Lock and Key (2 page)

Inside, the yellow house was sort of odd. The kitchen was the biggest room, and everything was lined up against one wall: cabinets, appliances, shelves. Against another wall was a huge propane heater, which in cold weather worked hard to heat the whole house, whooshing to life with a heavy sigh. The only bathroom was off the kitchen, poking out with no insulated walls—my mom said it must have been added on; there’d probably been an outhouse, initially—which made for some cold mornings until you got the hot water blasting and the steam heated things up. The living room was small, the walls covered with dark fake-wood paneling. Even at high noon, you needed a light on to see your hand in front of your face. My mother, of course, loved the dimness and usually pulled the shades shut, as well. I’d come home to find her on the couch, cigarette dangling from one hand, the glow from the TV flashing across her face in bursts. Outside, the sun might be shining, the entire world bright, but in our house, it could always be late night, my mother’s favorite time of day.

In the old one-bedroom apartment, I was accustomed to sometimes being awoken from a dead sleep, her lips close to my ear as she asked me to move out onto the couch, please, honey. As I went, groggy and discombobulated, I’d do my best not to notice whoever slipped back in the door behind her. At the yellow house, though, I got my own room. It was small, with a tiny closet and only one window, as well as orange carpet and those same dark walls, but I had a door to shut, and it was all mine. It made me feel like we’d stay longer than a couple of months, that things would be better here. In the end, though, only one of these things turned out to be true.

I first met the Honeycutts three days after we moved in. It was early afternoon, and we were getting ready to leave for work when a green pickup truck came up the driveway. A man was driving, a woman in the passenger seat beside him.

“Mom,” I called out to my mother, who was in the bedroom getting dressed. “Someone’s here.”

She sighed, sounding annoyed. My mother was at her worst just before going to work, petulant like a child. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, watching as the couple—he in jeans and a denim work shirt, she wearing slacks and a printed top—started to make their way to the house. “But they’re about to knock on the door.”

“Oh, Ruby.” She sighed again. “Just talk to them, would you? ”

The first thing I noticed about the Honeycutts was that they were instantly friendly, the kind of people my mother couldn’t
stand
. They were both beaming when I opened the door, and when they saw me, they smiled even wider.

“Well, look at you!” the woman said as if I’d done something precious just by existing. She herself resembled a gnome, with her small features and halo of white curls, like something made to put on a shelf. “Hello there!”

I nodded, my standard response to all door knockers. Unnecessary verbals only encouraged them, or so I’d learned. “Can I help you?”

The man blinked. “Ronnie Honeycutt,” he said, extending his hand. “This is my wife, Alice. And you are?”

I glanced in the direction of my mother’s room. Although usually she banged around a lot while getting ready— drawers slamming, grumbling to herself—now, of course, she was dead silent. Looking back at the couple, I decided they probably weren’t Jehovah’s but were definitely peddling something. “Sorry,” I said, beginning my patented firm shut of the door, “but we’re not—”

“Oh, honey, it’s okay!” Alice said. She looked at her husband. “Stranger danger,” she explained. “They teach it in school.”

“Stranger what?” Ronnie said.

“We’re your landlords,” she told me. “We just dropped by to say hello and make sure you got moved in all right.”

Landlords
, I thought. That was even worse than Witnesses. Instinctively, I eased the door shut a bit more, wedging my foot against it. “We’re fine,” I told them.

“Is your mom around?” Ronnie asked as Alice shifted her weight, trying to see into the kitchen behind me.

I adjusted myself accordingly, blocking her view, before saying, “Actually, she’s—”

“Right here,” I heard my mother say, and then she was crossing the living room toward us, pulling her hair back with one hand. She had on jeans, her boots, and a white tank top, and despite the fact that she’d just woken up about twenty minutes earlier, I had to admit she looked pretty good. Once my mother had been a great beauty, and occasionally you could still get a glimpse of the girl she had been—if the light was right, or she’d had a decent night’s sleep, or, like me, you were just wistful enough to look for it.

