The Lock My Mother In Law Kept

The first thing I noticed was that the furniture in the front room had moved. The couch was under the window now instead of against the wall. My grandmother’s clock was off the mantel and sitting on the floor in the corner, facing the wall. Little things. I told myself she had cleaned and maybe pushed things around to vacuum.

Then I went down the hall to our bedroom to put my bag down, and the door was shut, and there was a deadbolt on it.

A brass deadbolt, new, the kind you buy in a blister pack at the hardware store in Logansport. It had been drilled into our fifty-year-old door, into that solid old wood, with little curls of sawdust still caught in the grain underneath where whoever did it had not even wiped up after himself. The door was locked. My own bedroom door was locked against me in my own house.

I stood there and I honestly did not understand what I was looking at. My brain kept trying to make it be something else. A mistake. A new fixture. Something.

“Wade,” I called, and my voice came out funny.

I turned the knob and it would not give. I pushed. Nothing. I went looking for Carol and found her in the kitchen, and she was humming, drying one of my plates with one of my towels, and she had a ribbon around her neck, pale blue, and hanging off it was a little brass key.

“You’re home,” she said, and she smiled. “How is your father?”

“Carol,” I said, “there is a lock on our bedroom door.”

“There is,” she said, pleasant as anything. She hung the towel over the oven handle and smoothed it. “I had the Menke boy come put it on Tuesday. He did a nice job, didn’t he. Barely any mess.”

I just looked at her.

“I decided,” she said, “that if I am going to be staying here to help you two, which we all know is going to be more and more, I ought to have a room that is mine. Somewhere I can keep my things and not have them disturbed. It only makes sense.” She touched the key at her throat. “I moved your things to the little room. You and Wade can use the spare. It is cozier anyway, and honestly, Renee, you two do not need all that space. It is wasted on you.”

I remember the word wasted. I remember thinking I must have misheard.

“That is our bedroom,” I said.

“It is Wade’s house,” she said. Gently. Kindly. The way you correct a child who has gotten something sweetly wrong. “And Wade’s mother needs a place to rest her head. I am sure you understand. You are a guest in a lot of ways yourself, when you think about it. You have only been a Hollis four years.”