Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

“Henry had custody, Mom.”

“So? Did I raise you badly? Did I ever take a drink while you were growing up?”

“You stole me from him. You stole him from me.”

She considered this. Then she sighed. “Here we go again. After all I did for you, you blame me.”

“You robbed me of the truth.” Henry Jackson would have been sixty-two this year, not old. His remains had now been officially interred at Memory Gardens in Brea.

“Would you rather he had robbed you of your mother? I doubt that.” Esmé changed the subject and talked about all the wonderful things she planned to do when she finished serving her time, eight to ten years. She would renovate her house at last, she said, not asking but assuming Ray would keep it for her. She didn’t know yet that the house had already been sold to pay her legal fees. Where she would go when she got out was something Ray didn’t want to think about. She told him she would quit her job at the market and do volunteer work in the schools.

Quit her job! She had been terminated long before her guilty plea to second-degree murder.

Esmé rambled on. She loved kids. She needed kids in her life. But Leigh and Ray had decided their baby wouldn’t be visiting Esmé at the prison. Ray didn’t want to hurt his mother, so he might never tell her until the day she walked through the locked gates to whatever was left of her existence.

He let her meander on, worrying about her. Mainly, as always, he felt amazed that this woman had loved him so fiercely that she had killed his father.

He listened, took her in, and felt so sad.

Beau smiled, waving his arms. He kicked his round legs all day long. After Raoul finished changing his diaper, he quieted, lying peacefully down against the bold blue bolsters edging his crib. Kat came in to finish cleaning up the changing table. Raoul leaned over the crib, playing with Beau’s little fingers.

He and Kat had found Jacki some help, and Jacki was back to working part-time.

Kat was seeing a lot of Zak.

After several weeks of silence between them, Zak had finally called. “Hiya.”

“Hiya.” Kat had been attempting a chicken curry, chopping onions in her kitchen, holding the phone to her ear against her scrunched-up shoulder. She had a special new knife they sold on television, a big book of recipes, and a hobby, being a homebody who liked her own company better than almost anyone else’s.

Although tonight Leigh and Ray were coming over. They saw a lot of each other these days. Ray was going to tell her that they were pregnant, and she was going to look surprised, as if Leigh hadn’t told her that a month ago during one of their long lunches.

Zak said, “So-”

Kat picked up the board full of chopped onions and dumped them into the wok. “So-”

“I’ve tried to work out why things haven’t worked between us, and I want to clear the air.”

“Okay.”

“I hadn’t had a date in two years when I met you. I have a brother who’s a little like Jacki, concerned about me becoming a creepy bachelor. Sometimes that makes me nervous and it made me really nervous because-I like you, and you don’t seem very responsive. So I’m going to lay it on thick, and tell you everything and that way I’ll know I’m being rejected for myself, and not for the image. You know what? I hate Rollerblading. You just sounded like such a fun-loving person, it seemed like the right thing to do. I’m a reader, mostly nonfiction, but I can get into a thriller. I’ll go to any movie ever made, and eat a large popcorn clogged with butter. I like to take walks in my neighborhood. And I basically like my life the way it is. It’s-contented. Wonderfully boring.”

“Oh, Zak!” How bizarre. He had a dating game, too. “We did start out awkward, didn’t we?”

“You surprised me, though, talking about yourself. And I felt you deserved the same from me. A little bit of the truth. I see other people bogged down in mortgages and babies and-that’s not for me right now, Kat. So now you know.”

She smelled the curry, then reached to pull the cloves down from the shelf. Nobody else liked cloves the way she liked cloves. “You like cloves in curry? I mean lots? Don’t lie to me now, Zak.”

“Love them. I swear.”

“Want to go out with me Friday night? We won’t get tattoos. We won’t skate. And we won’t shop for rings. Anything else suits me, too.”

“You have a deal.”

Kat smiled, thinking back to their conversation. Then Jacki came into the nursery, real pearls on her neck, looking older in the most lovely way, made somehow more sophisticated by her recent motherhood.

“We’ll be back by midnight. You sure you can do this?”

“I look forward to it.” That was true. Jacki gave her a hug and she and Raoul departed, leaving Kat with Beau.

He willingly came out of his crib and Kat sat in the rocking chair, resting him on her legs. “I hope you’re feeling amusing,” she told him. “Gum display. I guess that means you’re happy? You like the mother and father you picked? Oh, good. I totally agree. And what about me? Am I the world’s most fabulous aunt?”

Beau followed her lips with his all-out blue stare. She gazed down at him and something happened which had not happened before. They really looked at each other. Beau didn’t blink. He had the Tinsley glare down already. He looked and looked and Kat felt that she was being sucked into his new-old soul.

She leaned down close and whispered, “You’ll forget it all soon and this’ll be the only world for you. But before you do I have to ask you a question. Okay?”

His eyebrows raised. He waited with milk-scented, bated breath.

“Have you met your uncle Tom at any point?”

No change in his expression, but he continued fascinated. No kicks, no waves. He listened intently.

“No?” Kat said, disappointed.

“Aaah,” Beau said, suddenly opening his mouth hugely.

At that moment Kat understood. She just hadn’t phrased the question properly. Beau’s scanty hair, soft brown, smelled good as she lowered her head and rubbed her cheek against his. His ears were going to be big, and the nose had the Tinsley crook.

“I get it,” she said. “I think I’ve suspected it for some time. You look at people with the same…perspicacity. Right through me, just like him. He knew I meant no harm. He knew how much I loved and admired him.”

Beau brayed at her. A couple of brand-new baby teeth poked through his bottom gums like kernels of fresh corn.

“I’m going to take such good care of you this time, little buddy.”

Ray went home to Leigh.

When they had moved from Topanga, he had closed up his hobby room, stuffing the house models into the trash bin or sending them to a donation center. How relieved he had felt, letting go. The models had served their purpose, revealing their secrets, and the truth about both his father and his mother. His collection of keys, wrestled away from him by Leigh during foreplay to a particularly fine night of sex, disappeared, never to be seen again.

“Suzanne called,” Leigh said as he walked into their new shingled house in Santa Monica. He threw his car keys onto the painted bench from Leigh Jackson Designs, and then watched her setting down a plate on the trestle table in the kitchen. The bulge in her stomach didn’t slow her down one bit. She was at her shop daily-if not sawing and sanding, she was drawing. “I’m fertile in every sense of the word,” she had laughed when he had remarked upon her incredible energy.

He came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, smelling her neck. “Oh, I am so very hungry tonight, Leigh.”

“Good. We’ve got plenty. It’s great to be out of the boonies and close to so much fantastic take-out food again.”