fixed watches in a little shop in Hamtramck. When he wrote a repair slip, he left a tiny crescent beside the finished job.

“Leave room for light,” he used to say.

I had carried that habit into my iris-color index. Each card held a painted swatch, the pigment mix, fiber directions by clock position, and a coded job number. Below that sat the serial number of the signed delivery receipt.

The crescent went beside that number only when I had matched the finished eye to its receipt.

Felicity called the index my paint cookbook.

Years earlier, when she hired me, I had asked for one line in our agreement. My hand-painted color index remained mine. It stayed locked at the clinic while I worked there, and any patient information stayed protected.

She had laughed and signed.

“Keep your little recipes.”

I had kept that agreement too.

At lunch, I walked past the fitting room. Omar Haddad sat outside it with his cap in his hands.

He was fifty-seven, an Arab American man and a retired flight dispatcher. I had made his eye four years earlier. He still came for a yearly polish, though his custom work was long finished.

“New office?” he asked, looking at the stockroom.

“More shelf space.”

He smiled, then held up an envelope.

“They say I owe $2,160 for a second custom eye. August twelfth.”

“Of this year?”

“That's what it says.”

I had polished his old eye in June. I had not made him another.

“Ask for the itemized bill and delivery receipt,” I said.

“Already did. Flight work taught me something. A departure time isn't a feeling.”

Felicity appeared behind him.

“Omar, we're finding some problems in Eamon's work.”

He looked at my face, then hers.

“Then paper should help.”

She took him into her office.

That evening, I counted acrylic blanks until the front door locked. Then I opened my reference drawer. My key still worked.

I did not remove any patient files. I opened my index beside the stockroom desk and checked August twelfth.

Three jobs had reached final polish that week. All three had crescents and receipt numbers. Omar's coded number appeared only on the June polish card.

The clinic's delivery binder lay on the shelf where staff used it each day. I opened it to the same date.

There were seven custom deliveries.

Four names belonged to people for whom I had made nothing that summer.

One signature had a small break through its middle. I had seen that same break on an older receipt, where the scanner glass had been scratched.

I closed the binder and wrote its page number in my own dated work log.

Before I could turn out the light, a notice slid beneath the stockroom door.

Felicity had scheduled a records cleanout for Friday.