The Brass Key

The brass key was warm in my pocket by the time I got out of the car. I'd been carrying it around for two weeks, ever since Jeanne mailed it to me with a note that said, "Front door sticks. Lift the handle and swear at it. It likes that."

The swear part worked. The door came open on the second pull and I stood in the front hall of the Fenwick house, which smelled like sawdust and old paper, and waited for somebody to holler at me for letting the sea air in.

"Billie?" Her voice came down from somewhere above me. "Is that you?"

"Who else would swear at your door at nine in the morning?"

"Come up. Mind the hole in the landing. I keep meaning to board it."

I minded the hole, mostly, and found her in what used to be the third-floor sewing room. It was the only room in the house that looked half done. New window, new floorboards, walls insulated and ready for plaster that hadn't shown up yet. A futon in the corner with a quilt on it. That was where she was living, apparently, in the middle of her own construction site.

Jeanne was sixty-two that spring and looked it in the good way, gray braid down her back, paint on her forearms, glasses pushed up on her head. She'd been my closest friend for twenty years. We met at a professional development course when we were both in our forties and we'd been having lunch every other Thursday since, in person at first and over the phone once I moved four hours away, minus the two years her mother was sick.

"Sit anywhere that isn't a hole," she said, and cleared a paint bucket off the futon for me.

"I brought donuts."

"You're an angel and I'm covered in primer." She sat down next to me anyway, took the bag, looked inside. "Old-fashioned. You remembered."

"I remember everything about you. It's my burden." I let that sit a second, then got to it. "Okay. Look at the room."

She looked at the room. I looked at her.

"Well?" she said.

"It's coming along. You've got the window in, the floor's done, insulation's in. What's left, plaster, trim, the stair rail?"

"The stair rail is a whole project. The banister came apart in my hands in March. I've been using a rope."

"A rope."

"A good rope, Billie. Marine grade."

"I don't care if it's naval issue, Jeanne, you're sixty-two years old and going up and down those stairs holding a rope."

"Sixty-three in June," she said, like that settled something, and reached for another donut.

Here's the part I'd rehearsed in the car, and I still botched the opening. "So I took this week off. Vacation days I was going to lose anyway. I figured I'd come up Monday through Friday and we'd knock out the plaster. I did my kitchen myself in ninety-four, I still remember most of it."

She stopped with the donut halfway to her mouth. "You did not."

"I did. I drove up last night, I've got a room at the Anchor Motel, and I'm not arguing about it."

"Billie." She set the bag down and turned so she was facing me, which was serious. Jeanne facing you was serious, she'd been a teacher for thirty-one years and she could still make a whole room quiet with a look. "You don't owe me anything."

"I'm not paying a debt."

"That's exactly what you're doing."

"It's not." I'd gone over this. "Twenty years ago I had that audit at work, the one where they were going to fire me over those travel claims that weren't even mine. I drove up to your town and you sat with me in that diner on Harbor Street for three nights and went through every receipt with a highlighter. You found the one that cleared me. You didn't have to do that. We barely knew each other."

"That wasn't a favor, that was two friends eating bad pie. I liked the pie."

"The pie was terrible."

"The pie was terrible," she agreed. "But I wasn't keeping score, and neither should you."

"Well, too bad, because I keep score. It's the adjuster in me. I've been carrying that one on the books for twenty years and it's coming due whether you like it or not." I picked up the donut bag and put it on the window sill so she couldn't argue with her hands full. "Besides, it's not really for you. I need the vacation. My doctor said I need a hobby that isn't spreadsheets."

"Your doctor said no such thing!"

"My doctor absolutely said those words. Doctor-patient confidentiality means you can't check."

She laughed, which I counted as a win, and then she looked at the room again and the laugh kind of drained out of her.

"I can't pay you back for the plaster," she said. "You know that, right? Even the materials are going to be a stretch."

