The House Key

I'm Cathy, I'm forty-three, and I deliver packages for a living. That matters later, sort of, but mostly it matters because it means I know every back street in this town and every porch that has a dog on it. My ex-husband Dan lives on one of the nice streets. No dog. Just a Craftsman bungalow he bought with money from the bar, The Rusty Anchor, that he'd been talking about opening since we were both in our thirties.

We got married when I was twenty-eight. Divorced when I was forty. You can do that math. Three years divorced as of March, and I still can't hear a certain Tom Petty song without getting mad.

So how did I end up standing in his kitchen in July, drinking his good coffee out of his good mugs? It went like this.

He called me on a Tuesday. Not because we're friendly. We're not. We're the kind of exes who like each other's posts once a year on birthdays and then feel weird about it. He called because Lucy, his girlfriend, had a yoga retreat in Sedona for two weeks, and he decided he wanted to go with her, and he didn't trust anyone else with the house and the cat.

"You know I have employees, right?" he said. "But they'd throw a party. Marty would throw a party. I know Marty."

"You absolutely know Marty would throw a party," I said. I was sitting in my van in a cul-de-sac eating gas station peanuts when he called, which felt right.

"So will you? Two weeks. Feed Tank. Water the tomatoes. That's it."

"And why can't Lucy do it before she leaves?"

"Because she leaves Thursday and I leave Friday and the cat needs a handoff day."

I should have said no. A smarter woman would have said no. But regarding me and Dan, I'm allowed to say it because it's my story. When he left, it wasn't a slow sad drift. I caught him in the back office of the bar with a waitress named Kayla, and it was exactly as gross as it sounds, and the divorce was fast and ugly and then suddenly quiet. And in the three years since, I had built this small hot coal in my chest about him, and the coal did not want me to say no. The coal wanted me in that house, looking at everything.

"Yeah, fine," I said. "I'll water your stupid tomatoes."

"Thank you. Really." He paused. "It's good to hear your voice, Cath."

"Stop it," I said, and hung up, and then sat there feeling pleased, which made me madder than anything.

* * *

So that's how I got the key. He left it under the ceramic frog by the back door, because Dan has never once in his life changed a hiding spot. I let myself in Friday evening and Tank screamed at me like I owed him money, and then forgave me in about four minutes for a can of tuna.

The house was nice. I hate that it was nice. Hardwood floors, that green paint I always wanted on the kitchen cabinets, a record player in the living room that probably cost more than my car payment. He'd put out towels for me. Folded. On the guest bed. With a little note that said GLAD YOU'RE HERE in his terrible handwriting, and I stood there holding it and felt something complicated and then threw it in the drawer.

Lucy's stuff was everywhere, since she'd just left that morning. Yoga mat by the door. A wall of sandals. Smells like some kind of coconut oil everywhere, and I want to be fair, the house did smell good. Better than when it was mine and smelled like burnt toast and fertilizer.

I wasn't going to snoop. I wish I could say I wasn't, but come on, of course I was going to snoop. I watered the tomatoes. I fed the cat. And then at about nine I was in the bedroom putting my own bag in the closet when I opened the wrong side and there was her whole life hanging in there. Little dresses. A pink robe. And on the floor, a suitcase, open, half unpacked in a hurry, clothes spilled out like she'd been shoveling them in.

I told myself I was just closing it. Really. I reached in to gather the spill, and that's when I pulled the black lace thong out of the pile.

Now look. I'm a grown woman. I buy bras for myself at the outlet mall. I know what lingerie is. But something about it, the little bow on the front, the price sticker still on the tag, forty-eight dollars, did something to my blood pressure. Dan's girlfriend owns a forty-eight dollar thong and leaves it on the floor of my former closet. My closet. My paint.

I did what any mature forty-three-year-old does. I took a photo of it lying on the hardwood with the price tag facing up, and I texted it to Dan with the caption "housekeeping." No emoji. Emojis are for people who aren't angry.

He replied in under a minute, which meant he wasn't busy at whatever welcome dinner Lucy's retreat people were throwing.

"Ha. Sorry. She was rushing to pack. Thanks for the laugh."

"Pick up your laundry," I typed back.

"It's not mine, trust me," he wrote. And then, a minute later, "You look good by the way. Saw your profile picture."

I put the phone face down on the dresser. Who says that? Your ex wife is in your house and you comment on her profile picture? I picked the phone back up and typed "she's pretty" and hit send and then immediately regretted it because it read like I cared. I did care. That was the problem.

"Didn't say that," he wrote.

