Soren Sold Our Machines While I Checked Alma’s First Lane

The marble rolled toward the left gutter and stopped beside my boot.

“There,” I said. “That dip is why your bowlers keep blaming their balls.”

Alma Torres bent beside me. At fifty-eight, the Mexican American owner of Prairie Lantern Lanes still checked every repair herself. She had brought our crew coffee and warm rolls before sunrise.

“Can you fix it, Dimitri?”

“Yes. We’ll measure it before we cut.”

I was thirty-two, a broad-shouldered Greek American man with dark curls, thick brows, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

My name was Dimitri Karras, and I resurfaced bowling lanes. Most mornings, my shirt held enough maple dust to start a small fire. I used gauges to record the work, but I liked watching a marble settle first. A floor could hide a low place from your eyes. It could not hide one from that little glass ball.

Behind us, Soren Beck clapped his hands.

“Crew meeting. Come hear how we’re moving up.”

Our four summer workers gathered near the shoe counter. Outside, Grand Island was waking beneath a pale Nebraska sky. A grain truck rattled past the center’s front windows.

Soren was forty, a lean Danish American man with sandy hair, a red neck, and white teeth he showed whenever money came up.

He handled sales for our business, Flatline Lane Service. I handled the wood, machines, and people who worked beside them.

“Dimitri’s our hired operator,” he told the crew. “A very good one. But business decisions come through me.”

Luis, our newest worker, looked at me.

“I thought you two were partners.”

“In the everyday sense,” Soren said. “Everybody here is a partner in success.”

He could spend six words where one would do, then spend tomorrow’s deposit before lunch.

I set my marble in its cloth pouch.

“We each own half,” I said. “That’s in our agreement.”

Soren laughed as if I had corrected the price of a sandwich.

“See? He handles details.”

Alma put down the coffee pot.

“Details keep my roof up,” she said.

He kept smiling, but his ears changed color.

We had come to inspect twelve wood lanes before a scheduled June shutdown. Alma’s contract was $11,600. She had paid a $5,800 deposit. Our crew would start Monday and work through the week.

The machines waited in our rented shop across town. There were two wide resurfacing sleds, an edge machine, a dust extractor, and a powered inspection cart. I had built the sleds before Soren and I formed the partnership. Each one rode on a frame I had measured, drilled, and paid for myself.

The other three machines were mine too.

Their brass plates ran from K-01 through K-05. Small numbers, deep cuts. When I stamped them, I had wanted the marks to survive sanding dust and rough loading.

Soren had once called the plates fussy.

He had called the equipment leases fussy too, right before signing them.

Flatline rented my five machines for $2,400 a month in all. The five lease sheets ran from L-101 through L-105, one for each brass plate. Soren had signed every sheet. We stored everything together because one heated shop cost less than two. Storage did not bother me. Missing payments did.

By then, three lease checks had failed to arrive.

“Cash timing,” Soren had said. “Once the summer jobs hit, you’ll be whole.”

The week before, he had shown me pictures of his fishing boat at Sherman Reservoir. He wanted a bigger one. I had wanted the checks he already owed me.

I had kept working. I had also kept the unpaid invoices.

That morning, he wanted to take photographs of Alma’s lanes. He moved a mop bucket out of view and told the crew to stand behind him.

“Something for our next stage,” he said.

“What stage?” I asked.

“You’ll love it when it’s ready.”

I returned to lane seven with my straightedge. Alma followed.

“He always talk over you like that?” she asked.

“More lately.”

“Coffee’s free. Being treated like furniture isn’t.”

By noon, I had marked the low boards and made a cut plan. Soren had left without helping load our gauges.

At the shop, I wiped dust from the K-01 plate. Then I opened my steel records box. Inside were my purchase receipts, fabrication bills, lease originals, and the inventory Soren had initialed on every page.

I had started keeping originals after a freight company lost a crate years earlier. People remembered whatever helped them. Paper had fewer moods.

My phone rang while I was checking the missing payments.

“Mira Holt,” a woman said. “I’m purchasing Flatline. Soren said you’d demonstrate the equipment at Monday’s job.”

I stopped turning pages.

“Purchasing what?”

“The service business. Customer contracts, shop contents, all five machines. He signed this morning.”

“Did he tell you who owns those machines?”

There was a short silence.

“He told me everything in the shop belonged to Flatline.”

“Send me what he signed.”

The email arrived before we hung up.

On the first page was a price of $186,000.

On the last was Soren’s name beside a promise that he had full power to sell every listed asset.