What Linda Ames Said at the Door

Roger

He came back a little after eleven.

I heard the truck, and then I heard him in the front hall talking low to Linda, and then he came into the kitchen with his seed cap in one hand and a paper sack from the hardware store in the other. His face was gray. He looked like he had not slept either.

“I’ve been out to the place,” he said.

I waited.

“I put the table back in. The chairs. The boy’s bike is in the shed. The rest of it is in the front room, I didn’t know where things went, I didn’t want to put them in wrong.”

He set the sack on the table. “The new locks stay on. I found out this summer the man from Third Street, the one who left the dog, kept a copy of the old key to every house he ever lived in, and I never changed them out there. That part I should have done years ago.”

I said, “Roger, I have the money.”

I held out the envelope. He did not take it. He looked at it.

“Who’s that from,” he said.

“The elevator. The break room jar.”

He sat down hard across from me. He sat there for a long time and did not say anything.

Then he took a folded paper out of his shirt pocket, and I knew what it was before he unfolded it, because it had been taped to my door in a plastic sleeve. He had taken it back off the door. He smoothed it flat on the table between us.

He looked at it. Then he tore it in half, and in half again, and set the pieces in a little pile by the sugar bowl.

“You don’t owe me eleven hundred dollars,” he said. “You don’t owe me November. You don’t owe me December. You’ll pay me in January when the comp gets straightened out, if it does, and if it doesn’t we’ll talk about it then. Give that money back to Steve or put it in the bank for those kids.”

“Roger.”

“I am not finished,” he said. He was not looking at me. He was looking at the torn paper.

“I am sorry I did that to you. I am sorry I did it on that day, and I would be sorry if it was any day. I had no business doing it.

“Linda’s right, I don’t ask. I never have. I see a number and I don’t see who’s under it. And I don’t know how to fix that at sixty-eight years old, but I am going to try.”

Linda was standing in the doorway with a dish towel. She did not say anything. She did not have to.

The key

June came in then, carrying the cat.

She stopped in the middle of the kitchen and looked up at Roger. She was four. She had heard her sister say the word key so many times in the last twelve hours that I think she had decided it was the most important word there was.

“Are you the man with the keys?” she said.

Roger looked at her for a while. Then he reached into the hardware sack and took out a new brass key on a plain steel ring, the kind they cut while you wait.

He got up out of the chair, slow, the way a man his age gets down to a four-year-old, and he went down on one knee on his own kitchen floor so he was at her height.

“I am,” he said. “I am the man with the keys. This one is for your house. Your house, you hear me? It’s yours as long as you want it. Can you keep it safe for your mama?”

June took the key in the hand that was not holding the cat. She studied it. She turned it over.

“It’s shiny,” she said.

“It’s new,” Roger said.

“Daddy had a key,” June said.

Roger stayed down on that one knee. I watched his face. I watched him try to say something and not be able to.

“I know he did, sweetheart,” he finally said. “He sure did.”

June put the key in the pocket of her funeral dress and went to show it to Bo.

Roger stayed on the floor a while longer. Linda went over and put her hand on his shoulder, and he reached up and covered it with his, and neither of them said anything. I looked at my tea.