The Chairman Dropped My Shutter While Customers Watched In The Rain

I heard Brant Keene before I saw him. His heels struck the market floor in pairs, fast and hard, as if someone had ordered the concrete to get out of his way.

I could name most customers by their steps. Mrs. Bell dragged her right boot. The bus driver from Third Street took three quick steps, then stopped to fold his gloves. People thought I watched the aisle all day. Mostly, I listened.

I was Farid Darvishi, fifty-eight, an Iranian American man with brown skin, silver curls, and a narrow face lined deeply around the eyes.

I repaired umbrellas at Canal Roof Market in Dayton, Ohio. It was a private covered market, with twelve stalls upstairs and old storage rooms below. November rain tapped the roof while I replaced a broken stretcher on a yellow umbrella.

Brant stopped beside my workbench.

At forty-six, Brant Keene was a white man with a square red face, pale cropped hair, and a thick neck above his neat blue collar.

He held a red sheet against his chest.

"Put that down," he said.

"The spring will jump if I let go."

"Then let it jump."

Six shoppers turned. Across the aisle, Imani Rooks stopped weighing cumin.

She was thirty-four, a Black woman who could sell a bag of cloves as if she were inviting you to a party. She gave Brant her bright market smile.

"Morning, Chairman. Buying anything, or just bringing weather?"

He ignored her.

"We've found an illegal power draw in your basement. You're stealing electricity from the tenants."

The spring rested between my thumb and a wooden clamp. I tightened the clamp before I answered.

"Which circuit?"

"Don't play games. Your little room was a handshake favor. It doesn't entitle you to run machines on everybody else's bill."

"My drying fan uses less power than your office heater."

"Every disagreement with you turns into insubordination."

That word came easily to him. He had been elected chairman of our tenants' committee eleven months earlier. Since then, he had begun calling requests for receipts attacks on market unity.

He slapped the red sheet onto my bench. It demanded $684 for unauthorized electricity and $95 for enforcement. Payment was due by five that afternoon.

Under the figures, someone had typed: WORKSHOP OCCUPANCY UNDOCUMENTED.

My rent was $425 a month. It had cleared on Monday. I kept the bank receipt under my cash tray.

"Show me the meter readings," I said.

"The committee doesn't answer to you."

"I helped write its rules."

"Then you should respect them."

He reached for my shutter chain.

"There's a customer's umbrella on the bench."

"They can collect it after you settle."

Imani stepped into the aisle. "You cannot keep people's things."

"Spice stall, stay out of this."

Her smile left.

I put the yellow umbrella on the outer counter. The customer, a nursing aide with damp sleeves, took it without meeting my eyes.

"Come back Friday," I told her. "No extra charge."

Brant pulled the shutter halfway down. Metal scraped metal. He ducked beneath it and fitted a padlock through the floor ring.

He had done it before I could get my coat.

The cold reached my wrists. For twenty-seven years, my father’s brass umbrella stand had sat beside that bench. Inside its false bottom, wrapped in wax paper, were the pages Brant believed had never existed.

I had stored them there after a basement pipe burst. An umbrella man learned to keep paper above water.

"Give me ten minutes inside," I said.

Brant smiled for the watching shoppers.

"You should have thought of that before taking what wasn't yours."

I could have shouted then. My mouth had gone dry enough for it. Instead, I asked Imani for a plain envelope and a pen.

"A complaint?" she asked.

"A record."

I wrote the time, the people present, and what Brant had said. I copied the notice amount exactly. Then I asked the nursing aide for her name.

"Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

"No. You saw something. Those are different things."

She wrote her phone number.

After Brant left, Imani brought tea in a paper cup. Beyond the covered doors, a bus hissed against wet pavement. The Great Miami was high that week; everyone came in talking about water.

"Have you got a lease?" she asked softly.

"More than a lease. An annex. Original signatures. A circuit map."

"Where?"

I nodded at the brass stand behind the bars.

Her eyes moved to the basement door. Six weeks earlier, Brant had rolled a private freezer down those stairs. I still had the security clip from that morning, saved because his cart had struck my delivery rack.

I had not known which outlet he used. Now I needed to look again.

At five minutes to noon, my phone rang. Brant's message was only seven words.

"Pay today, or your basement gets cleared."