The Archive Key

I got the spare key in the mail a week before Wally left. He'd sent it with a note and a page of instructions, all very formal, which was how he did everything. Wally had been my client for two years. We ended therapy six months ago, both of us agreeing it was time, and after that he became something like a friend, which is technically against the rules but nobody asked me.

His house sat on the edge of town, cedar shingles, a long row of windows facing west toward the Jemez. I pulled my car up the gravel drive on a Tuesday afternoon in June, and the mountains were doing that thing they do at the end of the day where they look purple and close, like you could walk to them in an hour.

The key stuck a little in the lock. It always had, even when I met him there once for a session because his car was in the shop. I jiggled it, pushed, and the door gave.

Inside it smelled like cedar and old paper. That combination is basically Wally in scent form.

I'm twenty-eight, and I got divorced in March. Married at twenty-five to a man I met at a work conference, which should have warned me off conferences forever. The divorce was amicable in the way everyone says it will be before it actually is. We split the dishes down the middle and I took the cat and I cried for about two months and then stopped, mostly. What I wanted, what I had built this whole house-sitting arrangement around, was a week where nobody needed anything from me. A week where I was nobody's therapist, nobody's ex-wife, nobody's anything. Just a woman in a nice house with a stack of bad novels.

I set my bag down in the living room and that's where I saw the typewriter.

It sat on his desk like it owned the place. Black, heavy-looking, an antique from somewhere around the 1940s if I had to guess, and I did guess because I don't know anything about typewriters. One key was missing. Right in the middle of the top row, a little gap where an R should have been, just a naked little slot staring at me.

There was a note taped to the desk beside it, folded over. Wally's handwriting, small and careful. It said: "Ask the grower about the key."

That was it. No explanation. Of course not. Wally had been giving me three-sentence answers to direct questions for two years, so a mystery note taped to a broken typewriter was right in character.

I carried my bag to the guest room and unpacked. The guest room had a window facing the same way as the living room, out over a neighbor's yard. There were tall poles and strings set up in neat rows, and climbing plants on some of them, green and sprawling. I hadn't paid much attention to the neighbor on my previous visit. It looked like some kind of garden. A big one.

I made tea in Wally's kitchen and sat at his table and felt restless within ten minutes. This was the part nobody tells you about being alone on purpose. You clear the whole week. You get the house. And then the quiet sits down across from you like a client who won't talk, and you realize you have no idea how to fill it.

Wally had a good life. I kept circling back to it. He had this house, and a job at the university where he kept some archive full of old letters nobody else would ever read, and he had friends, and he had a typewriter on his desk with a note taped to the desk that referred to some story I wasn't part of. Ask the grower. The grower. Like I was supposed to know who that was.

I was jealous of an archivist. I knew how pathetic that sounded even while I was feeling it. But there it was. Twenty-eight years old, sitting in a borrowed kitchen, envying my former client his community and his history and his typewriter with its one missing key. My own apartment had a couch I bought the week my husband moved out, and everything in my life matched that couch. New, temporary, mine alone.

I heard a dog bark somewhere and then a knock at the front door.

I almost didn't answer. But Wally had left instructions about packages, and I dragged myself off the chair and went to get it.

The man on the porch was tall, thirty-something, sunburned across the forehead, wearing a work shirt with the sleeves rolled. He looked familiar in a way I couldn't place.

"Oh, hi. Sorry to bother you," he said. "Is Wally here?"

"He's out of town. Conference. I'm house-sitting. I'm Suzy."

"Chandler. I'm next door." He pointed over his shoulder, toward the poles and strings I'd been looking at from the guest room. "Hops. I grow hops."

"That's what that is?"

"Mostly." He shifted his weight. "So, look, this is embarrassing, but my wifi is down and the company can't send anyone until Friday. Would it be okay if I borrowed his for an hour or two? I have invoices I can't put off. I'd rather ask than just squat on his password."

"Well, he's left me instructions for the packages but nothing about wifi refugees," I said. "Come in. I'm sure it's fine."

He came in and I showed him to the living room and got the wifi password off the note on the fridge. He sat at one end of the couch with his laptop and I sat at the other end with my tea, and we did the polite thing where two strangers in the same house pretend they're alone for about four minutes.

Then he saw the typewriter.

"God, look at that thing. Still missing the R?"

"You gave it to him?"

"Years ago. Grad school. A thank-you gift." He was typing now, half his attention on the screen. "It's a long story."

I don't know how to explain what happened in my chest when he