She smiled at me, then eased a hand over my shoulder as she came to the door and offered them her other one. “Ruby Cooper,” she said. “And this is my daughter. Her name’s Ruby, as well.”

“Well, isn’t that something!” Alice Honeycutt said. “And she looks just like you.”

“That’s what they say,” my mom replied, and I felt her hand move down the back of my head, smoothing my red hair, which we did have in common, although hers was now streaked with an early gray. We also shared our pale skin— the redhead curse or gift, depending on how you looked at it—as well as our tall, wiry frames. I’d been told more than once that from a distance, we could almost be identical, and although I knew this was meant as a compliment, I didn’t always take it that way.

I knew that my mother’s sudden reaching out for me was just an act, making nice for the landlords, in order to buy some bargaining time or leverage later. Still, though, I noticed how easy it was for me to fold into her hip, resting my head against her. Like some part of me I couldn’t even control had been waiting for this chance all along and hadn’t even known it.

“It’s our standard practice to just drop by and check in on folks,” Ronnie was saying now, as my mother idly twisted a piece of my hair through her fingers. “I know the rental agency handles the paperwork, but we like to say hello face-to -face.”

“Well, that’s awfully nice of you,” my mom said. She dropped my hair, letting her hand fall onto the doorknob so casually you almost would think she wasn’t aware of it, or the inch or so she shut it just after, narrowing even farther the space between us and them. “But as Ruby was saying, I’m actually going to work right now. So . . .”

“Oh, of course!” Alice said. “Well, you all just let us know if there’s anything you need. Ronnie, give Ruby our number.”

We all watched as he pulled a scrap of paper and a pen out of his shirt pocket, writing down the digits slowly. “Here you go,” he said, handing it over. “Don’t hesitate to call.”

“Oh, I won’t,” my mom said. “Thanks so much.”

After a few more pleasantries, the Honeycutts finally left the porch, Ronnie’s arm locked around his wife’s shoulders. He deposited her in the truck first, shutting the door securely behind her, before going around to get behind the wheel. Then he backed out of the driveway with the utmost caution, doing what I counted to be at least an eight-point turn to avoid driving on the grass.

By then, though, my mother had long left the door and returned to her room, discarding their number in an ashtray along the way. “‘Hello face-to-face’ my ass,” she said as a drawer banged. “Checking up is more like it. Busybodies.”

She was right, of course. The Honeycutts were always dropping by unexpectedly with some small, seemingly unnecessary domestic project: replacing the garden hose we never used, cutting back the crepe myrtles in the fall, or installing a birdbath in the front yard. They were over so much, I grew to recognize the distinct rattle of their truck muffler as it came up the driveway. As for my mom, her niceties had clearly ended with that first day. Thereafter, if they came to the door, she ignored their knocks, not even flinching when Alice’s face appeared in the tiny crack the living-room window shade didn’t cover, white and ghostly with the bright light behind it, peering in.

It was because the Honeycutts saw my mother so rarely that it took almost two months for them to realize she was gone. In fact, if the dryer hadn’t busted, I believed they might have never found out, and I could have stayed in the yellow house all the way until the end. Sure, I was behind on the rent and the power was close to getting cut off. But I would have handled all that one way or another, just like I had everything else. The fact was, I was doing just fine on my own, or at least as well as I’d ever done with my mom. Which wasn’t saying much, I know. Still, in a weird way, I was proud of myself. Like I’d finally proven that I didn’t need her, either.

As it was, though, the dryer
did
die, with a pop and a burning smell, late one October night while I was making macaroni and cheese in the microwave. I had no option but to stretch a clothesline across the kitchen in front of the space heater I’d been using since the propane ran out, hang everything up—jeans, shirts, and socks—and hope for the best. The next morning, my stuff was barely dry, so I pulled on the least damp of it and left the rest, figuring I’d deal with it that evening when I got home from work. But then Ronnie and Alice showed up to replace some supposedly broken front-porch slats. When they saw the clothesline, they came inside, and then they found everything else.

It wasn’t until the day they took me to Poplar House that I actually saw the report that the person from social services had filed that day. When Shayna, the director, read it out loud, it was clear to me that whoever had written it had embellished, for some reason needing to make it sound worse than it actually was.

