There’s a ring of keys in a drawer in the kitchen of our house that open nothing – at least not that anyone in this house knows of. My kids couldn’t know, and my wife wouldn’t either, though some of them are certainly hers.
She has taken the kids to the park this morning, my wife has, then the grocery store, and I have the house to myself. Looking for a pen and pad of paper, I find the keys. Looking at each key, I find myself wondering if one of them belonged to this girl I knew.
It was a long time ago, and I have no idea why she gave it to me. I was teaching then, and I had summers off. She was one of the girls my roommate was seeing that summer. He worked early, and in the mornings, after he left, she would open the door to my room without knocking, crawl under the covers. I would wake, and we would talk, this girl and I, I don’t remember what about.
She had her own place, a small house she had inherited, just down the street on a road that ran parallel to the interstate. It was only a few minutes away, but she carried a backpack with some clothes and a toothbrush in her car because she so rarely returned there. We had a washer and dryer, and she would often run a load of clothes while we were in bed talking.
Really, she did the talking.
Really, she drifted off in little sailboat topics, and I would stare at the flecks of dust dancing lazily in the light coming through the window.
I told my roommate about this. That must be pretty annoying, he said. Waking you up like that, when you don’t have to get up.
Yeah, I agreed, but neither of us told her to stop.
I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but at one point that summer, she gave me the spare key to her house. She had mentioned it a number of times, needing someone to give the key to, and it seemed she had a disproportionate fear of being locked out. It was small enough, the key, so I carried it in my wallet, so as not to confuse it with the other keys on the ring in my pocket. I lost touch with her shortly after. Rumor was she met a guy, some hippie junkie, and they took off for a time in her beat-up blue Corolla to California.
My number never changed, so I assume she never was.
Locked out, I mean.
I kept the key much longer than there was reason to, long after my lease ended, likely long after she kept that house – I kept it even after I heard from a friend of a friend years later that she had OD’ed in some actor’s apartment out in LA.
I remember my wife asked me about it once, when the key was still in my wallet. This was before my wife was my wife. I told her I didn’t remember, but it seemed like a bad idea to throw out keys.
Now that I think about it, staring at the kitchen window, the flecks of dust dancing on the lintel in the morning light, it’s highly unlikely that any of these keys were hers, that girl I knew. I am sure I would still know it now to look at it – whatever good that does me. I suppose I just wanted to think about her, and I guess today is as good as any to remember.
