My Husband Handed Her My Stool And Called It A Promotion

Nolan put Celia on my paint stool before he told me she was his mistress.

He had wiped the seat first. I noticed that. He never wiped it for me.

"Celia will manage Tallgrass Cabinet Works," he said. "You can stay on the pretty stuff."

I held a brush above a tin of blue paint. One drop swelled at the tip.

"The pretty stuff?"

"Cabinets, Willa. Let's not turn this into something."

At twenty-eight, I was a white woman with pale freckles, brown hair cut at my chin, and a thin scar through my left eyebrow.

I restored pinball cabinets for a living. I could mix an old red from memory, then match the faded patch beneath a rail. That morning, like every morning, I wore mismatched socks. One had yellow pears. The other had gray heels.

My husband was thirty-two. Nolan was a white man with sandy curls, a dimple in his left cheek, and the neat hands of someone who let other people lift the heavy end.

He used that dimple when a buyer asked why a shipment was late. He was using it now.

Outside our Rapid City shop, November wind rolled a paper cup along the alley. Inside, the heater clicked beneath the smell of wood glue and warm dust.

"Is she also moving into our house?" I asked.

Celia looked down at her boots.

Nolan stopped smiling.

"We were going to discuss that privately."

"You chose the shop."

He shut the office door behind us. Through its glass, I saw Celia open the desk drawer where I kept clean rags.

"You don't understand the sales side," Nolan said. "We're nearly broke. Celia can fix that."

"We shipped three finished machines last month."

"Sent out. Not sold. Storage isn't revenue."

He said it slowly, as if I had confused a screw with a nail.

We each owned half of Tallgrass Cabinet Works LLC. I did the wood, paint, stencils, and final cabinet checks. Nolan handled buyers and the books. That division had worked until he began calling my half a hobby.

"I need the bank statements," I said.

"You need to finish the red cabinet."

On the wall behind him hung our inventory sheet. Seven machines had yellow UNSOLD tags. Beside them, in a separate box, he had written NIGHT ORCHARD: DISPLAY ONLY.

I looked at that line longer than the others.

My aunt Ruth had left me that cabinet before I married Nolan. It was the seventh of twelve made for a traveling pinball exhibit in 1959. Ruth had saved its original headbox, painted panels, and paper serial tag. There was no working playfield inside.

Collectors still called about it.

When we brought it into the shop, I made Nolan sign a one-page loan sheet. He laughed, but he signed. I kept it with Ruth's estate papers.

"The Orchard stays off the sales list," I said.

"Nobody wants your empty wooden box."

His eyes moved toward the office printer.

That was the first thing that scared me.

The second was the new password on our bookkeeping screen.

I went back to my bench. Celia had moved my sample cards into a wastebasket.

"These were taking up space," she said.

I lifted them out, one stack at a time.

Every finished cabinet got a small blue paint dot beneath its coin door. It was my mark that the color coat had cured. I put the same dot on a sample card, then stapled a copy of its freight label to the back.

If a cabinet came back scraped, I had its color and its route in one place.

Nolan called them my little craft cards.

"I need those," I said.

"Nolan said shipping was his department."

"Paint travels."

She gave a short laugh. I put the cards in my lunch bag.

At four, Nolan handed me a proposed schedule. Celia had signed it as operations manager. My hours had been cut from forty to sixteen.

"We can't pay you for standing around," he said.

There was still blue paint drying on my wrist.

I took my coat and drove to a motel near the east end of town. I paid $89 with my own card. Then I spread seven sample cards on the bedspread.

Three labels showed the same destination: 466 Dry Creek Road, Unit 18. The consignee was Spur Ledger Trading.

I remembered those machines leaving. Nolan had said one was going to a collector in Nebraska and another to a buyer near Spearfish. Yet both sat on his UNSOLD sheet.

I did not know what that meant yet.

At 8:14, my phone lit up.

Priya Raman, our freight dispatcher, had sent a message.

Willa, did you approve another pickup for the Night Orchard cabinet? The destination changed again.