My Wife Set Divorce Papers Beside Our Cutting Table

Mai put the envelope beside my shears while I was matching a blue seed on two strips of chair fabric.

The seed was smaller than a grain of rice. If I missed it, the leaves would seem to jump when someone sat down.

"Put those away," she said. "We need to be adults."

I closed the shears.

I was forty-four, a Hmong American man with a broad brown face, close-cut black hair going gray at the ears, and a low right shoulder from years of pulling cloth.

My name was Seng Lor. I cut upholstery patterns in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Our studio sat in a brick mill where rain tapped the tall windows like loose pins. I could fit a wing chair with less waste than most men used on an ottoman. I lined every seam up with the smallest mark in the cloth.

Mai called that my gift when customers were listening.

When they left, she called it sewing.

Mai was a small woman with a smooth oval face, a straight black bob, and thin gold glasses she pushed up with one careful finger.

At forty-two, she could make a buyer feel like the only person in a room. She was Hmong American, like me. Unlike me, she liked rooms where nobody had to lift anything.

She slid the envelope closer.

"The divorce papers are inside. Your lawyer can accept service. I don't want a scene here."

"Here is where you brought them."

Her smile held for a second. Then it went flat.

"I'm trying to be kind."

Behind her, the Blackstone ran high and brown. A truck bumped over the loading ramp downstairs. I kept my palm on the fabric so the two blue seeds stayed together.

Mai Xiong and I had been married nineteen years. We had no children. There had always been another order, another market, another reason to wait.

"What happens to Small Repeat?" I asked.

Small Repeat Studio was our company. We each owned half. Mai handled textile licenses. I handled the chairs, the patterns, the loading dock, and whatever broke before nine.

"We sell," she said. "Gideon has someone interested."

Gideon Vale had started visiting that winter. He wore clean boots and called himself a studio sale adviser.

"How much?"

"Sixty-five thousand. For a tired shop, that's generous."

"And the designs?"

She gave a small laugh.

"Seng. Those licenses brought in almost nothing. Eighteen thousand six hundred dollars in the last year and a half. Before expenses."

I looked at the roll under my hand. My River Seed pattern. Seven small leaves, then one blue seed turned toward the stem. A hotel order had used six hundred yards of it that spring.

"All twelve patterns?"

"You don't understand minimum guarantees. Returns. Agent fees."

"I understand eighteen thousand six hundred."

"Then let's keep this simple. You take the machines and your tools. I handle the business end."

She laid down a second paper, headed Proposed Asset Sale.

There were yellow tabs beside my signature lines.

"You can read it tonight. Gideon needs an answer Friday."

"I'll read it now."

"He has other buyers to consider."

"For our shop?"

She took off her glasses. The kind voice vanished.

"Don't start picking at words. You sew. I kept us paid."

She left the sale paper on the table and went into the office. A moment later, I heard her talking softly on the phone.

I did not follow her.

Under the cutting table sat a flat metal box. It held my original drawings, dated bills for their first printing, and a blue binder Mai had once called my worry book.

I had drawn those twelve patterns in the two years before our wedding. We formed Small Repeat much later. When the company began selling licenses, I had agreed to let it act as my agent. I had kept the original rights in my own name. The signed schedule said so.

That did not make every dollar mine alone. We had built a marriage and a company around those dollars. But a sale of the shop could not make another man the owner of my drawings just because Mai put them on a list.

In the binder was something else: the original royalty escrow instruction. I had signed it at a bank desk, with Mai beside me. Any change to the account needed both our approvals.

I remembered the pen because it leaked. A small blue spot still sat beside my name.

I called Felix Duarte from the loading stairs.

"Can you check some royalty figures?" I asked.

"Whose figures?"

"My wife's."

He did not tell me to calm down.

"Bring what you have."

Before I left, I turned over the proposed sale. Its last page listed the buyer: Vale Room LLC.

Below that, Gideon Vale had signed as its owner.