The morning Curtis changed the locks on our print shop, he sent me one text message at 5:12 in the morning while I was sitting in the parking lot of the Village Inn drinking lukewarm coffee out of a paper cup. His words were right there on the screen for anyone to see. “This is my business and my building now. Go find your own life, Diane.”
I want to tell you I fell apart right there in the booth.
I didn’t. I just felt something closer to quiet, the exact way you feel when a heavy iron gate finally clicks shut after you have spent years waiting for it to drop. You just sit there and breathe.
Curtis and I built Halvorsen Print and Sign in Topeka together, or at least that was the story we told every church group, customer, and supplier for twenty-two years. The truer story was that I bought the building back in 1998, two full years before I ever met him at a hardware auction, using the money my late father left me from selling his auto repair shop. The deed went straight into my name. Diane Halvorsen. I kept it that way after we got married, not out of any grand suspicion, but simply because changing a deed costs money and time at the courthouse, and we were always short on both of those things when you are running a small shop.
Curtis always ran the front counter. He was good with people, loud and hearty, the kind of man who remembers everyone’s first name and slaps the delivery drivers on the shoulder. Over the years our regular customers started calling it Curtis’s shop, and he stopped correcting them, and then I stopped correcting them too, because correcting folks just makes everyone uncomfortable. You get used to disappearing a little bit at a time until you are just part of the inventory.
About a year ago he hired a designer named Shauna, 34 years old with sharp blonde hair and shoes that cost more than my winter coat, and I watched the two of them build a whole world right in front of me that I was not invited into. Late orders that required staying after dark. Trade shows down in Kansas City that I was told I was too tired for.
He started saying my business in front of me during staff meetings, just testing me, watching to see if I would argue or make a scene.
I never argued. I am not proud of that now. I told myself I was keeping the peace and protecting our twenty-two years. Looking back on it, I was just bone tired and didn’t have the stomach for a fight over a clipboard.
So the locks changing did not actually shock me to my bones. What Curtis never knew, because he had never once read our own paperwork or visited the county recorder’s office in his life, was that everything he thought he had just seized sat on a slab of concrete with my maiden name on the deed, free and clear, no mortgage, since 2011.
I finished the last swallow of my coffee, paid the waitress two dollars, and drove downtown to the courthouse.
I paid one dollar for a certified copy of the deed, just to feel the heavy raised seal under my thumb. Diane Halvorsen, sole owner of the land and the structure.
Then I drove over to the shop and parked right in my usual spot by the side alley. I did not try the new deadbolt he had installed. I just stood on the concrete sidewalk and watched Curtis through the big front glass window, showing Shauna something on the wide monitor, both of them laughing at a proof. He looked like a man who thought he had just won the lottery.
I didn’t knock on the glass. My father used to tell me when I was a little girl helping him sort washers in the shop that the loudest person in the room usually has the weakest hand.
I drove back home to our small house on Tenth Street and went straight to the metal filing cabinet in the spare bedroom. I pulled out the commercial lease agreement we had drafted ourselves years ago. Because here was the detail Curtis had completely forgotten in his haste to lock me out. The business, the LLC, did not own the building. It rented the building. From me. And the lease he had signed himself in 2015 without reading gave the landlord the right to terminate for cause with thirty days written notice if any partner was barred from the premises or if the primary terms of operation were breached.
I laid the deed and the lease side by side on my kitchen table and read through every single line three times, just to make sure my eyes weren’t skipping anything in the morning light.
Then I called a commercial attorney named Miller whose office was three blocks from the square, a woman a friend from church had used during her messy bakery buyout. When she picked up the phone, her voice was brisk and professional. I told her I owned a commercial building in Topeka that my husband had just locked me out of, and I wanted to know how fast a landlord could legally evict a business tenant who had violated the terms of the lease.
She was quiet for a second, then she asked me the one question that made my hands finally go completely still on the kitchen counter. “Diane, is your name the only name on that deed?” I told her yes, nobody else’s. She let out a small breath through her nose and said, “Then he has no idea what’s about to happen to him.”
The attorney drafted the notice of lease violation and immediate thirty-day intent to vacate before noon that same day. We didn’t bother waiting for a court date to explain things to him. We walked right through the front door at two o’clock while the shop was full of afternoon customers picking up rush banners, Miller holding the folder and me holding the extra set of keys I had kept in my purse the whole time.
Curtis dropped a stack of cardstock when he saw us walk in past the register. He took two steps out from behind the counter, his face turning that blotchy red color it always went when he was cornered, and pointed a finger right at my chest. “You can’t be in here,” he yelled loud enough for everyone in the shop to hear. “I changed those locks. You’re trespassing.”
I didn’t yell back. I just laid the certified deed and the eviction notice right on top of the paper cutter where he kept his coffee mug. “You’re thirty days behind on your notice, Curtis,” I told him, my voice sounding much steadier than my knees felt. “And you’re renting from the wrong person.”
Shauna came out from the back room with a roll of vinyl under her arm, looked from Curtis to me, and then quietly set the roll down on a folding table and walked right out the front door without saying a single word. Curtis looked down at the papers on the cutter, then up at me, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. “Diane,” he started, his voice cracking on the syllable. “Wait a minute.”
I turned around and walked back out to my car in the alley, leaving him standing there in the middle of his empire with thirty days to pack up twenty-two years of his own mistakes.
