The New Owner Raised Her Glass Beside My Packed Suitcase

Nolan waited until I had taken off my clean gloves before he told me he had sold the lab.

He had brought six paper cups and a bottle of pear juice into the packing room. My suitcase stood under the coat hooks. A blue sweater hung from its open zipper.

"Bea owns Cedar Thread now," he said. "We closed this morning."

I was forty-four, a mushroom-spawn cultivator in a rented building on the south side of Olympia, Washington. That morning, I had moved oyster cultures from agar to jars of cooked millet. Nobody had mentioned a sale.

I was a Chinese American woman with a round face, brown eyes, and black hair threaded with gray that I kept in a short braid.

Nolan Shen, my husband, stood beside the new investor as if they were posing for a newspaper.

Nolan was a tall Chinese American man with neat black hair, heavy eyebrows, and a bright smile above a narrow chin.

At forty-six, he still liked a room best when everybody faced him. He managed sales. He remembered customers' children's names and forgot the dates they needed their spawn.

"How much?" I asked.

"Six hundred eighty-four thousand dollars."

Dani, our assistant, set down her cup.

Bea Keller wore a cream raincoat with no rain on it. Her firm, Tall Reed Capital, had paid for our new grain mixer in August. Nolan had called it a small investment.

"You'll receive a transition packet," Bea said.

"I'd like the asset list."

Nolan gave his warm sales laugh.

"Lihua, nobody needs a lecture about jars."

Through the window, I could see the empty glass waiting outside the sterile room. I always tapped each jar lightly with a spoon, then lined them up by pitch. It helped me settle into work. A low note did not prove bad glass, and a high note did not prove clean spawn. For that, I needed eyes, plates, and time.

Nolan called the tapping my little kitchen habit.

He had told that story to everyone who visited.

"Come into my office," he said.

He closed the door behind us and stopped smiling.

"You made that awkward."

"You sold our work without telling me."

"I sold the company. You never wanted the business side."

He laid a motel reservation on his desk beside four fifty-dollar bills.

"I need you to stay elsewhere while we sort things out. Your clothes are packed."

"For how long?"

"Don't make me set a date."

My hands went cold. I reached for my phone and checked the household account. Yesterday it had held $9,260. Now a notice said it was closed.

"Where's the grocery money?"

"I've handled it."

That was his answer to everything he did not want me to see.

We had been married thirteen years. He had paid the bills while I worked behind the lab glass. At first, I had thanked him for that.

"Did Bea read the culture license?" I asked.

He rolled his chair back.

"She hired people who understand sales."

"Schedule C requires my written consent."

"Those are old forms."

"They still have your signature."

He looked toward the door, where people could hear us.

"Customers bought from me. They knew my face. Ask yourself what this place was worth before I put it on the road."

I could have told him. My first deposits predated both the company and our marriage.

Instead, I took a picture of the motel paper and the money. I saved the account notice too.

"I want my personal archive."

He pointed toward the break room.

"Take the red box. Leave the actual company records."

The red box had once held our wedding dishes. Now it held deposit receipts, royalty statements, and my copies of the license schedules. I had brought it in that week to check a storage renewal.

Cedar Thread paid me five percent of sales from six named culture lines. The payments went into my own small account. Nolan had called them my seed money.

I lifted the box with both hands.

In the packing room, Bea was studying the loading list. Two yellow tags lay in the trash beside her shoes.

Yellow meant hold. It meant a batch had not cleared its checks.

"Where are those cases going?" I asked.

"Paid orders," Nolan said behind me.

Dani looked at the floor.

I did not ask her to choose a side in front of the people who signed her paycheck.

"Keep your shift notes," I told her.

Outside, rain had filled the shallow dent in my car hood. I put the archive on the passenger seat and the suitcase in back. Nolan watched from the dry doorway.

"Call when you're ready to be reasonable," he said.

I spent $94 on a room off Martin Way. Then I put the receipts on the bed in date order.

The oldest bore my full name, Lihua Shen, under Depositor. The license behind it gave the company limited use of those six lines. It did not give Nolan permission to transfer that use.

At nine seventeen, Bea emailed the closing packet.

On its last page, beneath a consent I had never seen, someone had placed my signature.