The Bronze Key

The gravel in the drive-in lot had gone soft with grass. I stood there at seven in the morning with my clipboard under my arm and my coffee going cold, and I thought, well, here we are again.

I'm Glenda. I'm forty-three, I'm an architect, and I had flown back to Yuksom to assess this drive-in for a restoration proposal. That was the official reason. The unofficial reason I kept in my back pocket like a receipt I wasn't ready to show anyone.

Bryce and I had dated for two years, a while back. We met at a craft fair in Gangtok, of all places. I bought a hand mirror I still use. He was a spindle maker then, sawdust in his eyebrows, and I asked him how long it took to make one spindle and he said, "Longer than you'd think, shorter than you'd hope," and that was sort of that.

The breakup was my fault, mostly. I got itchy. Yuksom is small and I kept telling myself I was stagnating, and instead of saying that out loud I picked a fight about a cabinet he was building me. A cabinet. Who fights about a cabinet? Then I left, and I never gave him the real explanation, and the argument just stayed half-finished like a sentence that trails off.

Six months ago the festival planning committee pulled me back for this project. I said yes too fast. Lila noticed. She didn't say anything, but she noticed.

The gate was supposed to be locked. Lila, the church organiser, had the only key, and she wasn't due until nine for the community shower program launch. We were turning the concession stand into a donation point and the field into parking, and I was supposed to walk the site first and make notes.

Except the lot gate was chained but not locked. And the projector booth door, up on its concrete base at the back, was standing open.

That was wrong. Roger ran this drive-in until it closed in 2012, and since then he's kept the equipment out of sentiment, and he guards that booth like a dragon guards coins. If the booth was open, somebody was in it.

I climbed the outside stairs, which creaked the whole way, and looked in.

Bryce. Forty-four now, same forearms, a bit more gray. He was bent over the old projector with a wrench and a rag, and he had the padlock from the booth door sitting on the bench beside him, and a key. An ornate bronze key, heavy looking, the kind with a curly bow on top.

He looked up. "Huh," he said.

"Yeah," I said. "Huh."

"You're early."

"Lila gave me the gate code last week. She didn't mention the booth."

"I didn't tell her. Roger knows I'm in here. He gave me his blessing." He straightened up and wiped his hands. "What are you doing here at seven in the morning, Glenda?"

"Assessment. I'm writing the restoration proposal. That's my job now." I stepped into the booth. It smelled of motor oil and dust, and the morning light came through the little projection window in a long dusty bar. "That key. Is that what I think it is?"

He picked it up and turned it over in his palm. "Depends on what you think."

"It's the key from our last weekend. You bought it at that junk stall because it was pretty and it fit nothing. You said it fit nothing in the whole world."

"It fits the padlock on this door now. I had a locksmith fit a padlock to it, three years ago. Roger wanted the booth lockable again and I wanted..." He shrugged. "I wanted an excuse to own a bronze key."

"You fitted a padlock to a souvenir?"

"Is that a crime?"

"It's sort of a lot, Bryce."

"It's a padlock, Glenda. Don't build it into a cathedral."

I put my clipboard down on the bench and immediately regretted putting my clipboard down, because it signaled staying. "You know what, fine. Let's just say it. You've been waiting to say it, I can see it in your face."

"Say what?"

"That I left without explanation."

"Okay," he said, and set the wrench down. "You left without explanation. There. Said. Four years late, but said."

"I explained."

"You explained the cabinet. Nobody leaves a two year relationship over a cabinet."

"The cabinet was symbolic."

"Oh, symbolic!" He laughed, but not kindly. "I got a lot of mileage out of that word, believe me. Symbolic. My friends would ask how it ended and I'd say, well, it was symbolic, and they'd look at me like I'd been dumped by a philosophy textbook."

"That's not fair."

"None of it was fair. I was ready to build you a house, Glenda. You told me the town was stagnating and I heard, I'm stagnating, and I didn't say it back fast enough, and then you were gone. That's the explanation I pieced together myself, over about four years. You never gave me one."