"Didn't ask," I wrote back.

And then I turned my phone off, which felt enormous and powerful, and I went and sat on his nice couch and drank a beer from his fridge with my feet on his coffee table.

Here's what I knew about Lucy, from the internet, because yes I looked. Lucy, twenty-seven. Yoga instructor. Met Dan at the bar about a year ago. In every photo she's doing some pose on a beach and her stomach looks like a sponsorship deal. I don't hate her. Okay, I hate her a little. Not even because of Dan. Because she's twenty-seven and I'm forty-three and my knees sound like someone walking on bubble wrap.

I finished the beer and went to bed in the guest room and lay there listening to the house. It was weirdly easy to be there. That's the part that surprised me. No ghosts or anything. Just a nice quiet house and a cat on my feet and a drawer full of somebody else's little black dresses one room away.

In the morning I watered the tomatoes, and one of them had blossom end rot, and I felt a tiny petty joy about it. See? Not everything in Dan's life is perfect. His tomatoes are dying.

* * *

The plan was quiet days. Feed cat, drive my route, come back, sleep. It lasted four days.

Monday evening I came back from my route around six, and there was a car in the driveway that wasn't Dan's. Little silver thing, sunshade in the windshield. And standing on the porch in leggings and a huge cardigan, digging through her purse, was Lucy. Back from Sedona four days early, apparently, and locked out, because Dan's key was in Sedona with Dan.

"Oh thank God," she said when she saw me. "You must be Cathy! He said you were coming! I am so sorry, I know this is so weird, I just need five minutes, I left my good bra here and I have a class tomorrow!"

I stood at the bottom of the steps with my mail in my hand and looked up at her. Twenty-seven years old, tan, glowing, apologetic. Forty-eight dollar thong on the floor of my closet.

"Sure," I said, and climbed the steps, and took my time finding the key under the frog. "Come on in. I just made coffee."

She followed me into the kitchen like she wasn't sure the floor would hold her. She smelled like airport, that recycled air smell that sticks to clothes. I poured her a coffee without asking and she wrapped both hands around the mug like it was January.

"You're being so nice about this," she said. "I would totally understand if you slammed the door on me."

"Why would I slam the door on you?"

"Because I'm the twenty-seven-year-old yoga instructor sleeping with your ex-husband?" She winced. "I mean. You know."

"I know."

"Dan told me everything. The waitress, the whole thing." She sipped. "He's actually really sorry about that, by the way. He says it a lot."

"Good for him," I said. "The tomato plants are out back, if you want to earn your keep."

She laughed at that, a real one, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders. She pulled her hair off her neck and twisted it up and let it fall again. In leggings and a cardigan she still looked like a person who has never once had a bad morning. I hated her a little. It was getting familiar.

"I like your house," she said.

"It's his house."

"It's nice, though. I only ever see it at night, coming in late." She looked at the cabinets, the window over the sink. "You picked these colors, right? The blue?"

"Dan's idea of blue. I picked the exact shade."

"He talks about that. The paint." She said it lightly, as if it were trivial, and then she went quiet, and the quiet had a shape to it.

I got my bra out of the closet for her, her good bra, thirty-six D, and she stuffed it in her purse with a grateful noise. Then she should have left. She didn't leave. She sat down at the kitchen table and said, "Do you have wine? I feel like I owe you, like, a whole bottle of wine."

It was seven in the evening in July and I was housesitting and none of it was my problem. "There's an open bottle in the fridge," I said. "It might be vinegar."

It was not vinegar. It was a decent red that I would bet money Dan bought to impress her, and we drank it at the table with the last light coming in over the tomatoes. She asked about my route. She asked about Tank. She told me the retreat was mostly hiking and smoothies and one woman who cried during a sunrise meditation, and I told her about the blossom end rot and she laughed so hard she had to put her glass down.

"Okay," she said, wiping her eyes. "Okay, I have to say something, and you're going to think I'm insane."

"Try me."

"I've been weird about you. Since he said you were housesitting. Like, weird weird." She turned her glass in a circle on the table. "I looked at your pictures too. Is that creepy? That's creepy."

"You're forgiven. I looked at yours first."

"I know you did, he told me, and I said well of course she did." She grinned. "And then I kept looking. You have a really good smile. You have this whole thing in the one with the lake, this look, and I kept thinking, Dan, you absolute idiot, what did you let go of?"

I did not know what to do with that. I am forty-three years old and three years divorced and the last person to compliment my smile was my dentist. "Well," I said. "Thank you."

"And there's more," she said, and took a breath