The New Lock On The Loft Door Held My Key Outside

My key went halfway into the lock and stopped.

Through the glass, I could see my shears on the cutting table. A red thread hung from one handle. I had left it there the night before, when I still thought a late supper was the worst thing waiting at home.

Lionel opened the door on its chain.

"The business is bankrupt, Bea. There's nothing to come in for."

"Then let me get my coat."

"Don't make a scene."

I was a white woman of sixty-three, with a broad face, gray hair in a blunt braid, and pale freckles across my thick wrists.

Those wrists had hauled wet canvas upstairs for thirty years. I made nautical flags in our sail loft above a narrow yard near Spa Creek in Annapolis. I could cut a perfect circle without a template. Lionel used to show customers that trick as if he had taught it to me.

He was a white man of sixty-six, with silver hair brushed flat, pink cheeks, and a neat little belly under his blue blazer.

That morning, the blazer had brass buttons I had sewn on.

"Where are our savings?" I asked.

"Gone. Forty-six thousand, two hundred dollars. Suppliers. Taxes. You wouldn't understand."

A man behind him lifted a cardboard tube. I knew him as Doyle Mercer, a cheerful fellow who arranged bulk orders for marinas.

"Business is rough all over," Doyle said.

Lionel smiled at him. That smile had always needed my silence to look kind.

"Where's the bankruptcy case number?" I asked.

The smile slipped.

"Go home, Bea. I'll explain when you're calm."

He shut the door.

I stood under the awning while a delivery truck splashed through yesterday's rain. Below the loft, halyards tapped against masts in the creek. I counted four taps, then four more, until my hand stopped shaking.

The tube bothered me more than the lock.

My mother's patterns lived in tubes like that. Not the standard signal flags anyone could make. Hers were private fleet badges, club pennants, and old family designs, drawn full size on heavy paper. She had built a small business before I was born.

When she left the drawings to me, Lionel called them old wrapping paper.

Later, he learned what customers paid for the work they made possible.

I walked to a coffee shop on West Street and bought tea for $2.75. Then I took a blue folder from my tote.

I had carried it for eleven days.

Inside were seven returned-check images from Broad Creek Savings, sent to me by Ruth Sayer, a fleet treasurer and one of our oldest customers. Her bank returned her paid checks as pictures, front and back. She had asked why our receipt named a different company.

Seven checks. Seven deposits. Twenty-seven thousand, four hundred dollars.

The checks were payable to Kells Sail Loft. The backs showed deposits to Kells Signal Holdings LLC.

Under that name sat a signature shaped almost like mine.

Almost was a large word in my trade. A circle cut almost right looked like an egg once the flag caught wind.

I never looped the lower stroke of my K. The person who had signed those checks did.

When Ruth first sent the pictures, I had asked Lionel about the new name.

"Tax work," he said. "Stay with the stitching."

So I had stayed with it. I had also copied the pictures, saved her email, and written the date on a fresh sheet of paper.

Beside each order number, I had put the cloth used, the hours worked, and the amount we should have received.

At home, Lionel had made the computer passwords his business. In the loft, I kept my own order book. He never asked to read it. Perhaps thread on a cover made numbers look harmless.

I called Ruth.

"Did you tell Lionel you sent me those checks?"

"No. He told me you were having memory trouble. I thought you deserved to answer for yourself."

I stared at the steam above my cup.

"Did I?"

"You remembered that my husband's memorial pennant needed the cream border, not white. Lionel had forgotten his name."

I let myself breathe.

"I need the bank to look at these."

"I'll call my branch," she said. "And Bea? Don't hand anyone the only copies."

My mother had said something much like that when we went to her lawyer years ago. She had left me more than paper tubes. The signed pages explaining that were in my own safe-deposit box.

Lionel knew about the box. He thought it held earrings.

I put my tea down without drinking it.

Then Ruth called back.

"There's another thing," she said. "Doyle asked our fleet to welcome a new pattern supplier next month. He said a seventy-five-thousand-dollar sale closes Friday at four."