I looked at the projector instead of at him. "How far along is that?"

"Don't change the subject."

"I'm not changing the subject, I'm asking about the projector. It's my job to ask about things."

"It's my job to not let you off the hook, and then answer, apparently." He touched the projector anyway, because he can't not. "Carbon arc head, 1958. The drive-in closed in 2012 and Roger cried, honestly, he stood in this booth and cried. I've been rebuilding the shutter assembly and the takeup reels. Motor's rebuilt. Lens is original. When it's done I'm donating it back to the town and we're going to run films in this lot again, first Saturday of the month, free, everyone brings their own chairs."

"That's..." I stopped. "That's good, Bryce. That's really good."

"You still didn't answer."

"No. I didn't!" I sat down on the stool by the bench, because my legs felt like they wanted a vote. "The truth is the town wasn't stagnating. I was. There's a difference and I knew it at the time and I didn't say it, because if I said it was me then you'd have said you could fix it, and you couldn't fix me, and I'd have let you try, and we'd both have drowned."

He was quiet for a bit. The projector's flywheel ticked as it cooled, some old habit of the metal.

"Okay," he said finally. "That's an explanation. Four years late. But it's one."

"I know it's late."

"Why are you telling me now?"

"Because you asked. And because I came back partly to see you."

I hadn't planned to say that. It just walked out. He went still, the way he does when he's measuring something.

"Partly," he said.

"Partly. The proposal is real. The work is real. Lila's shower program launches in two hours and I have forty minutes of walk-through to do. But yes. Partly."

"Partly how?" He put the bronze key down on the bench between us, deliberate, like setting a piece on a board. "Say the partly."

"You're going to make me spell it out."

"You made me wait four years. I can make you say a sentence."

"Fine." I took a breath. "I came back partly because I never stopped thinking about you, and I wanted to see whether the half-finished argument was still standing in the road, or whether we could finish it."

"Finish it how? With a verdict? With a rematch?"

"With whatever comes after finishing it. I don't know. I know I'm not leaving this town without trying."

He looked at me a while. Then he picked the key back up and held it out.

"Then finish this first," he said. "Lock the booth behind us. It's yours for the morning, and it's yours after, if you want it. Consider it symbolic."

"Don't you dare use that word at me."

"Too late. It's out." He was grinning now, and it was the old grin, the one from the craft fair. "Come on. Walk me through your proposal. Tell me what a forty-three year old architect would do with a dead drive-in and a field full of grass."

"First thing I'd do is fix the booth stairs. They nearly killed me."

"Second thing."

"Second thing, I'd put the screen frame back up and put a proper light behind it, so the whole valley sees it at night and knows the place is alive again."

He nodded slowly. "Roger's going to cry again."

"Good crying or bad crying?"

"With Roger there's only the one kind." He picked up his jacket. "Come on, then. You've got forty minutes and I've got a shutter assembly that doesn't want to be alone."

I took the key. It was heavier than I remembered, warm from his hand, and it fit nothing in the whole world except one door, which I was starting to think was the whole point of it.

He didn't head for the stairs, though. He stopped by a crate near the door and tipped it toward me.

"Before you go. Look at these."

The crate was full of spindles. Dozens of them, each one a different wood, some pale as bone, some dark as walnut, one a deep red-brown I couldn't name. Every one of them was carved, flutes and beads and little woven-looking bands, no two alike.

"You made these?" I picked one up. The surface was so smooth my thumb kept sliding.

"For the weaving co-op, mostly. They sell them with their shawls. Loom parts, bobbins, that sort of thing." He shrugged like it was nothing, but he was watching my face while I turned the spindle over. "That one's rhododendron. Hard to get, but it polishes up sweet."

"You never made these when we were together." I said it before I could stop it. "You made furniture. Tables, chairs. Big stuff."

"I started small after you left." He took the rhododendron one back and held it up to the window light. "Turns out a spindle has to be exactly right or the whole thread snaps. You can't fake a spindle. You can fake a chair leg."