My Boss Cleared My Bench While Snow Filled The Parking Lot

Bram had put a cardboard box on my workbench before I took off my coat.

"Your things," he said. "Keep it simple."

At seventy, I was a broad Greek American man with white curls, brown skin, and thick, calloused hands.

Those hands had made me a living as a prosthetist in Sheridan, Wyoming. I built and fitted artificial limbs. I smoothed every test cast myself, even when a machine could have done most of the work.

Bram Ellery was a lean white man of forty-six, with pale eyes, a neat blond beard, and shirts that never carried plaster dust.

He owned Cottonwood Limb Clinic. He liked a clean billing screen more than a clean fit.

"What happened?" I asked.

He slid a letter across my bench.

My full name, Nikos Daskalakis, was typed above the word termination.

It said my contract ended that morning. My last check would be $1,280. I would have no patient contact through the clinic.

"You called people already," I said.

Through the thin wall, I had heard our desk worker reading a script. She had said age could affect judgment. She had said patients should let Bram check any socket I had fitted.

"We needed to protect confidence," he said.

"Whose confidence?"

He tapped the letter.

My bench faced a narrow window. Beyond it, snow blew across the parking lot toward the creek. I had watched spring floods and school buses through that glass for seventeen years.

Now my mug stood in a box beside my lunch.

"You can take that plaster junk too," Bram said. "I'm paying to heat a museum."

Along the back wall stood thirty-eight numbered casts. Each held a shape I had worked on with a patient. Each had three shallow thumb grooves across its base.

I had first made those marks to grip wet plaster. Later, they became a habit. When my hands shook from anger, I could set three fingers in them and slow down.

"All of them?" I asked.

"Today. Or they go in the dumpster."

I pulled my old employment agreement from my bag.

Bram laughed. "Of course you brought paper."

I opened it to Schedule B. When he had bought the clinic four years earlier, I had asked for one small term. I could keep numbered teaching casts, with written patient consent. They held no names. A separate consent list stayed in the patient files.

"These are mine," I said. "You signed here."

"Congratulations. You own garbage."

He wrote permission for removal on the back of my dismissal letter. I asked him to date it. That annoyed him more than anything else I said.

My daughter, Lena, brought her pickup after her shift at the library. We wrapped the casts in old towels.

"Do you want me to say something to him?" she asked.

"Help me lift this one."

She carried number 417 with both arms. Its base had a little shelf where I had kept its signed test card in a clear sleeve. The card listed the approved socket and the parts used at final delivery.

"You saved everything," she said.

"Everything I had permission to save."

That difference had always mattered to me.

At home, we set the casts on shelves in my heated garage. My late wife had once called it the second pantry. She had said I stored shapes the way her mother stored beans.

I put my work apron on its hook. Plaster dust fell onto my boots.

The phone rang before I could brush it off.

"Nikos?" Hattie Brooks said. "Tell me you're sitting down."

Hattie was sixty-two, a Black woman with silver braids and an easy laugh. She was a retired bridge engineer, though I doubted she had retired from checking anyone's math.

I had fitted her first lower-leg prosthesis five years earlier. Last June, we had finished a new socket and foot.

"They called me," she said. "Young fellow said you had lost your touch."

I looked at my hands.

"Bram said that?"

"His desk did. I asked for the inspection report. She offered an appointment."

"I'm sorry you had to hear it."

"Don't spend your sorry yet. My leg started acting wrong after their free tune-up. You remember what you put on it?"

"I have the card."

"Good. I have something too."

She had filmed her final fitting for her sister. She had also filmed the tune-up pickup because she wanted to compare her walk.

"Engineers get teased about taking pictures," she said. "Right up until somebody needs one."

I reached for cast 417. My fingers found its three grooves in the dim garage light.

"Can you come tomorrow?" I asked.

"Look outside."

Headlights moved across the frosted window. Her car had already turned into my drive.