Keyholder's Gratitude

I do a lot of house calls on Sundays. People lock themselves out of stuff on weekends, that's just how it goes. This particular Sunday it was Dwayne Landry, three doors down from my own place in Pine Meadows, of all things. He'd snapped the key off in his garage side door and couldn't get his car out. I was over there maybe forty minutes, drilled and rekeyed the lock, charged him half what I should have because he's a neighbor and a nice guy, and I figured that was that.

I was backing my van out of his driveway when it hit me.

My master ring. It was sitting on his workbench in the garage. I'd set it down while I dug through my kit, and I never picked it back up. And of course the new lock I'd just installed had one of those auto-latch jobs. The door had swung shut behind me and locked itself. I'd basically locked myself out of a garage with my own hands.

I sat there in the van with my foot on the brake and actually laughed out loud. Then I groaned, because it wasn't funny. That ring is basically my whole career on a carabiner.

I knocked on his side door instead. Dwayne answered in a t-shirt and sweatpants, a beer in his hand, and he looked at me standing there and just started grinning.

"Don't tell me," he said. "Something's wrong and it's my fault somehow."

"Kinda! I left my keys on your workbench. The whole ring. And the garage door shut and locked. The one I just put on for you, by the way. It works great."

He laughed so hard he had to set the beer down. "So the locksmith locked herself out. That's the best thing that's happened to me all month, Margie, I'm not even kidding."

"Glad I could entertain you! Now are you gonna let me back in there or what?"

"Well, here's the thing," he said, and he touched the back of his neck. "The opener for the main door is the only way in from outside, and the spare opener is, uh, in the garage."

I stared at him. "You're joking."

"I wish! There's a spare in the box with the manuals somewhere, but half my stuff is still packed from the move, or the un-move, I guess. My ex took the good boxes." He said that last part real casual but it didn't land casual. "Give me ten minutes to dig around. Meanwhile, come in and sit down. I owe you a drink anyway for the lock."

"Dwayne, I can just wait on the porch, it's fine."

"You're gonna stand on my porch for ten minutes while I crash around in boxes like a raccoon? Come on. Sit. It's the least I can do, you saved me about four hundred bucks this afternoon."

I don't usually go into clients' houses. I need to state that from the start. I've learned you keep it business, you keep it short, you don't sit down in these people's kitchens. But he was a neighbor, and I was stranded in a cul-de-sac I live on anyway, so I figured what's the harm. I followed him in.

His living room was half empty. A couch, a recliner, a TV on the floor because the stand hadn't been assembled yet, and a bunch of boxes stacked against one wall. A big bare spot where I guessed a dining table used to be.

"Excuse the mess," he said, waving at everything. "Wine? Beer? I think I have wine, Karen left a bottle of some kind."

"Wine's fine."

He came back with a bottle that had a screw cap and two glasses that didn't match. "It's red. I think. It says red on the label, so."

I laughed at that, I couldn't help it. "Fancy! This is nicer than what I drink at home, honestly."

We sat on the couch, at opposite ends like it was a job interview, and he told me the whole thing while I sipped the wine, which was honestly terrible and I had two glasses of it anyway.

"So Karen moved out in March," he said. "Twenty-one years, and she took the good boxes and the dining table and the whole idea of a marriage, apparently, because I sure don't have one anymore."

"Twenty-one years. God. I'm sorry, Dwayne!"

"Nah, it's okay! It really is. It was over way before March, we both knew it. She's happier. I'm, well." He gestured at the TV on the floor. "I'm assembling furniture and eating over the sink. It's a lifestyle."

"How old are you, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Forty-eight. You?"

"Forty-four. Divorced too, going on nine years now."

"Nine years! What's the secret to nine years of being single? Asking for a friend. The friend is me."

I told him there was no secret, you just get used to your own space and then it's hard to give it up. He said he was looking forward to that part, the space, but the evenings were long. He said it light but it didn't come out light.

"The worst part is Sundays," he said. "Weekdays are fine, I got work. Sundays are just this big empty room with me in it. And then today, thank God, a guy breaks a key in a lock and a locksmith shows up and fixes it, and I got somebody to talk to for forty minutes. Best Sunday I've had in months. That's the honest truth."

That got me right in the chest, I'll admit it. I know what long Sundays are. I've had about four hundred of them.

