Eleven Keys Under the Christmas Tree

Why I didn’t just change the locks

A buddy of mine from the union hall said what most people would say. “Change the locks, man. Thirty bucks at the hardware store. It’s your house. They’ll get over it.”

He was right about the law. The deed was in our names, Ethan Moser and Jordyn Halvorsen, recorded at the courthouse in Forest City. Those eleven keys did not give anybody any right to anything.

But I was marrying into this family in June. I was going to sit at Curt’s table for the next forty years. And I had watched Jordyn’s face when she talked about her dad. She worshipped that man.

If I changed the locks in the first month, the story told at every family gathering for the rest of my life would be the story of the time Jordyn’s new husband locked the family out of Grandma’s house.

I did not want to win that way. I did not want to win at all, really.

I just wanted my fiancee to be able to sleep, and I wanted her family to understand that the house had people in it now.

So I did not call Curt. I did not change the locks. I did not raise my voice to anybody.

I drove thirty-five minutes to the Hy-Vee in Mason City and walked the aisles until I had what I needed.

I bought a guest book, the kind with a cloth cover and lined pages, and the biggest glass canning jar they had, with a metal lid. I bought a package of index cards too.

When I got home, Jordyn was awake and sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea.

I set everything down in front of her and told her my idea, and she stared at the jar for a long time.

“Forty-five dollars?” she said finally.

“It’s what a room at the motel out by the highway costs,” I said.

“The furnace is running twelve hours a day in this cold. Every time somebody stays, you strip the beds and wash the sheets. It’s not punishment. It’s just honest.”

She picked up the jar and turned it in her hands. Then she started to laugh, a real laugh, the first one in days. “My dad is going to have a heart attack,” she said.