Chapter 4: Not for Sale

Calvin Gibbes arrived at ten o'clock exactly, in a loud checked jacket and a black car that took up half the yard.

He brought a man with a leather folder, who stood by the door and said nothing.

"So this is where it's made," Calvin said, walking in.

He ran a finger along the bench and examined it.

"Charming. Does the dust come with the rent?"

Rett kept his hands in his apron pockets, because they were not entirely steady.

Under the apron, a bruise on his hip throbbed every time he moved.

He had not stopped thinking about the hand that put it there.

"Mr. Gibbes," he said. "The shop is closed to visitors."

"It's open to me." Calvin smiled. "I own your chairs."

"You own a license."

"Same thing, at my age."

Dell sat on a stool in the corner with a bag of pretzels, chewing slowly, like a man at a play.

"This is Mr. Pallas's representative," Calvin said. "He'd like to see the fourteenth design."

"There isn't one."

"There's a sketch. I've seen the sketch," Calvin said. "A rocker, for a porch."

He took a check out of his inside pocket and laid it on the bench.

"Nine hundred thousand dollars to sign the line off as it stands. Everyone goes home."

Rett looked at the number.

It was more money than his shop had earned in six years.

It would clear the loan on his equipment and leave enough over to put a new roof on his grandmother's house.

It would also put his name on nine plywood chairs.

And his grandmother's rocker, the one she sat in for forty years, would end up on a pallet in some importer's yard.

"No," Rett said.

"You haven't thought."

"I've thought," Rett said.

"It's a lot of money for a man who sleeps above his own lathe."

"I sleep in my grandmother's house," Rett said. "And it's none of your business."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Shelved My Designs, Then Crashed Into My Bed from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.