Boots on the Wrong Feet

I'm forty-three years old, I teach sports medicine at a university, and I have published two papers on injury prevention, so you would think a woman like me could keep track of one small brass key. The hook by the cabin door is empty. My jacket is on the hook, my pack is by the door, and the little carabiner clip that held my car key all weekend is dangling there like a smartass remark. I sit down on the bunk and stare at it.

This is what I do, I want to tell you. Every time I start to really care about somebody, some part of my brain starts dropping things. My keys, my phone, my gloves, my mind. Two years ago I spotted David on a boulder problem at the gym, and within a month I couldn't find my sunglasses for a week. The day he told me he loved me, I left my wallet on the roof of my car and drove four miles before a guy in a pickup started honking and pointing. So maybe this is just my body doing math. Maybe some nervous old animal in me knows that when your keys are in the lock and your bags are packed, a good weekend is over, and it keeps hiding the evidence.

Because the weekend was good. That's the problem. We climbed Saturday, and David, who is thirty-five and a dental hygienist five days a week and a monkey the other two, led that hand crack on the north face like he'd rehearsed it, and then he lay in the grass at the base and made up lyrics to a song about cam placement until I laughed so hard I had to sit down. I have dated careful men and exciting men, and this idiot is somehow both, and I'm already halfway gone, which is exactly when my pockets start leaking.

"Still no key?" David comes in from the porch with an armful of firewood, all six feet of him, hair flattened by the hood of his jacket. He sets the wood in the box and looks at my face, and I watch him read me like a chart. "Okay. Okay, don't panic. We'll tear this place apart. Where did you have it last?"

"If I knew where I had it last, I'd know where it is, wouldn't I." I'm proud of how calm that comes out.

"Fair. Good point. Very professorial." He starts with the gear shelf, because that's where everything in this cabin goes to die. The climbing club has leased this place for years, and the shelf near the door is a graveyard of half ropes, cracked helmets, a blender nobody will admit to owning, and a box of mismatched stuff that includes, God help us, his boots. He digs around in there and comes up with one scuffed brown hiking boot, the left one, and hands it to me like a waiter presenting wine, while I can see perfectly well that the right one is on his foot.

"David."

"Yes?"

"You are wearing the other boot."

"I am wearing one boot, yes!"

"And you're handing me the boot I need to not have, on the theory that this is helping me find a key."

"Two problems, one boot exchange." He grins at me, and I swear to you, the man had a whole plan before he walked in. "The key hunt is a group activity. You're on the team now. Team uniform."

So I put the thing on. That's my whole argument, right there. I jam my bare foot into his left boot, lace it badly, and stand there with one enormous boot and one sock, arms crossed, so he can see what he has wrought. It's a good look. It's a devastating look. I can tell it's devastating because he stops grinning for a second and just looks at me like I'm the view from the north face.

"Point made?" I say.

"Not even slightly, but come here anyway." He crosses the room, drops to one knee on the worn boards, and takes hold of the boot to tug it off, and his hands are slow about it, and one of them slides up over my ankle and stays there, thumb moving in a small circle over the bone. The boot comes off. His hands do not.

"I'm supposed to be at a department meeting," I say, and my voice does something embarrassing on the word meeting.

"It's Sunday."

"The meeting is Monday, I have a three hour drive, and I can't drive anywhere because somebody is hiding my key."

"Allegedly hiding." He kisses the side of my knee through my jeans, which is not a rebuttal.

We do actually search. That part is real. We go through the bunk cushions, the wood box, his duffel, my duffel, the pockets of every jacket on the wall, and the flour canister for reasons neither of us can explain afterward. He gets down flat and looks under the bunks with a phone flashlight. I pull everything off the gear shelf and put it back worse. And then, when I step on the board near the hearth and it clicks instead of creaks, I go quiet, and he hears it, and we're both on our knees prying up a warped plank with a fireplace poker, and there it is, my key, sitting on the dirt underneath like it's been there since the cabin was built.

I pick it up. He lets me pick it up. And then, with the smoothness of a man who has been planning this since the wood pile, he takes it out of my hand and puts it in his front pocket.

"No," he says, when I open my mouth. "The search isn't over. We haven't checked the loft. We haven't checked behind the stove. You were very upset ten minutes ago, and I think you need to be thoroughly comforted before you operate a motor vehicle."

"Give me the key."

"Come and get it."

I could just take it. I'm stronger than I look and he knows it, and if I said "give it back" like I meant it, he'd hand it over that second