First of all, I had running water. Just not in the kitchen, where the pipes had busted. This was why the dishes tended to pile up, as it was hard to truck in water from the bathroom just to wash a few plates. As for the “vermin, ” we’d always had roaches; they’d just grown a bit more in number with the lack of sink water, although I’d been spraying them on a regular basis. And I did have a heater; it just wasn’t on. The drug and alcohol stuff—which I took to mean the bottles on the coffee table and the roach in one of the ashtrays—I couldn’t exactly deny, but it hardly seemed grounds for uprooting a person from their entire life with no notice.

The entire time Shayna was reading the report aloud, her voice flat and toneless, I still thought that I could talk my way out of this. That if I explained myself correctly, with the proper detail and emphasis, they’d just let me go home. After all, I had only seven months before I turned eighteen, when all of this would be a moot point anyway. But the minute I opened my mouth to start in about topic one, the water thing, she stopped me.

“Ruby,” she said, “where is your mother?”

It was only then that I began to realize what would later seem obvious. That it didn’t matter what I said, how carefully I crafted my arguments, even if I used every tool of evasion and persuasion I’d mastered over the years. There was only one thing that really counted, now and always, and this was it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s just gone.”

After the tour, the pond reveal, and a few more awkward moments, Jamie and Cora finally left me alone to go downstairs and start dinner. It was barely five thirty, but already it was getting dark outside, the last of the light sinking behind the trees. I imagined the phone ringing in the empty yellow house as Richard, my mother’s boss at Commercial Courier, realized we were not just late but blowing off our shift. Later, the phone would probably ring again, followed by a car rolling up the drive, pausing by the front window. They’d wait for a few moments for me to come out, maybe even send someone to bang on the door. When I didn’t, they’d turn around hastily, spitting out the Honeycutts’ neat grass and the mud beneath it from behind their back wheels.

And then what? The night would pass, without me there, the house settling into itself in the dark and quiet. I wondered if the Honeycutts had already been in to clean things up, or if my clothes were still stretched across the kitchen, ghostlike. Sitting there, in this strange place, it was like I could feel the house pulling me back to it, a visceral tug on my heart, the same way that, in the early days of the fall, I’d hoped it would do to my mom. But she hadn’t come back, either. And now, if she did, I wouldn’t be there.

Thinking this, I felt my stomach clench, a sudden panic settling over me, and stood up, walking to the balcony door and pushing it open, then stepping outside into the cold air. It was almost fully dark now, lights coming on in the nearby houses as people came home and settled in for the night in the places they called home. But standing there, with Cora’s huge house rising up behind me and that vast yard beneath, I felt so small, as if to someone looking up I’d be unrecognizable, already lost.

Back inside, I opened up the duffel that had been delivered to me at Poplar House; Jamie had brought it up from the car. It was a cheap bag, some promo my mom had gotten through work, the last thing I would have used to pack up my worldly possessions, not that this was what was in it anyway. Instead, it was mostly clothes I never wore—the good stuff had all been on the clothesline—as well as a few textbooks, a hairbrush, and two packs of cotton underwear I’d never seen in my life, courtesy of the state. I tried to imagine some person I’d never met before going through my room, picking these things for me. How ballsy it was to just assume you could know, with one glance, the things another person could not live without. As if it was the same for everyone, that simple.

There was only one thing I really needed, and I knew enough to keep it close at all times. I reached up, running my finger down the thin silver chain around my neck until my fingers hit the familiar shape there at its center. All day long I’d been pressing it against my chest as I traced the outline I knew by heart: the rounded top, the smooth edge on one side, the series of jagged bumps on the other. The night before, as I’d stood in the bathroom at Poplar House, it had been all that was familiar, the one thing I focused on as I faced the mirror. I could not look at the dark hollows under my eyes, or the strange surroundings and how strange I felt in them. Instead, like now, I’d just lifted it up gently, reassured to see that the outline of that key remained on my skin, the one that fit the door to everything I’d left behind.