The Night Beverly Drew A New Line Across My Work

Beverly Pruitt stopped beside my shoe cart while I was closing a split seam on a church usher's loafer.

"Everybody needs to see this," she called. "This is what happens when one vendor thinks rules are for other people."

I kept the needle still. A needle could leave an ugly hole if you pulled it sideways.

I was a broad-shouldered Dominican American woman of forty-two, with brown skin, dark curls pinned above my ears, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

My name was Xiomara de la Cruz. I repaired shoes from a rolling kiosk at Lantern Yard Night Market, on a city lot three blocks from the Mobile River. I could match a faded thread from memory. Folks brought me shoes they had stopped wearing but couldn't bear to throw away.

That night, the air smelled of hot oil and river mud. A barge horn sounded beyond Water Street. My little fan pushed the same wet Alabama air around my ankles.

Beverly put her clipboard over my work lamp.

"You've pushed three feet into the fire lane. Move now."

I looked at the gray boundary blocks beside my cart.

They were closer than they had been the night before.

Beverly was a white American woman of fifty-five, with a stiff blond bob, pink cheeks, and square red glasses hanging from a gold chain.

She managed the market through her company, Pruitt Market Services. She liked a crowd for a warning. If two people watched, she raised her voice until ten people watched.

"My cart hasn't moved," I said.

"Then the pavement walked?"

A few people laughed. The usher reached for his unfinished shoe, then stopped.

"I'll need ten more minutes, Mr. Bell," I told him.

"You don't have ten minutes," Beverly said.

She tapped the blocks with her pointed shoe.

"Two hundred seventy-five dollars for obstruction. Cash clears it tonight. After that, fifty dollars an hour."

"May I see the city fee sheet?"

She lowered her clipboard.

"Are you calling me a liar?"

"I'm asking for the fee sheet."

My voice stayed low. That wasn't a trick. In my house growing up, six people could talk over one another. At work, I liked hearing the thread pass through leather.

Beverly took my soft voice for something else.

"Some people need things explained twice," she told the crowd.

Behind her, a food vendor handed her folded bills. She slipped them into the side pocket of her jacket without counting them or reaching for a receipt.

I had seen that pocket before.

I reached under my counter for the blue permit binder.

My mother had taught me to test a repair with three small stitches in honey-colored thread. Make them, then pull. If the leather held, keep going. Three honey-colored stitches still marked the hem of my work apron.

I touched them before opening the binder.

My market space cost ninety-six dollars a month, paid through the city's vendor account. Beverly ran the nights, but the city issued the plot assignments. My packet held a stamped plan, the original survey sheet, and the rule that only the city could approve a boundary change.

The plan gave my stall eight feet across and six feet deep. Forty-eight square feet. I had built my cart to fit, with room left for my chair.

"I have my approved measurements," I said.

Beverly pressed the binder shut with two fingers.

"Don't wave old paperwork at me. I'm responsible for safety here."

"Please take your hand off my permit."

For a moment, nobody laughed.

She removed her hand.

At the edge of my lamp stood a small repair camera. I used it to show customers cracked welts and worn heel seats before I covered them. It also watched the cart when I left it locked beneath the market awning overnight. The city allowed approved carts to stay there.

Its wide view included those gray blocks.

I glanced at the tiny light. Still on.

"You'll sign that you received this," Beverly said, tearing a yellow notice from her pad.

"I'll write that I received it. I won't agree that I owe it."

"You people with your little conditions."

"My name is Xiomara. Put the notice in that name."

She wrote hard enough to tear the paper.

I finished Mr. Bell's seam after she walked away. The thread was a dull brown called tobacco in my supply book. He offered twenty dollars for an eighteen-dollar repair.

"Keep your two dollars," I said. "Your shoe was the easy part."

Once he left, I photographed the blocks, the notice, and the wheels sitting inside my chalk marks from the previous evening.

Then Beverly came back with two men in work shirts.

"Last chance," she said. "Pay tonight, or my crew takes your equipment at sunrise."