Garrett Changed The Workshop Locks Before The Last Frame Had Cooled

The new lock was brass. The old one had been dull gray, with a notch where I had caught it with a fork blade.

I tried my key twice. Then I held the door still and tried once more.

Through the glass, my newest frame hung above the bench. A little white tag swung from its seat tube. I had finished its last joint at nine the night before.

Garrett came out of the office with his phone raised.

"Don't make this a scene, Chin."

"My name is Chinedu. Open the door."

He turned the dead bolt but left the chain on.

I was a tall, lean Nigerian American man of twenty-eight, with dark brown skin, close-cropped black hair, and a pale burn mark across my left wrist.

The mark came from my first month as a bicycle-frame brazier. At our shop in Ogden, Utah, I joined steel tubes with heat and brass filler. I cut the tubes, fit the joints, and built frames for people whose bodies or plans did not fit a box from a store.

I also tapped finished tubes with the smooth end of a small steel rod. A clean ring was one clue. A dull note told me where to look harder. Sound never replaced the other checks, but it made me stop and listen.

Garrett hated that part.

"You listen to bikes more than people," he used to say.

Now he smiled through the gap.

"I've made a business decision. You're done here."

Garrett Hume was a white man of thirty-one, with swept-back sandy hair, blue eyes, and bright white teeth above a beard he kept edged like a ruler.

He wore a cream jacket that had never been near our flux pot. Behind him, the office wall held photos of him shaking hands beside frames I had built.

"What decision?" I asked.

"The workshop. The name. The custom frames. They're mine now. I handle the money, the sales, the growth. You can pick up your personal stuff next week."

"Did something get signed?"

He laughed.

"That's your problem. Always waiting for someone to tell you what happened."

The shop was called Switchback Frame Works. We rented two bays west of Washington Boulevard, where the wind brought grit under the doors and freight trains rattled our cups. On clear days, I could see the Wasatch above the roof across the street.

Garrett had chosen the gold lettering. I had made the sign bracket from scrap steel.

"There are customer frames in there," I said.

"There's inventory."

"Mara's touring frame is not inventory. Neither is the orange repair job."

"I know what I'm doing."

His phone buzzed. He glanced at it, then at the lot, as if someone might see us and lower his worth.

"Look, you're good with a torch. I'm good with business. We both knew that."

I watched the white tag move behind his shoulder.

"I need the serial register."

"Company records stay here."

"And my purchase ledger?"

"Whatever notebook you scribbled in, get another."

He shut the door before I could answer.

For a moment I stood with my lunch sack pressed against my coat. It held rice, beans, and an apple. I had planned to finish two chainstay bridges before noon.

I went to my truck instead.

The shop's books lived on a shared computer. But every Friday night, I entered equipment purchases in a clothbound ledger at home. I kept receipts behind each page. When a customer paid a deposit, I saved the signed build terms and wrote the assigned frame number in a separate register.

Garrett knew I kept copies. He called them my bedtime stories.

He had never asked why I also kept the first operating agreement, with the green paper clip still on its signature page.

At the shop's start, he had said, "You read the dull parts. Just flag where I sign."

I had read every page.

My phone rang while I sat in the truck. It was Mara Keene, who had ordered a touring frame for a ride south through the red rock country.

"Garrett said pickups are on hold," she said. "He said the bank needs to count things. Is my frame okay?"

"Did he say which bank?"

"A credit union. He sent me a message by mistake. Then he deleted it."

"Save whatever you still have. Your frame was hanging safely when I saw it."

I could promise that much. Nothing more.

After we hung up, I called the number from an old business card in my glove box.

"Juniper Basin Credit Union," a woman answered. "Svetlana Volkov."

I gave her my full name and the shop's name.

"I'm scheduled to inspect your pledged assets Friday morning," she said.

It was Wednesday.

"There's something you should see before then," I told her.

"Bring records, Mr. Eze. People bring me stories all day."

Then my phone lit with a message from Garrett.

Friday, nine sharp. Stay away during inventory. You don't want to find out what I signed.