"Dwayne, I gotta be straight with you," I said. "I feel weird about this. Sitting here, drinking your wine. You're a client. I don't hang out with clients. It's a rule I sort of have, not a written rule, but a rule."

"Margie, come on. Look around. You think I'm fraternizing with anybody? I got one friend in this whole neighborhood and it's the guy who mows for me. You're the first person who's sat on this couch since I moved in, besides my brother, and he talked about crypto the whole time."

I laughed so hard wine almost came out of my nose. "Oh no!"

"Two hours! Two hours about crypto. So believe me, the bar is on the floor here."

"Okay, well, here's a thought," I said. "What if it's not client stuff? What if we're just neighbors? Neighbors borrow cups of sugar and get stranded in each other's garages. That's not fraternizing, that's just living on the same cul-de-sac."

He pointed his glass at me. "Neighbors. I like that. Neighbors who both got dumped and both hate Sundays."

"Careful, I'm gonna start crying into the bad wine."

"It's not bad! It says a vineyard on it!"

"Dwayne, it says a vineyard on everything."

He laughed at that, and it was a good laugh, the kind that comes up from the belly, and I caught myself thinking he'd probably been a fun guy before all this. Still was, maybe, under the boxes and the floor TV.

Then he went quiet and looked at his glass for a second. "Can I say something kind of honest? Without it being weird?"

"Sure."

"I don't remember the last time a woman sat in my house and laughed at my jokes. Like actually laughed. It's been a long, long time, Margie. So thanks. For coming back with the key thing. Even though it was your own fault."

"It was absolutely my own fault, yes!"

"Best mistake you ever made, then."

I should have left it right there. That was the natural ending of the evening, right there, warm and funny and safe. But I'd had two glasses of the bad wine and my Sundays have been long too, and what came out of my mouth instead was, "Well, you still owe me a real dinner. This was wine, not dinner. Neighbors do dinner."

I said it before my brain signed off on it. His face did this thing, this little lift, like a window opening in an empty house.

"Dinner," he said. "Yeah. I can do dinner. I make a mean spaghetti, if I'm being honest. It's like four ingredients and one of them is a jar, but it works."

"Sold! That sounds way better than my cooking, which is cereal."

"Friday?"

"Friday works."

We got up and he went and dug through the boxes in the hallway, crashing around like he promised he would, and came out holding the spare garage opener with both hands like it was a trophy.

"There it is! Manual says the extra one was in the box with the manuals. I read the whole manual this afternoon hoping there'd be a spare. First time I've read a manual in my life."

He opened the garage and there was my key ring, sitting right on the workbench where I'd left it, big and dumb and obvious. I grabbed it and held it up.

"See, everything works out," he said. "You forgot your keys, I got wine, now we got dinner plans. That's a system."

"That's a disaster that turned into a system, is what it is."

"Same thing, kind of."

I walked the three doors down to my own driveway and sat in it for a minute in the dark. I don't know what I was feeling, exactly. It'd been a long time since I'd had plans on a Friday. I told myself it was just dinner, just neighbors, spaghetti out of a jar, nothing to think about. I told myself that all the way into the house, and then again in the shower, and it mostly worked.

Mostly.

Friday I changed my shirt three times. For spaghetti out of a jar! Three shirts! I finally settled on the blue one and told myself to knock it off.

I walked down to his place because it felt weird to park in front of a guy I was having spaghetti with. Three doors. Twenty seconds. Plenty of time to talk myself out of it, which I didn't.

He answered the door in a clean button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled. Smelled like garlic and something burning a little.

"Oh hey, you came!" he said. "I was worried the garlic would scare you off. It's everywhere. It's in the walls now."

"Good. I love garlic. What's burning?"

"That would be the garlic bread, which I forgot existed for like four minutes. It's fine! It's just extra toasty on one side."

The house looked different. Boxes still stacked in the hallway, but the kitchen counter was cleared off, and he'd put actual placemats down. Candles even, the kind that come in a jar. I laughed when I saw them.

"Are those from the hardware store?"

"Hardware store candles are still candles, Margie. Ambience is ambience."

We sat and ate, and you know what, the spaghetti was actually good. Four ingredients and a jar, like he said, but he'd added Italian sausage he browned himself