My Wife Left A Supplier Bill Beside My Divorce Papers

The bill arrived with a picture of granite we had never bought.

I knew the stone first. The black slab on the invoice had white veins as thick as shoelaces. Our three churchyard jobs called for fine gray granite, cut low so it would not hide the old markers.

The amount was $8,800. Across the bottom, someone had written, Second Notice.

My wife had circled it in red.

"Another thing you forgot," Celeste said.

I set down my sandblast hood. At forty-one, I was a broad-shouldered mixed-race Black and white man with brown skin, gray at my temples, and a pale stone-dust line across my beard.

I engraved monuments in Beaufort, South Carolina. Some days I cut dates. Other days I reset old tablets with lime mortar and tried to give a leaning name another hundred years.

"Which job?" I asked.

"It's on the bill, Dorian."

"Which stone?"

She sighed toward the ceiling, as if answers might drop from there.

Celeste was thirty-nine, a mixed-race Latina and white woman with a sleek dark bob, green eyes, and nails the soft pink of a shell.

As our office manager, she kept our office as neat as a hotel desk. Bills went into cream folders. Bad news went into my name.

"You work with your hands," she said. "Let me work with numbers."

For eleven years, I had.

That did not mean I had forgotten how.

I read the supplier name. Tern Shoal Granite. Under it was a small drawing of a bird and a post office box in Savannah.

"We buy through Fox Tern Quarry," I said.

"Tern Shoal handles their local orders now."

There were two terns in that answer and something wrong between them.

Outside, a truck rattled over the road toward Port Royal. The air smelled of wet oyster mud. Inside, Celeste's desk smelled of lemon cleaner.

She pushed a second folder toward me.

"Please read this tonight."

On top was a draft separation agreement. Below that sat a list of shop debts, all beside my name.

The total was $67,700.

"You're leaving?"

"I'm trying to make a clean break."

I looked through the office window at the half-cut lily on my bench. A customer had chosen it for her mother's marker. I had spent the morning getting one petal right.

"How long have you been planning this?"

"Don't make a scene."

There was no one else there.

That was how I knew she had already pictured the scene and assigned me my part.

"You keep the shop," she said. "You always wanted that."

"What is this $48,000 equipment balance?"

"A business has costs."

"What equipment?"

She picked up her bag.

"You can ask the accountant after you sign."

We did not have an accountant. We had Celeste, a tax preparer once a year, and the faith I had placed between them.

After she left, I locked the front door. I did not sign anything.

I went to the sample cupboard behind the blast room.

Every stone job had a packet. Inside went a thin sample, the duplicate quarry draft, and the original purchase authorization. I closed each waxed-paper packet with blue sail thread and dated the knot.

My father had taught me that. Stone chips could settle a color dispute. Paper could settle the rest.

Celeste called them my little graves.

"You could put all that on a screen," she often said.

Screens had their uses. So did a knot nobody had opened.

The packets belonged to me, like the owner's bank access I had kept when I gave Celeste permission to pay bills. I had let her run the office. I had never signed away the business.

I lifted the packets for the three churchyard jobs.

Their blue threads were still tight.

Beside the cupboard lay a delivery slip Celeste had brought me that morning. It claimed I had accepted eight granite bases from Tern Shoal.

My name appeared at the bottom.

I remembered handwriting after seeing it once. Families thought that helped me copy a mother's birthday card onto stone. It did.

It also meant I knew Celeste's small, open four and the way she dragged a pen up from a final s.

The name on that slip looked like mine until the last letter.

Then it looked like hers.

I called Farrah Quinn. She had checked the books for a cemetery board after its treasurer blamed a $63 mistake on the bank.

"Bring nothing through the mail," she said. "Leave the packets shut. I'll come Saturday."

"I haven't told you what happened."

"You asked for a forensic bookkeeper before supper. Something happened."

I almost laughed.

Then the office printer woke behind me.

Celeste had sent one more page from wherever she was staying.

It showed a scheduled payment of $9,600 to Tern Shoal Granite, due Monday at nine.