"I'm not taking money. This is a working vacation. You feed me, I sleep in that motel that smells like low tide, we get a room done. That's the whole deal."

"It's more than a whole deal. It's five days of skilled labor." She picked at the paint on her forearm. "But I'm not going to turn it down, because I looked at the letter from the town last week and if the parlor isn't finished by fall they're condemning the house. So I have exactly one pride left and I'm spending it right now. Thank you. Please help."

"See? That wasn't so hard."

"Shut up and look at this rope," she said, and made me test the banister anchor point, which was worse than she'd let on. The whole stairwell was going to need work. The whole house was going to need work. We walked through it together, room by room, her narrating, me writing numbers in a little notebook, and by noon I understood the size of it in a way that would have scared me if I hadn't already committed. Exposed lath in the back bedrooms. A chimney crack the mason wanted too much money to fix. Boxes. Everywhere, boxes, her mother's whole life in cardboard that nobody had opened since the funeral.

That afternoon we sat on the porch steps with iced tea and she finally told me the part she'd been dancing around on the phone.

"So here's the thing," she said. "There might be money. Real money. If I can find it."

"What kind of money?"

"Mom had a life insurance policy. I'm nearly sure of it. She paid on something every month, I saw the withdrawals when I was handling her accounts at the end. But it's not at the bank and it's not with her regular agent. I called three companies and they all said they'd need a policy number or at least a company name."

"And you think it's in the house."

"I think it's in the house. She kept everything. I found her divorce papers from 1978 last month. I found my father's bowling trophies. If there's a policy, it's here somewhere, and if I find it before the town deadline, the house gets finished and I stop lying awake doing arithmetic."

"That's why the boxes are all still stacked in the parlor," I said. "You've been looking."

"I've been looking. Slowly. Alone. I got through the hall closet and half the dining room and then I ran out of, I don't know, stomach for it." She turned the glass in her hands. "It's her handwriting on everything, Billie. Every box has her writing on the tape. It knocks me flat, some of these."

"I can read the handwriting. You can sit with the tea and point."

"That's actually not a bad split."

"Then it's settled. We hunt for paper all five days and I swing a hammer when we need a break." I hesitated, because the next part was the part she hadn't told me on the phone, and I wanted to get it right. "You said something about a brass box. When you mailed the key. You wrote a sentence about it and then crossed it out, but you crossed it out badly. I could read it through the back."

She stared at me. "You held that note up to a light?"

"I'm an insurance adjuster, Jeanne. Reading through things is the entire job."

She laughed again, shorter this time, and looked out at the street for a while. A pickup went by with a boat on it. Gulls were doing their thing on the church roof across the way.

"There's a brass box," she said finally. "Document box, the kind with a keyhole. Mom kept it on the top shelf of her closet my whole childhood and I never once saw it open. After the funeral I went looking for it and it wasn't in the closet. It wasn't anywhere. And then last month I found, in a box of recipes, believe it or not, a little brass key taped to the inside flap. No note. No label. Nothing in any of her papers about a box."

"And you think the policy's in it."

"I think if a woman hides a box her whole life and hides the key somewhere else, whatever's in that box, she meant it to outlive her." She looked at me. "It might be the policy. It might be love letters. It might be nothing."

"It's something. She wouldn't hide nothing."

"That's what I keep telling myself at three in the morning." She finished the tea. "So now you know why you're really here. Not just the plaster."

"I'm here for the plaster too. I bought knee pads, Jeanne. I'm committed."

"The key could be anywhere in this house. It could be in a recipe box, like the other one. It could be in a book. She hid things in books constantly. We'll be sorting for weeks."

"Then we'd better start tomorrow," I said, and she nodded, and up the street the light went kind of gold on the water, the way it does here, and for a minute neither of us said anything, which was fine. Twenty years of friendship buys you those minutes.

"I'm glad you came," she said. "Even if you're wrong about owing me."

"I'm not wrong. But we can argue about it while we plaster."

