Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

Leigh never did understand Esmé’s house on Close Street. So many times she had harped on replacing the fixtures in the bathroom, installing a new stove, insulating the attic, removing the old asbestos, rebricking the uneven basement walls. Esmé had refused and Ray had backed her. “Leave it true to its time period,” he said.

“Why not cherry it up?” Leigh had persisted. “A Nelson sunburst clock. Basket chairs. Let’s turn the back patio into a real lanai, with netting and colored-glass balls.” This was not long after she and Ray had married, and their hands had always touched as their bodies leaned toward each other.

“No, thanks, Leigh, although you are always so full of helpful suggestions, aren’t you?” Esmé had said as kindly as she could considering how upset these suggestions made her. “I come home after a long day of checking out people’s groceries and water the sweet peas against the back fence. I run the water in the sink, which fills up a lot quicker than your water in your fancy new house. My toilets don’t spare the water, either, and the wall furnace may be rusty, but by God it heats the place in two minutes flat.”

“In other words, don’t touch,” Ray had told Leigh, smiling, looking into her eyes, squeezing her hand.

“What a summer we are having,” Esmé said to Ray, as he took his place at the bird’s-eye maple dining room table. She thought to herself, he isn’t sleeping. He looked scruffy, like he had slept in his clothes. Masking her concern, she went on, “My pink roses are in bloom. Have you ever noticed how much scent affects mood? It sure does mine. Surely there’s some research on it. These sweeties smell like…the ocean at dusk.” She stuck her nose into a cluster she had placed in a handblown vase she had bought at a flea market that harbored an invisible crack on the underside. “They smell like a world striving for perfection. Better than incense. Better than Chanel No. 5. More delicate.”

Ray began to eat.

Esmé talked for a while about things that interested her that she thought might interest him, but Ray fiddled with his meal in almost total silence.

“What’s the matter? You’re hardly eating.”

His fork rattled against the table as he set it down. “What kind of a man was he? My father?” He looked so healthy and young, so-unhappy.

She put her fork down, concentrating on her answer. Wasn’t it strange that even a grown man like Ray, in his late thirties, married, was still mourning the loss of a father he hadn’t seen since he was two years old? “You haven’t asked about him in years. What’s going on with you, Ray?”

“I’ve been thinking about my life. I would like the information. You never told me much. All I really know is that he left before I was born and died when I was two. You weren’t married long.”

She sighed. “Like I’ve told you before, Henry looked like you, but not so tall or good-looking. His hair was dark like yours. Had a job in a bank.”

“Why didn’t you keep photographs? Wedding photos, at least?”

“I told you, when he left, I was very upset, Ray. I put them in a box and somewhere along the line the box got left behind.”

“And he had no family?”

“An aunt in South Dakota or somewhere. Ray, I have told you all this. He had left home very young to come out to California. He never got along with his parents. I can’t remember what the problem was, anymore. He was…hard to get along with.”

“Why did you break up? Was it me?”

Esmé sighed. “What do you mean?”

“Was he…afraid. Or maybe he didn’t want kids.”

“Maybe he was afraid, but he never knew you. It wasn’t personal, honey. I’m sorry you grew up without a father, but I’ve tried to make it up to you.” Her breathing wheezed slightly. She got up, opened a sideboard drawer, took out her inhaler, and took in a long breath. She was feeling disturbed by his haranguing, all this ancient history they had been through so many times before. Ray always went back to the past when things went wrong in his life. The medication went into her lungs, relaxing the bronchi, but making her feel a little dizzy.

She said softly, “You know I don’t like talking about those years. It was hard, raising you, feeling like I had so much responsibility and no support. I love my life now. I love thinking about what good things might happen today. Like a visit from my son.”

“Why did we move so much when I was growing up?”

She shrugged. “We had good reasons. Can we talk about something else?”

“Sometimes we left in the dead of night. Were we evicted?”

“Maybe once or twice. Usually not.”

“Until we moved to this house, I never had a friend for more than six months.”

“We had each other.”

“When you’re a kid, however you live is normal. If you have a parent that screams at you, well, that’s life. If you’re poor, you don’t notice. But I look back and I wonder. You had jobs that barely covered the rent. It wasn’t like your career forced us to move constantly. Eight schools before high school. That isn’t normal.”

“Nobody in Southern California has what you would call a normal childhood,” Esmé shot back. “It’s a place you come to change your life. Everybody came from somewhere else, Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas. Here you get to be who you want, and you’ve benefited from that, by the way. Thank God for the great public universities. Like the Marines say, suck it in, soldier. Move on. Anyway, we did settle down, staying right here from the time you were twelve.”

“You know, I used to play a game with myself. At each new place, be a new guy. Be friendly; stay aloof. Be smart; play possum.”

“Well, that sounds like a strategy. You had to fit in somehow.” Her patience had about given out. She wondered if Ray, always a little obsessive, was developing a real problem.

“It’s bothering me. I think about this house or that one, and try to remember the day we left. Who was I that day? Why did we have to start all over again? You know, I’ve been building models in the past few months of all the houses we lived in.”

Esmé frowned. “Why?”

“Leigh and I…had problems.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” And deeply surprised, since this was the first time she could recall Ray ever mentioning anything so personal about his marriage.

“Life gets to a certain point-” He stopped. “She wanted-” He stopped again. “I wish I knew some things, that’s what I came here to tell you.”

“Don’t get bogged down in things that happened a million years ago, that’s what I want to tell you.” She got up from the table to get coffee and cups. “Hey, after supper, I have a treat for you. Remember how you threw some cantaloupe seeds into the gully behind the house one year, and they sprouted and fruited? Well, I did it again. Three baby cantaloupes-”

His hands were fists. They sat on the table as if he were holding forks in them, and he was staring at the old fruit-design wallpaper, his brow lowering. Alarmed, Esmé stopped talking. She could hear the clock in the living room ticking.

“Mom, listen. Leigh’s gone.”

“Gone?”

His eyes moved to the red vase, then he leaned over, reorganizing flowers, stretching out leaves with his long sensitive fingers. “Didn’t you wonder why she didn’t come tonight?”

“Well, I thought-What happened, Ray?” She sat down heavily in the kitchen chair.

“Did she say anything to you about us, what was happening with us?”

“Leigh doesn’t confide in me. Thinks I’d be too much on your side, maybe.”

“We had a fight.”

She wiped her wet hands on the dishrag, preparing herself for a sleepless night, hating to see him in such pain.