A little give and take

We sat on opposite sides of the conference table. Her attorney, his tortoise-shell reading glasses precariously perched on the tip of his nose, was reading off a list of our belongings. “Assets” he called them. We were divvying them up like little kids sorting through Halloween candy.

She was keen on getting all the choice chocolate and caramel nuggets in her pile, leaving me with the black jelly beans and lint covered Bit-o-Honeys.

I didn’t care. I just wanted to be done with this.

“Two ceramic ewers,” he intoned, checking the items off his list, preparing to transfer them to her candy pile.

“He can have those,” dismissing the jugs with a flip of her hand. “I wouldn’t have those hideous, cheap Pottery Barn knock-offs in my house.”

Keeping my expression neutral, I tried to hide my excitement. Of all the antiques we accumulated during our short and treacherous marriage, those ‘knock-offs” were the most valuable.

The primitive School of Mines pottery would easily appraise at more than $20,000 each. She wouldn’t know that because they weren’t her idea of extravagant.

My attorney laid his hand flat on the table, his sign for me to stay quiet.

“If he accepts those, he would expect another big-ticket item,” he tapped the tip of his pen on his legal pad. “He gets the Lexus, along with the pottery, and he’ll give up the wing-back chairs.”

My soon-to-be-ex and her attorney huddled together for a minute with him doing most of the talking. When they parted, he counter offered.

“The chairs and the matching settee,” he said. She sat beside him a little too close, her artificially plump lips pursed in a victorious pout.

I hated that living room furniture. I wasn’t giving up anything I wanted.

“Deal.”

The two attorneys scribbled the transaction into their respective give-and-take columns, and the haggling continued.

Trifecta, a weekly one-word prompt, challenges writers to use that word in its third definition form, using no less than 33 words or no more than 333. The week’s prompt is: Cheap [adj.\ˈchēp\] 3: of inferior quality or worth: tawdry, sleazy