The room above the print shop was supposed to be the venue for my fiftieth. One big window looked out over the railroad tracks. The band had just taken a break, and my cousin was telling a story about a catfish that bit him on Center Hill Lake when the doors came open.
Lance walked in forty minutes late. He had a girl with him, maybe twenty-six, in a white slip dress and cowboy boots with no socks. He didn’t wave at anybody. He walked straight into the middle of the room with his hand around her waist and tapped his bourbon glass with his ring finger.
“Margo,” he said, loud enough for the people by the dessert table to turn around. “This is Brittany. She’s taking your place.”
No one moved. My sister dropped a spoon into the potato salad. Somebody’s phone kept announcing a football score in the corner.
I set my napkin on the table. I had known Lance for nineteen years. I had not known his voice could sound like a man firing a hostess on a reality show.
Brittany gave a little finger wave. She was wearing my favorite shade of lipstick.
“I mean in the showroom too,” Lance added. “She’s moving into operations. You can train her, if you want to stay on.”
I stood. The chair made a scrape.
“The bar tab is on your card,” I said. “I’m going home.”
He blocked the door. “Don’t be dramatic. You can keep doing purchasing. I’m not throwing you out on the street.”
I didn’t take the bait. I took my keys out of my pocket and squeezed them tight enough to hurt my palm.
“Tell Brittany she’s welcome to the purchasing spreadsheets,” I said. “They’re on the cloud drive. Two hundred and eleven open orders.”
Then I squeezed past him. The freight elevator smelled like bleach and fried okra from the restaurant downstairs. I rode down alone.
I didn’t cry in the Uber. I didn’t cry in the kitchen of the condo in Germantown I’d bought eleven years before I ever met Lance. I set three black suitcases on the bed and filled them with his clothes. I did not cut the sleeves out of his jackets. I folded everything. I even layered tissue paper between the shirts, like I did when I shipped tile samples.
He came to the door at nine the next morning. Brittany was behind him, scrolling on her phone.
“You saved me a trip,” he said when he saw the suitcases.
“The elevator is at the end of the hall.”
He took the handles. “I’ll see you at the shop at eleven.”
I closed the door.
The showroom was in a building my grandfather Roy Keller built in 1979 on Gallatin Pike. It had been a hardware store first, then a plumbing supply. When Grandpa died, the building came to me. It was mine before the wedding, and under Tennessee law that mattered.
Lance opened Foster Custom Cabinetry in there fifteen years ago. He had never paid me a dollar in rent. He had never paid me a salary either. I ran the orders, the vendor accounts, the CAD corrections, the delivery schedules, the screaming clients, the late shipments, the installers who showed up half-drunk. He shook hands and signed the contracts.
I also never had a title. I should have written that on a cake.
When I got to the showroom that morning, the air in the loading bay smelled like the vape shop next door and the cat, Catfish, was asleep on a pallet of drawer fronts. I scratched his one torn ear and walked inside.
Lance and Brittany arrived at ten after eleven. She ran her finger across a quartz sample as if it owed her money.
I stood behind the old oak desk I had refinished myself.
“Your work phone is here,” I said. “Passwords on a sticky note. The cloud link is in the notes app. The supplier portal uses the same password but with a capital L.”
Brittany grabbed the phone. “Is this the kind with the good camera?”
Lance didn’t answer her. He just checked his watch like I had already missed a deadline.
I opened a folder.
“The building is mine, Lance. For fifteen years you occupied it under a written license, not a lease. The license is terminated. You have thirty days to vacate or sign a commercial lease. Market rate for this block is nine thousand one hundred a month, triple net. Comp list is on page four.”
His mouth opened. “This is our business.”
“Your business. Your LLC. Your inventory. My building.”
“You can’t do this.”
“I already did. You have thirty days.”
Brittany stopped touching the quartz.
I set the folder on the desk. “Good luck with the schedule for the Lebanon delivery. The homeowner already fired one contractor. He has a handgun and a surveyor. I wrote his phone number on the sticky note.”
Then I walked to the front door. Catfish meowed as I passed.
The first payment hit my bank account thirty-one days later. Nine thousand one hundred dollars. I sat on my balcony with a cup of coffee and watched the sun come up over the river. I did not throw a party.
That first month, Brittany discovered that operations was not choosing backsplash tile.
On day nine, a mill rep named Ray called my personal cell. “Margo, sorry to bother you. The new girl sent over the cut sheet for the McFerrin house. They ordered inset white oak. She switched it to thermofoil, shade ‘Honey Pecan,’ and she put basic side-mount hinges on an overlay panel job.”
I switched the phone to speaker and set it on the cutting board.
“I don’t run operations anymore, Ray.”
