The Locks I Changed on My Mother
She walked down to her car at the curb. She went the way she was pointed, straight down the front walk.
Which is why she never went back around to the kitchen door.
When I got back to the bedroom, Carrie had sent Lucy to the kitchen for cereal. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with the shoebox in her lap. She had put the little bracelet back in its envelope.
I sat down next to her, on a heap of my own shirts.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t tell me she means well.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I asked you the first month we lived here.”
“I know you did.”
“I asked you nice. I asked you for four years, Ryan. I quit asking around Christmas because I got tired of hearing myself.” Her voice was steady. That was worse than crying. “Do you know what I did instead? I started getting up at 5:15 to wipe down my own kitchen before your mother got here. Like I was the one visiting.”
I had not known that. I had been at work.
“I was wrong,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Not her. I mean, her too. But I’m the one who gave her the key, and I’m the one who had the say, and I told you it was easier. It was easier for me. I let you pay for it. I’m sorry, Carrie. I’m not saying it so you’ll say it’s all right. It isn’t.”
She turned the shoebox a quarter turn in her lap.
“She had his bracelet out,” she said.
“I saw.”
“She didn’t even know what it was.”
“No.”
I put my hand on her back. She let me, which was more than I had coming.
“What are you going to do?” she said. Not what are we going to do. She had earned the right to make me say it by myself.
“The hardware store opens at 7:30,” I said.
She studied me a while. Carrie reads X-rays for a living. She knows how to look at a thing and see what is under it.
“I’ll believe it Monday at six,” she said.
That was fair.
I was at the hardware store when the man unlocked it. I bought two brass deadbolts in a pack, keyed alike, so one key would work the front door and the kitchen door both. Sixty-four dollars and some change. He asked if I wanted extra keys cut, and I said no, the two in the package were just the number I needed.
I did the kitchen door first.
That was where I found it. Her key was still in the lock on the outside, right where she had left it when she came in, red yarn hanging down against the paint. She had gone out the front and never thought of it.
I stood and looked at that key for a minute. Then I left it right where it was, backed out the two long screws from the inside, and pulled the whole deadbolt out of the door in two halves. The outside half came away in my hand with her key still in it.
The front door took another fifteen minutes. A deadbolt is a ten-minute job if the hole is already bored. I have changed alternators in the dark that gave me more trouble.