Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

“At work,” the younger one, a towheaded girl, ventured, then turned back to the television. On the screen, a pink character rode around in a vehicle that flew.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I must have gotten the time wrong. I thought they would be home by now.”

“Nope,” said the boy. “Mom works ’til four.”

“Nearly two more hours,” Ray said. “I’m really early.”

“Yeah.” The boy studied him, as if realizing he should be asking questions. He apparently couldn’t think of what those questions might be. His eyes flicked back toward the TV.

“Hot day,” Ray said, noticing the fan going, but no air-conditioning.

“Yeah,” the boy said again.

“You know, I used to live in this house.”

“You did?” Both children actually cared more about the cartoons. Any interest came out of sheer trained politeness.

“I had the room right off that hall there. On the left.”

“My room,” the boy said.

“And out back, we had a tetherball pole.”

They didn’t know what a tetherball pole was.

“There was a patio with a kind of-um-shade thing over it. Lattice.”

“Plants grow all over it,” the girl volunteered. “What a mess. Leaves all over the place,” she said, obviously quoting her harried parents.

“Mind if I look around?”

They didn’t. Certainly not properly advised about strangers by their parents, they turned their attention back to their cartoon while Ray wandered freely around the house. He made mental notes for his model-this window he had not remembered, that closet in a corner, not along the side.

Not much had changed, sad though, because what had been shiny and new in his childhood had turned shabby. Out back, the wooden lattice over the concrete patio had missing pieces, although, with a heavy, untrimmed wisteria, it actually appeared almost charming. Someone had tried painting the concrete below, but the paint was faded, chipped.

His bedroom, apricot-colored, no longer blue like he remembered it, now held a bunk bed. Apparently the boy had friends over, and an obsession with moving vehicles. Car stickers crawled randomly up and down the walls.

In the kitchen, blue Formica showed cracks from hot pans that should never have been set down on it. His mother used to shout at him if he came near the counters with something hot. He looked under the sink. She used to hide things there. Once she told him she kept twenty dollars in a can down there in case a crazed drug addict came knocking.

Bleach. Cleanser. Sponges in shreds.

But in the master bedroom, he found something that made this entire mad journey worthwhile. He easily discovered the wife’s stash of jewelry fatheadedly hidden at the back of her dresser. She had a few pathetic gold pieces, some mementoes worth nothing-really, if you judged people on such things you had to feel life was sad and paltry. But what caught his eye in that room was the crooked slat in the wide-planked flooring.

He recalled the slat, and his mother pushing on it.

She always had a hiding place. She called them her “safes.” Protectors, safes…he supposed it was common for single mothers to think this way.

He punched the unnailed side. The slat flew up.

Below, a dark, cobwebby hidey-hole exposed itself. He reached inside.

Back in the living room, he asked the children if they might want to go out for ice cream.

With pleasure he recognized as socially unacceptable, he pictured in his mind the fear their parents would feel, coming home and finding the children gone.

Sadistic, yes, but also just plain righteous.

He had come home to an empty house. He had known fear.

“No,” said the boy regretfully. “We’re not allowed to leave the house.”

He didn’t press and said his good-byes to the children, who appeared relieved to see him go. Did they somehow understand him to be an anomaly, not an acceptable part of a typical afternoon?

They seemed like nice kids, and he would have enjoyed teaching their parents a damn good lesson. Of course, the whole idea was nuts-he would have been caught. What on earth was wrong with him?

Pulling open the front door, since the children remained inert in front of the television, he felt satisfied with his activities of the day. He didn’t want undue attention. He pictured the parents coming home, their panic. It would be enough that he had come in, looked around, taken nothing, at least, nothing they knew they had.

“Who should I say came over?” the little boy asked as Ray prepared to leave.

Ray cracked the door open long enough to say, “Clint Eastwood.”

He did not have a cowboy hat to tip, so he merely nodded and let himself out, fingering the object he had found, which was now safe in his jeans pocket, and locked the door before pulling it shut.

On his way back home, he stopped in downtown Los Angeles, waiting patiently at a hydrant until someone on the street left a spot, then whipping into it, cutting off an Acura and an Infiniti, because unlike them, he didn’t give a damn if they scratched his car. What he gave a damn about was getting the goddamned space.

He breathed a few times, locking the doors remotely, ignoring the bitter invective spewing noisily from the Acura, accompanied by a hand pounding on the car door for emphasis. Two doors down, a dusty shop quaintly spawned in the days when even radios had sex appeal held a jumble of cheap electronics.

“Can I help you?” said the clerk in a three-piece suit, as unsuited to his surroundings as an arguing attorney at the beach instead of the bench.

“I need a cassette player.”

The clerk chewed his mouth. “Hmm.” He gestured for Ray to follow, and Ray did, down past aisles of plastic parts, earphones, wires, gadgets for every conceivable purpose, and some probably inconceivable.

He showed Ray car cassette decks.

“Portable,” Ray said.

The clerk’s brow furrowed. “Man, why you want one of them old things anyway?”

“You don’t have any?”

He put up a hand. “Of course we do. Just not much call for them these days. Wait a sec.” He turned his back to Ray and disappeared through a door at the back of the store.

Ray browsed the aisles, finding himself interested in a number of things that might be useful at some point, including miniature lighting fixtures for his models. He piled a few things on the counter. By the time the clerk returned with a very old-fashioned boom box that would run on batteries, he had managed to run up quite a bill.

“You’ll need headphones.”

“I have some.”

Outside the store, the Acura had disappeared. At Ray’s old hydrant spot, another car waited to fill another empty parking space, nature abhorring a vacuum. Ray put his purchases into the trunk of his car, slammed it shut, and drove off. The other car, with only inches to spare, slipped in behind him.

Back to Topanga, speeding, braking, tailgating, cursing. It was five in the afternoon and Ray was out of control, weeping and shouting in the car, not knowing what he was even shouting.

A cold shower. Ignore the phone messages and the computer. He pulled on running shoes and went outside and ran through the hilly neighborhood like the wind.

It worked. He came back to himself.

Calm now, walking back up the drive, he thought of the innumerable anonymous tenants who had lived on Bombardier Avenue over the past decades. Someone else must have found the loose board, used the opportunity it presented.

But he had proof they had not. He had seen his mother putting that board into place. He had been watching her. He always watched her with the jealous attention of the only child. That house hadn’t been renovated in thirty years. He had established that personally. The board merged with a thousand other rickety things that developed, and never merited special attention.