* * *

The next morning we started in the dining room at eight, and by ten I understood what I'd signed up for.

"Billie, look at this. A receipt from a hardware store in 1986. For paint. She kept a receipt for paint for forty years."

"Your mother did not throw things away. That's not a flaw, that's a system."

"It's a system that buried a policy under nine hundred receipts." Jeanne held up a handful. "What do I do with these?"

"Set them aside in the keep pile. Anything with a date and a signature goes in keep. Everything else, trash. We're not deciding forever today, we're deciding now."

"That's exactly what you said in the diner. Twenty years ago. Page through everything twice, decide fast, don't second-guess."

"And it worked."

"It worked," she admitted, and went back to the box.

We made a good pile and a terrible pile and a pile that was really just a third pile with guilt attached. By noon we'd cleared two boxes and found a roll of wallpaper, a hairbrush, and a letter from a man named Gerald that Jeanne read out loud because it was too good not to.

"'Dear Missus Fenwick, I regret to inform you the hedge situation has escalated.' Escalated. The hedge situation."

"There's more, there's a second page."

"'I have spoken to the hedge. It does not listen.'" Jeanne wiped her eyes. "Who was Gerald? Did he work for her?"

"No idea. But he fought a hedge and lost, and I respect that."

We ordered sandwiches and kept going through the afternoon. The light came through the plastic over the dining room window in a way that made everything look kinder than it was, which I figured was the house's way of apologizing.

Around three I hit the books. Her mother had books everywhere, stacked double on the shelves, and about a third of them had writing in them. Cooking notes, mostly. Some were grocery lists stuck in as bookmarks from stores that hadn't existed since the eighties.

"Check the spines and shake them gently," Jeanne said. "She flattened money in books too. I found a twenty in Gone With the Wind last year."

"That's not hiding, that's a savings account with a plot." I shook a cookbook and a picture fell out. Jeanne, maybe twenty-five, standing on a beach with her mother, both squinting.

"Oh lord, don't look at that one!"

"It's a good picture."

"It's a bad haircut is what it is."

"It's your mother's haircut on you and I think it's nice." I set it in the keep pile and she let it go, which she wouldn't have done in March. The house was doing something to her, or the sorting was. Things she'd have snatched away in March she was handing over now.

I worked through the shelf for another hour. Cookbooks, a church hymnal, a novel about a doctor that had a recipe for pot roast inside it, which felt like a threat. Then I pulled down a fat blue book with a cracked spine, a history of the county, and when I shook it, something didn't fall out. Something shifted. I opened it and there was a pocket cut into the pages, the old-fashioned way, square and clean, and a keyhole stared up at me.

Well. Not a keyhole. A key. Lying in the cut-out, small and brass, with a bow shaped like a heart that somebody had filed down at some point.

"Jeanne."

She didn't hear me. She was two boxes away, reading another Gerald letter. "Jeanne. Come here."

She came around the scaffolding with the letter still in her hand and stopped when she saw my face. "What."

I held up the book, open, the key sitting in the hollow. She didn't move for a second. Then she set the letter down on a box very carefully, the way you set down something when your hands aren't steady.

"That's not the recipe box key," she said.

"No. Yours is on the nail by the door. This is a different key."

"Her book. Her county history. She'd have that cutout made herself, she was handy with a razor knife. I used to read that book at her knee, I sat on that book, I slept on that book once at Christmas, and it was hollow the whole time." She laughed, one short note, not really a laugh. "She was funny, my mother. She was genuinely funny, and she saved it all for after."

"You want to do this now or sit down first?"

"Now. Absolutely now. If I sit down I'll think about it for a week."

So I took the key out of the hollow and put it in her hand because it was hers, that was never a question. Her fingers were dusty and there was plaster in the creases. She closed her hand around it and looked at it for a while, and I stood there not saying anything, because there was nothing to say that the key wasn't already saying.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. The box is in the house. It has to be. She wouldn't hide the key in the house