Beatrice Announced My Retirement Beside The Theater's Cookie Table

Beatrice told the neighbors I babysat my dead husband's puppets while I stood close enough to hear her spoon touch her cup.

"Someone has to watch the little things," she said. "Until we find Lenora a suitable place. Then I can sell this building."

She said it at our spring open house, beside a tray of cookies shaped like birds.

I was seventy, a mixed-race Black and white woman with brown skin, silver curls cut close to my head, and a left shoulder that sat higher from years at a carving bench.

My name was Lenora Brooks. I made marionettes. I carved their hands, balanced their control bars, and taught wooden knees how to bend without looking sick.

Babysitting would have been easier.

Beatrice Sloane was a white woman with a smooth blond bob, pale blue eyes, and neat pink nails that never showed the work behind an event.

At forty-two, my daughter-in-law could make a threat sound like an invitation to lunch. She moved the cookie tray toward a neighbor before she went on.

"Assisted living can be lovely. We must think ahead."

Outside, Pueblo's wind scraped a paper cup along the brick wall. Our little theater stood in Pueblo, Colorado, several blocks from the Arkansas River. My husband, Ellis, used to walk there when a scene would not come right.

He had been dead eleven months.

I still reached for his apron when I heard the kettle. Then I remembered, made one cup, and opened the workshop.

"What building are you selling?" I asked.

Beatrice gave me the smile she used when a child grabbed two programs.

"This one, dear. Eventually."

"Does the board know?"

"The board knows we need to be practical."

That was not an answer. I had spent forty years listening for the little click a puppet made when a pin began to work loose. I could hear a loose answer, too.

Micah stood beneath the light booth stairs. My son was forty-four, mixed-race Black and white like me, with Ellis's long face and my dark eyes. He worked as a lighting technician. That morning he had replaced a bad cable, tested six lamps, and done nothing while his wife packed my life into her mouth.

"Mom," he said softly. "Let's enjoy the open house."

"I was enjoying it."

He looked at the floor.

A neighbor named Ruth took a cookie without eating it.

"I thought you made all these," she said to me.

"I do."

"Ellis was the business mind," Beatrice said. "Lenora has always preferred her workshop."

I had preferred it. There was a difference between liking a quiet room and having no rights outside it.

Ellis and I had placed the property in a land trust years before. Its trustee held legal title. A separate nonprofit board ran the shows and classes. Beatrice had managed repairs, room rentals, and bills for three years, for $400 a month.

After Ellis died, I had let her keep doing that work.

I had not given her the ground beneath my feet.

In my workshop, an old biscuit tin held the original trust papers. A blue card marked the page Ellis and I had read twice before we signed. Across its top, in plain type, were the words Reserved Powers of Lenora Brooks.

I could still picture them.

"We can discuss this privately," Beatrice said.

"You began it publicly."

She touched my elbow. I moved it out of reach.

After the guests left, she laid a glossy folder on my bench. The assisted living place pictured inside cost $4,300 a month.

"I checked availability," she said. "You could have help with everything."

"Including decisions I can still make?"

"Please don't make care sound cruel."

Beside her folder lay a marionette with a broken ankle. I had tied a blue paper tag to its wrist and named it Tuesday. I gave damaged puppets temporary names while I repaired them. A broken thing ought not have to carry its trouble as a permanent name.

"Tuesday needs a new dowel," I said. "I need you to take that folder home."

"Micah agreed we should look."

"Looking is his right. Moving me is mine."

Her mouth tightened. She left the folder anyway.

I put it on a shelf, cleared a space for the biscuit tin, and washed the glue from my hands. Before I could fetch the tin, someone knocked on the front door.

A young woman stood outside with a tape measure and a rolled floor plan. She introduced herself as Celia Ward.

"Beatrice said I could measure the future shop space," she said.

"Future what?"

She looked past me at our rows of small seats.

"After clearance. I reserved the corner unit for my sewing business."

"What did you pay?"

"Six thousand dollars. She said demolition was already being arranged."

She handed me a receipt. At the bottom, beneath my daughter-in-law's signature, were the words Site Clearance Reservation.