“I know. I tried to explain. She told me I was mansplaining.”
“Follow the purchase order. It’s in writing.”
He let out a breath. “You get that in writing, too.”
By the end of the month, two delivery trucks had blocked the alley behind the shop for six hours. The third dropped a pallet of glass cabinet doors on the curb because nobody had signed the freight release. The pallet sat there in the rain until a man from the tire shop across the street shoved it under the awning.
The people who paid for those doors started calling the showroom every twenty minutes.
Lance signed the lease on day thirty.
He didn’t have a choice. The new space he’d looked at in Antioch needed a buildout, and the landlord wanted first and last plus a personal guarantee. Moving would have killed him. So he stayed. He paid.
Then came the divorce inventory.
We met in a conference room in Green Hills. My lawyer, Patricia Hines, sat at the head of the table with a yellow legal pad.
Lance looked like he had slept in his shirt. The collar had a ketchup stain.
Patricia slid a list across the table. “The building and the condo are Margo’s separate property. The house in Lebanon, the two trucks, the joint checking—those are marital. But so are the assets of the LLC.”
Lance’s hand stopped midair.
“She’s not on the LLC,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Patricia said. “Tennessee is an equitable division state. The inventory, the sample slabs, the computers, the delivery van—all purchased during the marriage with marital funds. Half of the net value is Margo’s.”
The accountant valued the business assets at four hundred twenty-four thousand eight hundred fourteen dollars and thirty-six cents. My half: two hundred twelve thousand four hundred seven dollars and eighteen cents.
Lance took a personal loan at a seventeen percent interest rate to pay me. I signed the check over to Patricia’s escrow account. She gave me a pen that said “Hine & Associates.” I still have it.
Brittany walked out before the loan came through.
I saw it because I’d gone to the building to sign off on a roof inspection. She was in the back office with a pink duffel bag, stuffing a pair of suede booties into the side pocket. She didn’t see me at first. Then she did.
“You think this is fun?” she said. “He told me you did all the real work. Then he turned into a guy who smells like diesel.”
I wrote “no visible leaks” on the form.
“The roofer needs to lock the hatch,” I said.
That was the last time I saw her.
The showroom turned into a yard sale.
Lance put orange signs in the windows: LIQUIDATION. ALL SALES FINAL. He sold display kitchens for less than the cost of the hinges. The custom walnut island from the front window went to a man who planned to turn it into a workbench for his motorcycle. Lance delivered it himself in a rented box truck.
I came to inspect the building on the last day of the lease.
The room was empty except for a broken sawbuck, two extension cords, and Lance sitting on the floor with his back against the far wall. The floor had dust in the shape of missing cabinets.
“I’m here to check the drains and the dock plate,” I said.
He didn’t stand up. “You happy now?”
“I need to see the back door. It was sticking in March.”
He made a sound that was supposed to be a laugh.
“Brittany says I lied to her. She thought she was dating a rich man. Now she tells people I’m a bankrupt who smells like diesel.”
I checked the outlet by the freight door. The faceplate was cracked. I made a note in my phone.
I set the inspection tablet on the floor in front of him. “Sign here, and here.”
He signed. The pen made a line that looked like a tic-tac-toe board.
I took the keys. I didn’t say goodbye.
Two weeks after that, he showed up at my condo.
It was a Tuesday. I was making coffee in my bathrobe. The call box buzzed.
On the video screen, Lance stood in the lobby with a bouquet of gas station carnations. The plastic wrap was wet. He had a receipt stuck to the bottom of one shoe.
I opened the door but left the chain on.
“Margo.”
“Lance.”
He pushed the carnations toward the gap. “I’m sorry. I was an idiot. The whole thing—it only worked because of you. I know that now. I want to start over. No showroom. No Brittany. Just us.”
His voice cracked. Real, maybe. Or maybe just the sound a man makes when he sees his own empty apartment.
I didn’t move.
“She took my place,” I said. “That’s what you told everyone.”
“I was high on my own ego. I didn’t mean it.”
“You meant every word. She took my place at the showroom. She took my place in your truck. She took my work phone. Then she couldn’t do the job.”
He pushed the flowers farther into the gap. The plastic rustled.
I shut the door.
Then I walked to the kitchen counter. I picked up my phone. I opened the building’s entry app, the one I’d used to give Lance a guest code after he sold his last car and needed a place to park.
I tapped his name.
Revoke access.
The screen asked me to confirm. I did.
On the lobby camera, Lance was still standing by the call box. He punched in a code. The keypad flashed red.
He tried again.
Red.
He hit the wall with the heel of his hand. The carnations fell to the floor.
I poured coffee into the blue mug with the chipped rim. I added exactly half a teaspoon of sugar.
Then I went back to my book.
