The Car Keys in the Parking Lot
“I know she does,” I said. “I’ll be back by noon.”
I did not tell him anything else. I was not trying to be hard. I just knew that if I explained it in that kitchen, it would become something between him and me, and I wanted it to be something between Brittany and me first.
The drive to Wisconsin Rapids takes about twenty-five minutes. The cold snap had finally broken overnight, and the sun came up bright and hard over the snow, the kind of January sun that hurts your eyes and does not warm a thing.
That little Sentra drove like a sewing machine. The heater worked. I turned the radio to the polka station out of Stevens Point just to have the company, and I kept both hands on the wheel the whole way.
Brittany’s apartment was in a two-story brick building on the east side, the kind with a parking lot that the landlord plows when he gets around to it. Snowbanks ran along every edge of the lot, piled high and gray at the bottom.
My silver Equinox was parked near her building. Somebody had brushed it off. Somebody had cleared the windshield all the way, not just a hole to see out of. I noticed that, too.
I cleared the windshield, but never reached the snow on the roof. I parked the Sentra beside the Equinox, near her building, and got out. Then I texted her. I had her number from a family group text her father had made two Christmases ago that nobody ever used.
I’m out front, I wrote. It’s Sheila. Can you come down for a minute?
The three dots came and went twice. Then: ok.
She came out the front door about five minutes later in a pink knit hat and a light gray coat, with her long light brown hair down under it. She had a set of keys in one hand. She stopped a few steps from the door.
She saw me first. Then she saw the dark blue car behind me. She looked at it for a long second, and then at the Equinox, and then back at me.
“Sheila?” she said. “What is this?”
Brittany and I had never been close. In four years she had said maybe ten words to me at Thanksgiving and five at Christmas. I always assumed she blamed me for something: for not being her mother, for being in her father’s house, for being there at all.
I had my black puffy coat pulled tight against the wind. I walked across the lot to her, my boots squeaking on the packed snow, and stopped a few feet away.
Then I held out the Sentra key.
“This one’s yours,” I said. “It’s a 1999 Sentra. It’s paid for, and the title’s in your name. You’ll need to put it on your insurance Monday and take the title in to get plates. Jake checked every inch of it.”
She did not take it.
“And I’ll need mine back,” I said.
Brittany already had my key in her hand. My key, with the little brass tag from the credit union still on the ring, the one they gave me the day I paid it off.