Brigitte Gave Away My Grow Rooms Over Chicken And Corn

Brigitte passed the corn and told me to move my farm before dawn.

"The caterer needs both rooms at five," she said. "Stack your little bags somewhere else."

We were eating supper at her house in Knoxville. Rain tapped the screen door. Across the table, my wife stopped cutting her chicken.

"Both rooms?" I asked.

"I promised them to Dana. She has a wedding on Saturday. A real event."

I set down my fork.

I was twenty-four, and I grew specialty mushrooms for restaurants and a Saturday market. I was a lean Japanese American man with straight black hair, brown eyes, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

That scar came from cutting open a grain sack. The faint gray marks on my white watch strap came from my other habit. I wrote room humidity there when my hands were too wet for my phone.

That evening, the strap read 91 / 92.

Those were good numbers for blue oysters.

"There are four hundred fruiting blocks in there," I said. "They can't sit in a truck."

Brigitte waved her serving spoon.

"Then take them to one of your little markets."

Brigitte was a tall white woman with a silver bob, pink glasses, and nails cut into neat red squares. She was fifty-four. She owned the old produce building behind her late father's house, off a road east of downtown.

She had called the empty building a gift when she first showed it to me.

I had called it a possible business address.

That difference had cost us six weeks of talks and a lawyer's fee before I moved in.

"Those rooms are leased," I said.

"Kenji, please. You're family."

"I'm also the tenant."

Lila touched my knee under the table.

She was twenty-five, a white woman with light brown curls she usually pinned up for work at the library. She could recall whole talks, down to where each person had stood. Yet when her family argued, she often acted as if she had heard less than everyone else.

"Mom probably means the loading space," she said.

"I mean the rooms with the cooling units," Brigitte said. "Dana needs clean space for tables and flower buckets. Her usual place flooded."

"My rooms aren't empty storage. They're growing food."

"At your age, everything feels like a career."

She said it kindly. That made it worse.

I looked at the glass of sweet tea beside her plate. Six months earlier, that same glass had sat beside a bank check for $28,800.

Twenty-four months of rent. Paid ahead. She had wanted cash to replace her roof. I had wanted a fixed place after a year of hauling blocks between rented sheds.

My commercial lease folder sat in the truck. I carried it on delivery days because it also held my insurance papers.

"You accepted two years of rent," I said. "I still have eighteen months left."

"And I've let you use my building. Don't make that sound ugly."

"Then don't give it away."

The spoon struck the bowl.

"You will clear it tonight. Dana has paid me $1,200. I will not be embarrassed over mushrooms."

Lila pulled her hand back.

"Paid you for what?" she asked.

"For helping her."

"Did you tell her about Kenji?"

"I told her my son-in-law had a small project there."

I could hear the little fan over Brigitte's stove. My own exhaust fans were six miles away, pulling fresh air past racks of living blocks. Each cluster needed air, dampness, and time. None of those things cared who had promised what over supper.

"Call her," I said. "Return the money."

Brigitte folded her napkin.

"I won't have a boy order me around in my kitchen."

I stood and carried my plate to the sink.

"I'm going to check my rooms."

Lila followed me onto the porch.

"Give me until morning," she said. "I can explain it when she settles down."

"She said five."

"She gets carried away."

"Does she have a key?"

Lila glanced toward the kitchen window.

"The owner key. Yes."

I took the blue folder from my truck and opened it beneath the porch light. On page four, two yellow tabs framed the access clause and the promise against interference. The last page held Brigitte's initials, large and sharp.

"Please read these tonight," I said.

Lila accepted the copies I kept behind the original.

"You're going to use this against my mother?"

"I'm going to keep growing food."

I drove toward the building through streets bright with rain. Before I reached the turn, my phone showed a drop from the room sensor: eighty-six percent.

At the loading door, a locksmith's truck stood beneath the light.

A man was drilling out my lock.