The Locks I Changed on My Mother
It was a bright morning by then, the sun coming straight down our street. I was on my knees on the porch boards with a screwdriver, snugging up the new one, the old lock cylinders lying beside the little paper sack. I felt somebody watching.
Lucy was in the doorway in her fox pajamas with a milk mustache.
“What are you doing to the door?”
“Putting on a new lock.”
“Was the old one broke?”
I thought about how to answer a five-year-old honestly.
“No,” I said. “The lock was fine. Daddy was using it wrong.”
She considered that. “Does Grandma get a key to the new one?”
“No, ma’am.”
“How will she get in?”
“She’ll ring the bell, like company, and Mommy will decide.”
Lucy looked past me at the doorbell button like she had never noticed we owned one. I am not sure she had ever heard it ring.
Carrie had come up behind her. She was dressed now, holding a cup of coffee. I stood up and held out one of the two new keys.
She took it. She did not say thank you, and I would have thought less of myself if I had wanted her to.
“Where are you going with those?” she said, nodding at the old cylinders.
“Mom’s.”
“You could just let it be. She’ll find out Monday when the key doesn’t go in.”
“I could,” I said. “That’d be the easy way. That’s how I’d have done it yesterday.”
Carrie almost smiled. It was the first one I had seen that day.
“Don’t be ugly to her,” she said. “I mean it. I’ve had four years to be ugly to her and I didn’t.”
“I know you didn’t.”
I dropped the old locks in the hardware sack and drove eleven blocks.
My parents’ kitchen has not changed since I was in grade school. Oilcloth on the table. The radio on the windowsill tuned to the farm report. My dad’s chair with its back to the stove, which is the chair he was assigned in 1982.
They had been married forty-four years that June.
He was sitting in it with the newspaper and a pencil, working the crossword. My mother was at the sink with her back to the door. I could tell from the set of her shoulders that he had already been given the morning’s events, and that in her telling I had thrown my own mother out of the house for folding laundry.
“Morning, Dad.”
“Ryan.” He looked at me over his glasses, and then at the sack.
My mother did not turn around. “If you have come to apologize, you can wait until I’ve finished these dishes.”
“I’ve got an apology to make,” I said. “It isn’t to you. I already made it this morning, and I’ll be making it a good while yet.”
I took the two old lock cylinders out of the sack and set them on the oilcloth, in the middle of the table, next to the sugar bowl. The brass was worn dull. The red yarn lay across the table.
She turned around then, drying her hands.
She looked at the locks. She looked at her own key, sticking out of one of them.
“What is that supposed to be?”
“Those are the locks off my doors, Mom. There are new ones on. I’m not giving you a key to them.”