The Morning Bram Called Me An Apprentice Beside My Empty Bench

My drawknife was gone. So were my stitching horse, my strap cutter, and the small brass stamp I kept wrapped in a sock.

Bram had left the broom.

I stood in our Bisbee storefront with a strip of rejected leather in my hand. I had been practicing a ladder stitch on it at home. The bottom rungs leaned left. I saved bad pieces because they could still teach me something.

I was thirty, a white woman with freckled arms, gray eyes, and red hair cut just below my chin. Six days a week, I made custom saddles behind that counter. My name was Delaney Alden. Until that morning, it had also been on the window.

Now a square of clean glass showed where Bram had scraped it off.

"Storage," he said when I asked about my tools. "We needed room for the film people."

Bram was thirty-seven, a white man with slick brown hair, pale blue eyes, and a smile that showed one gold tooth. He owned the display cases and had found the storefront. I owned the things that made the saddles.

He liked to blur that line when a customer came in.

A woman in dusty boots stood beside two crew members. She held a folded saddle blanket, not a camera.

"You must be Delaney," she said. "I'm Paloma Reyes. We spoke about the gray mare."

"She's helping today," Bram cut in. "My apprentice."

Paloma looked at him, then at the empty workbench.

"The order says Delaney builds all four."

"Under my direction. She gets nervous about deadlines."

I laid my practice strip on the counter.

"Where are the four fitted trees and the cut leather sets?"

A saddle tree was its frame. Those four had been fitted to the production's horses six weeks earlier. I had already shaped the seats and cut most of the leather. We had seven days left before delivery.

"Handled," he said.

Paloma unfolded her copy of our order. "We paid $7,200 down on $14,400. I need an answer better than handled."

"Your saddles will be ready."

"By whose hands?" she asked.

He smiled at the crew. "Mine are on every piece that leaves here."

That was true only because he carried them to the truck.

Paloma was thirty-four, Mexican American, and the film's head wrangler. During our fitting, she had tried each blanket herself and checked every buckle before letting a rider near a horse. She had told me, "An animal doesn't get a vote in our schedule. I have to be its vote."

I remembered that now.

"I haven't approved any finished saddles," I said. "And I haven't agreed to move my equipment."

Bram led me into the little back room.

"Don't embarrass me again."

"Give me the storage address."

"You bought that junk with cash, Delaney. Nobody can tell which tools belong to whom."

He said it softly, as if he were giving me useful advice.

Through the thin wall, I heard Paloma asking for a delivery list.

"What about the patterns?" I asked.

"Shop property. Same as the orders. You drew them while you worked here."

My pattern drawer stood open. The envelopes were gone. Each held full-size shapes for a saddle's leather parts, with my notes about fit and where strain would fall. Bram had never learned to read those notes.

He had learned which finished saddles sold for $3,600.

I reached for my lunch tin beneath the sink. He let me take it. He even held the door.

Inside the tin were an apple, a cheese sandwich, and a flat envelope I had brought to update the tool inventory. Bram had signed its first page when we opened eighteen months before.

He had called it boring then.

"Leave the key," he said.

I placed it beside the crooked ladder stitches.

Outside, Brewery Gulch was waking up. A delivery truck groaned uphill. The brick walls still held the night's cool, though the sun was already bright on the copper-colored slopes.

Paloma followed me onto the sidewalk.

"Did you take the deposit?" she asked.

"It went to the shop account. Bram handles sales. I handle the work."

"And that stamp on our first sample? The open circle with the little needle?"

"My maker's mark. I registered it before I met Bram."

She pulled out her phone. "Send me a picture of the real stamp impression."

"Why?"

"Because he just showed me a saddle with a closed circle."

My hand tightened around the lunch tin.

"Please don't put it on a horse."

"I didn't."

She handed me a business card and went back inside.

On the sidewalk, I opened my envelope. The signed tooling lease was there, with every serial number and my name above the word OWNER.

Behind it lay the pattern schedule Bram had initialed on every page.

My phone buzzed before I could close the tin.

Paloma had sent a photograph of four saddles lined up beneath our sign. Every one carried a false version of my mark.