My Wife Set An Empty Asset List Beside My Supper

Lydia put the separation papers beside my bowl of lentils. She moved my spoon first, so no soup could touch the pages.

"You can read those after you eat," she said.

I read the first page while she stood over me.

At fifty-seven, I was a lean Ethiopian American man with brown skin, close gray curls, and a pale burn mark across my left thumb.

That thumb rested on the line marked business assets.

Zero.

I tuned pianos for a living. Twelve of the pianos I cared for belonged to Cedar Interval Piano Rentals, the company Lydia and I had built in Concord, New Hampshire. We rented them to schools, churches, and recital halls from Manchester to the Lakes Region.

"Where are our instruments?" I asked.

"Transferred. The business failed."

Lydia was a tall white woman of fifty-four, with a smooth blond bob, pale eyes, and square red glasses she wore on a silver chain.

She lifted those glasses now.

"You kept saying the older ones needed work. I handled it."

I had said three needed new casters. That was different from saying twelve pianos had no value.

"Transferred to whom?"

"It's in the records."

"These records?"

I turned the sheet toward her. It held no buyer's name, no sale price, and no bank deposit. Just zero beside equipment, inventory, and cash.

"Don't start making this harder," she said. "I'm offering you the van and your tools. You can still earn."

In twenty-six years of marriage, Lydia had learned to make an order sound like a gift. She handled our bookings, money, and office mail. I handled strings, felt, wood, and the calls that came when a child dropped a coin between the keys.

She often said we each had our strengths.

She said it now.

"You hear things, Dawit. I understand business."

I took my worn tuning fork from the velvet tobacco pouch in my pocket. The pouch had belonged to my father. Its drawstring had been replaced three times.

I touched the fork to my knee and set its stem against the table.

The small A rose through the wood.

"Really?" Lydia said.

I let it fade. When two strings were close but failed to match, I listened for the beats between them. I had learned not to turn a pin until I understood which sound was wrong.

"I'll read everything," I said.

"My lawyer needs your answer by Friday."

It was Tuesday.

She left for what she called a late booking meeting. Her phone lit as she picked it up. Owen Pike's name showed on the screen.

Owen managed three recital venues and sent us work. He had begun calling Lydia directly last winter. She said that saved time.

After her car left, I went down to my shop.

The business office was upstairs, behind a door she had recently started locking. My shop had no lock. Lydia considered it a room full of dust and little wooden problems.

Under my bench stood a blue file box.

Every rental piano had its own folder. I kept serial numbers, repair bills, pencil maps, and photographs. I also kept dated copies on a drive that never left the shop.

Soundboards split in ways that looked alike until you knew where to look. A repair might need three spruce shims, one longer than the others. Another might have an old screw hole beside the bridge. Those marks stayed when a case was painted and a rental label changed.

Lydia called my folders the patient charts.

"Your wooden patients never pay," she used to say.

But they had paid. Last year, our fleet brought in $118,420 before expenses.

At the bottom of the box lay our signed company agreement. When we bought our first grand, I had insisted on one rule: neither owner could sell or transfer company property worth more than $2,500 without both signatures.

Lydia had agreed. Back then, she wanted protection from my habit of giving struggling music teachers a break.

I found the page. Her signature sat beside mine.

Then I searched the public rental listings from my shop computer.

North Lantern Performance Supply offered a walnut grand for an autumn recital in Pembroke. The listing said its fleet was newly acquired.

In one photo, a raised lid showed a small triangle of pale wood near the tail.

I opened folder CI-04.

Three spruce shims. One long, two short. A triangular patch where an earlier repair had failed.

I had fitted that patch during a week of freezing rain. Lydia had brought me coffee that week, before she began treating kindness as a price she might have to pay.

I printed the advertisement and wrote the date beneath it.

My phone rang before the paper cooled.

"Mr. Bekele?" a woman said. "I'm calling from the Pembroke recital committee. Your name is inside our rental piano. Could you look at it tomorrow?"