The Morning Bennett Took My Name Off The Theater Crew

Bennett took my name off the crew sheet with a red pen I had lent him.

He drew one line through Han, then handed the sheet to Priya Menon.

"We're keeping the people who can finish," he said.

We stood beneath the torn ceiling of the Wren Street Theater in Staunton, Virginia. The room smelled of wet wood and old dust. Beyond the loading door, a truck struggled up the hill toward Beverley Street.

I was thirty-five, a Korean American man with straight black hair, narrow shoulders, and a pale plaster scar across my left thumb.

I worked as a historical-plaster specialist. Give me one pass along a broken cornice with my fingertips, and I could draw its shape on zinc, cut a running template, and pull that shape in wet plaster.

Talking took me longer.

Bennett knew how to use that.

"Seojun helped in the shop," he told Priya. "Good hands. But an assistant isn't the person you put in charge of a rush job."

On the scaffold, Cal stopped wrapping a cord. Mara looked down at her boots. Neither spoke.

Bennett Shaw was a broad white man of forty with sandy hair, a square jaw, and work boots that never seemed to collect dust.

For six months, we had called each other partners. His company held the theater contract. My separate studio supplied the patterns, the molds, and my time. He found customers. I made old rooms whole.

He had been good at finding customers.

Priya studied the crew sheet. At forty-three, the Indian American theater owner could read a cost column faster than Bennett could explain it. She also knew which stagehand had a sick mother and which usher needed rides home.

That second skill made her slow to give up on people.

"Who owns the molds?" she asked.

"The company," Bennett said. "Everything needed to complete your balcony."

I set down my tool roll.

"Which company?"

He gave me the small smile he used when I asked a question in front of a customer.

"Don't make this awkward."

Behind him, the first restored strip of cornice caught the morning light. Its bead row had one flat bead, ninth from the corner. The old hand who made the original had slipped there, perhaps a hundred years ago.

I had kept that flat bead.

"Old rooms have handwriting," I had told Mara when we took the first impression. "We don't fix the spelling."

Now Bennett stood under that handwriting and called it his.

Priya asked, "Can you meet the opening date?"

"Eighteen days," he said. "I have a $46,800 schedule that says yes."

"I'd like the material list," I said.

"You aren't on this job anymore."

He held out his hand for my key.

There were things I could have said. I could have named the six nights I spent cutting leaves for the balcony brackets. I could have asked Cal who had shown him how to set the anchors without breaking the old lath.

Instead, I removed the loading-door key from its ring.

"Please send the termination in writing. Include the date and your reason."

Bennett glanced at Priya, as if my request proved his point.

"Of course."

"And preserve the library inventory."

"It's a shelf list, Seojun."

He had called it that when he signed it, too.

I picked up my tool roll and left the racks alone. Taking things during an argument was a fine way to turn clear ownership into a muddy story.

Mara followed me to the door.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Were you paid Friday?"

She shook her head.

I looked back. Cal had begun wrapping the same cord again.

At my studio, two streets below the hill, I washed my hands before opening the flat file. Wet plaster could ruin a page as easily as a ceiling.

Folder Four held the original loan agreement. The title read BAILMENT AND LIMITED USE OF MOLD LIBRARY. Below it were Bennett's signature, my signature, and an inventory dated six months before our first theater invoice.

I had built the library over nine years. There were forty-two master casts and sixteen silicone production molds, each with a number. The agreement said my studio owned them. Bennett could use them for listed work while our contract remained active.

He had initialed the page that barred unauthorized copies.

I photographed that page beside the date on his termination email.

Then I opened the attached crew announcement.

It called me a former shop assistant.

At the bottom, Bennett had promised Priya a demonstration the next morning: a full balcony bracket, already cast and ready to be lifted into place before lunch.

My phone rang while I was reading it.

Priya's voice was very quiet.

"Seojun, why did a piece of your plaster just break in my hand?"