Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

Jacki sat up straighter, put her hand behind to support her back, and made a face. “Well?” she said.

Kat decided, with a shiver, Jacki was right.

Because she felt nervous about the tone in her son’s voice when he called wanting to come over, Esmé decided to make a pineapple upside-down cake, one of Ray’s childhood favorites. She had time to make something relatively complicated.

Leigh didn’t like her pineapple cake. Leigh. She didn’t like thinking about what Ray was going through, and all because of that woman. Well, she had tried to warn him about the heart, and how marriage meant troubles and sorrows. Heartache. She ought to know.

Mixing butter with brown sugar, she considered this thought. She coated a nine-inch-round cake pan with grease and flour. A mother with a child to raise cooked thousands of boring meals, thousands of macaroni casseroles, burritos, and hamburgers. Esmé had never enjoyed that kind of cooking, which was such a chore when you worked all day checking out other people’s boring groceries. Ray’s father, Henry, had preferred fast food to her cooking. How had she ever thought to marry such a man?

Such a man. She creamed together butter and sugar until the mixture fluffed up, then added the eggs one at a time, beating them harder than she needed, seeing Henry before her, thinking about life’s turns.

Trying to obliterate the image of him that suddenly hovered before her, she beat in vanilla, and alternated adding the flour and milk, trying not to ruin the dough by thumping away too hard, watching for the smooth, shiny look that meant she had beaten the batter properly. Finished, she took a long knife out of the butcher block holder and set a pineapple on a cutting board, proceeding first to peel it, then cut it into neat half-inch-thick slices.

Halfway through the process, she realized the knife needed sharpening. She slipped it across a ten-inch diamond steel sharpener until when she touched the blade to her finger, the skin didn’t give, but broke.

No blood, fortunately.

Whack. So much better.

The pineapple slices made a pretty layer of circles, and she filled in the holes with chunks arranged in a pattern, then poured the batter gently over it, popped the pan into the old oven, set the timer, and shut the door.

She made a pot of coffee, intending to tidy up before Ray arrived, but settled into the one really comfortable chair in the living room and got lost in an article about the space shuttle.

The doorbell rang.

She rose, folding the newspaper, and put it into the holder by the fireplace. Ray liked the house neat, and she liked pleasing him. Glancing around as she walked toward the entryway, she assured herself that only the kitchen looked bad at the moment, and she’d soon fix that.

How grateful she was that they were still close. The bond between a single mother and an only son outlasted almost everything. Tidying her hair with her hands, she answered the door. “Honey,” she said, hugging him. She still loved the way he smelled.

“Mom.”

But he took no notice of the house, rushing through to the kitchen and plopping down at the kitchen counter on a stool. She had pans to clear, bowls to clean. Since the sink was in the middle of the island, she could work and visit with Ray. She began washing out the cake pans. “You sounded upset on the phone. Is this-something about Leigh?”

He shook his head. “We have to talk, Mom.”

“Sure, honey.” She still had twenty minutes on the timer, so she shrugged a little and went back to her sink. She reached under the sink for bleach. Nothing else cleaned the old almond-colored porcelain sink as well as bleach. She didn’t want him at the sink, checking on that damn persistent leak, getting on her case about it yet again, but he stayed away, tapping his fingers on the counter, apparently thinking hard.

“I went to Norwalk, Mom.”

“A new commission?”

“To Bombardier Avenue. The old house.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Why would you do that?”

“Because I believe you’ve lied to me, Mom.” He stood and put his hands in his pockets, walked to the window, and faced her again. “All that moving. I think you were running all those years, and I ran with you. I’m an adult now, and I can see things don’t make sense. I don’t believe you anymore.”

She swiped at the crumbs on the tablecloth. “I knew right away you were in a bad mood about something. But do we have to-”

“Why? Why did we move so much?”

Sighing, Esmé said, “You were so young and made friends easily. I guess it was kind of callous, dragging you around so much, but what I don’t understand is why-” She paused, thinking, why can’t you leave it alone! “What do you want from me, honey? Details? We moved from Norwalk because I didn’t like the traffic there. We moved from Redondo Beach because the chill bothered me. We moved from Downey because I found a place with cheaper rent.”

“The house on Bombardier? I went inside.”

Shocked, she sat down. “You did? How?”

“I kept the key.”

“You still have that old key collection?”

“I just remembered. You used to call me keeper of the keys.” He looked surprised by the memory.

She nodded. “Like the Roman god. Janus.”

“Who?”

“He had two faces, one looking toward the past, the other toward the future. You were such a serious boy. Ray, please don’t tell me you found the key and used it to break into the house.”

“That’s exactly what I did.”

“My God! Have you gone crazy? You really have been so strange lately-”

“I was invited in by the residents, actually.” He held up a hand. “Forget about that. That’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about a tape I found there.”

She flashed back to the tract house in Norwalk, the porch, his worst tantrum ever, the circus tent she put up in the living room at Christmas, her first safe place. “A tape,” she repeated to buy herself a moment.

“Yeah, remember that loose board? Under the rug in your bedroom? You hid things.”

“You knew about that?”

“I paid attention.”

Esmé said nothing for a few moments. Ray had phases. Every few years he would start pestering her about the moves, bringing this up, bringing that up, and now he was back into it, and it was apparently worse than ever. Now he had broken into somebody’s house and retrieved a tape she had forgotten all about.

Her life for so many years had had a serenity and peace lacking in her early years as a mother. She felt like someone peacefully gazing at a lovely view, when a lunatic appeared out of nowhere to push her over a waterfall.

“You and a guy talk,” Ray said.

The oven beeped. Her cake had finished. Esmé reached into a drawer for hot pads. Carefully opening the oven door, she pulled a round pan out. Perfect. She set the pan on a wire rack. The crusty yellow surface, evenly toasty, smelled of the brown sugar and savory fruit that lurked on the bottom. Carefully, she turned the cake upside down onto a platter.

“Invert it right away,” Ray said.

“I taught my boy right.”

“I was five when we lived there. That made you twenty-six.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“The man threatens you.”

“You listen to some old recording and you make assumptions, and they’re just plain wrong. Haven’t I warned you often enough to use your imagination to serve you, not to make your life harder? Well, I don’t know anything about any tape. I don’t remember back that far.”

“Oh, no?” Ray’s face wore the pinched look of a furious teenager, and Esmé thought, after all I’ve done, I’ve failed my son. He’s stalled and it’s my fault.

“Enough.” She pulled the pan off a little roughly, taking some pineapple with it, Ray watching without engagement, eyes glazed. “Smell that,” she said.