The keys were still sharp enough to scratch, the way new keys are before they've been worn to silk by a pocket. I stood in the open doorway with the cardboard tag folded back in my palm, reading the little stamped numbers on both of them like they might tell me something. The man next door was outside already, carrying something wrapped in a grocery bag from his car, and he nodded once in my direction without breaking stride. Down the block I could see the woman's blue mailbox - the one she'd painted herself, and the corner of her porch where she'd left the soup on the step in a pot with a lid weighted down by a rock.
Gary's pegboard was the first thing I saw when he opened the door, a whole wall of brass teeth hanging on little hooks, none of them with so much as a piece of tape. He took my key without looking at it, found an empty hook near the bottom - and the key swung once and went still among all the others. I asked him which one was mine and he said he'd know, the way someone says they'll remember where they parked. Walking back across the ten feet of grass between our doors, I counted at least thirty keys from memory, maybe forty, all the same color - all the same general shape, hanging there like a drawer full of dead batteries.
Gary picked up on the second ring and I could hear him already moving, the screen door slapping behind him, his slippers on the concrete. My mother had been calling through the mail slot, he said - and he could still hear her, something about her knees. There was a long pause where I heard the jangle of metal on metal, thirty keys or forty, the sound of someone opening a cabinet and closing it, opening it again. He said my address out loud - once, to himself, like a question. Then he said he'd get his car.
The Pegboard Full of Strangers' Keys
I got there eleven minutes before he did, which I know because I kept looking at the clock on the dashboard and then looking away and then looking again. She was on the other side of the door and the sound coming through the wood was the sound she used to make stepping on something sharp in the dark, except it wasn't stopping. Gary's headlights swept across the porch and he came up the steps with four keys pinched between his fingers like a hand of cards he hadn't sorted yet - squinting at them under the porch light the way someone squints at a menu in a dim restaurant. The first one went in and caught. The second one went in and turned halfway and stopped.
Dana came down the sidewalk with the slim-jim tucked under her arm like a rolled newspaper, still wearing her garden clogs, the left one with a crack along the toe she'd repaired with electrical tape. She didn't ask which lock or which door; she just slid the tool into the frame the way someone slides a letter opener under a flap they've opened a hundred times, and the bolt moved in under sixty seconds, the door swinging wide on my mother sitting on the floor with her back against the washing machine and a dish towel pressed to her shin. Dana was already past me - past Gary, past the threshold, her hand on the cabinet above the dryer before I'd even gotten both feet inside, and she came out with the white plastic box with the red cross on the lid, the one that had been in that cabinet since the previous owners. She set it open on the floor next to my mother and found the gauze on the first try - not the second, not the third, the first, without looking up.
The Woman Who Already Knew the Drawer
The drawer sticks on humid days and I've to pull with both hands and then it gives all at once. Dana's key has yellowed a little at the tape's edge, the ink from the marker gone slightly gray - her name still readable. The cardboard tag from the hardware store has gone soft at the corners from all the reaching past it. I move the rubber bands, I move the dead batteries, I move the bent takeout menus and the stubby pencil and the thing I've never identified that might be a furniture key. The two keys I don't move.
Dana called once, maybe eight months after the floor incident, to say she'd noticed the light above my mother's back steps had been burned out for a while - and did I want her to swap the bulb while she was already up on her ladder trimming the hedge. I said yes, and she said she'd need to know where the outdoor outlet was to test it, and I started to describe it and she said never mind, she remembered from the time I'd run the extension cord out for the holiday lights. The bulb she used was the right kind, the warm kind - not the blue-white kind that makes everything look like an evidence photograph, which I'd never have thought to specify but she already knew. When I called my mother that evening she said the back steps looked like the back steps again, which was as close as she got to saying she felt safer going out to check the mail after dark. The ladder she'd borrowed was still leaning against my mother's fence the next morning, which meant she was coming back.
The following winter Dana knocked twice and let herself in without waiting, which I only know because my mother mentioned it the way she mentions the weather - just a thing that happened, she'd been in the middle of a nap and Dana had come to read the water meter number off the wall behind the furnace because someone official had called about a billing discrepancy and my mother couldn't find her glasses. The number Dana read out was written in my handwriting on a strip of masking tape I'd stuck there two winters before, black marker, slightly smeared on the last digit from where my thumb had pressed before it dried. My mother said Dana had also moved the stepstool back to where it belonged, under the counter by the toaster - without being asked, because apparently it had been sitting out in the middle of the kitchen floor for four days. When I drove over that weekend the stepstool was exactly where it should be and there was a new bulb in the hallway fixture, a warm one, and I stood under it for a moment before I understood that no one had called me about the hallway bulb. The old bulb was in the recycling bin in the garage, not the trash - which is where it goes.
Disclaimer
This article is for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute professional, financial, medical, or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.
