The room
A desk with a caliper, not a hitting bay
Suite 5 is a table, a north window, and a drawer of cores. There is no launch screen. If you came to watch a ball fly, the capitol steps are prettier.
Marta set the lease in 2014 because Third Street still had a locksmith and a tailor, which is the company a grip desk deserves. The caliper is a modified machinist tool with brass faces so it does not pinch winter skin. We keep it in a felt sleeve. Golfers laugh at that once. They stop when the 64ths match the crease they actually have.
The north window matters. Fluorescent light lies about leather tack and about how red a cold palm is. We size in daylight when we can. January afternoons we use a paper-white lamp that Marta hates and uses anyway.
You sit. You take the glove off. You put the hand on a pine board that has a pencil line at 90 millimeters, because every palm wants to splay if you let it hover. Then the caliper. Then a number. Then an argument, sometimes, which we settle by measuring again, not by raising our voices.