The Keys On The Rail

The new key lay on the wooden rail in front of the bench, bright and sharp-edged, the brass still shiny from the cutting wheel. Next to it lay an old car key worn silver at the teeth, with a little brass school bus hanging off it by a ring.

Nobody in that courtroom said a word while my son set them down. I want to tell you how he got there.

Judge Mabry had called him back to the witness chair after Brynn stepped down. He went slowly. He'd picked his cap up off the floor, and he held it in both hands again, but it didn't look the same in them anymore.

"Mr. Haskett," the judge said, "where were you at six forty-eight on the morning of June tenth?"

"Springfield, Your Honor. At the marine show."

"Do you have a hotel receipt?"

"I stayed with a buddy."

"His name?"

Wade opened his mouth and nothing came out of it.

"Would you take out your wallet, please, and read the court the last four digits of your debit card."

Curtis Lyle half stood. "Your Honor, my client doesn't have to."

"No, he doesn't," the judge said. "And I'm allowed to notice that he won't."

Wade looked at his lawyer. He looked at his wife, back on the first pew with her coat folded in her lap. And then he looked at me, and I saw the boy on the back steps with his father after the district final, the half-gallon empty between them. Just for a second. Then it closed up again.

"Brynn's the one with the DUI," he said. "Brynn's the one who drinks. She's making this up to keep Poppy."

"Mr. Haskett, I have your voice on a recording, your card on a receipt, your signature on a sales contract dated before my order, and your daughter's drawing of you at your mother's freezer with the date on the back in somebody else's handwriting." Judge Mabry took off her reading glasses and let them drop on their chain. "Would you like to try that answer one more time, or would you like to stop talking?"

He stopped talking.

She ruled from the bench, no recess, no week to think. She'd signed a lot of emergency orders in nineteen years, she said, and she'd lose sleep over this one. Then she read it into the record in a voice as flat and clean as a ruler.

The petition for guardianship was denied and dismissed. The emergency temporary order was vacated, effective immediately. Any contract executed on the Respondent's property under that order, or in anticipation of it, was void. The court visitor's report was to be supplemented in light of new evidence. The transcript, the recording and the exhibits would be referred to the Tully County prosecuting attorney for review regarding a false report to law enforcement and false statements in a sworn pleading.

"And Mr. Haskett," she said. "You'll surrender any key to your mother's home or vehicle in your possession. Now. Before you leave my courtroom. Put them on the rail."

Wade stood. He dug in the pocket of that new sport coat and came out with the bright one. He dug in the front pocket of his jeans, the same pocket he'd reached into in my driveway, and came out with my spare, and the brass bus swung once on its ring and bumped against his knuckles.

He set them on the rail. That was when I understood we'd all been holding our breath, because I heard the whole room let it out.

"The receipt says two copies," Judge Mabry said. "Where's the second?"

Wade looked at the floor.

"Mr. Haskett."

"Rhonda Fitch has it," he said. "For the walk-through."

I made a sound. I didn't mean to. Gil put his whole arm around my shoulders.

"Mr. Lyle," the judge said, without any expression at all, "you'll see that key is returned to Mrs. Loretta Haskett by five o'clock today, or you'll explain to me tomorrow morning why not." She lifted my spare off the rail by its little brass bus and held it out to me. Then she picked up her gavel. "Mrs. Haskett. You're free to go home."

Wade left first. He walked out the side door with Curtis Lyle and never turned around, and I didn't watch him go, because I was looking at Brynn.

She came to the rail. She stood there in her navy scrubs with her coat over her arm and her hair pulled so tight it had to hurt, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all. Up close I could see that her eyelids were swollen. She'd been crying somewhere, sometime, a lot, and hiding it the way she hid everything.

"You told me not to fight," I said.

"Every time you pushed, he sped up. After Route 5 I thought he'd do something worse before the hearing." She swallowed. "I needed you in there, quiet, where he thought he'd already won."

"And the receipt? In your coat?"

"I carried it everywhere. I wasn't leaving it in a house he sleeps in." She looked at the rail. "When you took it I almost told you all of it. Then he called."

"The brochures. In July."

"He made me put them there. He wanted you to see them from me." Her mouth moved. "You were supposed to hate me. It was the one thing I could do that he'd believe."

"I did hate you."

"I know. You were good at it."

I laughed. I didn't expect to. It came out of me cracked and too loud in that small room, and Brynn's face did something I had never seen it do in seven years. It folded. She put a hand over her mouth and she stood there at the rail and shook.

I've held a hundred crying children on the steps of a school bus. I'd never once held my son's wife. I went around the end of that rail and I did it anyway, and she was stiff as a board for three seconds, the same as Poppy in the driveway, and then she wasn't.

"Where's my granddaughter?" I said into her shoulder.

"School. She thinks she broke her promise." Brynn's voice was muffled. "She thinks it's her fault Daddy's in trouble."

"She didn't break anything," I said. "She drew it. That's different."

Gil drove me home. We didn't talk much. When we turned onto Heron Point Road the maple was bare and the lake was flat gray under the clouds, and my car was sitting in the gravel right where I'd left it, a little dusty, a little lonesome.

There was a locksmith's van in the drive by half past four. Gil had called him from the courthouse steps. The young man changed the front and the back and even the one on the storm cellar, and while he worked I opened the freezer.

On the bottom shelf, frost on the lid, waited a fresh carton of butter pecan. Brand new. Wade must have bought it when he moved my furniture out, and stood right here in my kitchen and eaten out of it.

I carried it out to the burn barrel behind the shed and set it inside and walked away.

At five-oh-five a car from Clinton pulled up, and a young woman from Curtis Lyle's office handed me a small envelope without looking at me. Inside was a key to a lock that didn't exist anymore. I put it in the junk drawer with the rubber bands, where it belongs.

The locksmith left me three new keys on a paper tag. I kept one. I put one on a string for Gil, because a man who breaks into your house at eleven at night with a flashlight to save you ought to be able to come in the front door.

The third I tied to a red ribbon from my sewing box.

Brynn brought Poppy at six. Poppy came through the door in one purple boot and one sneaker, and stopped in the middle of my kitchen, and looked at me, and her chin started to go.

"I told," she whispered. "I wasn't supposed to."

"You didn't tell," I said. "You drew me a picture. That's the best present anybody ever gave me."

She launched herself at my knees, and I let her knock me back against the counter, and I stood there with my arms full of pigtails and puffer vest and I didn't care who saw my face.

When Brynn went to leave I held out the red ribbon.

She looked at it for a long moment. At the key hanging off the end.

"Front door," I said. "It doesn't stick."

She took it without a thank-you. What she said was, "Okay, Lottie," and it was the first time in seven years she'd called me anything but Loretta.

Saturday morning I drove Poppy to the Lakeside Market for pancake mix. It was the first time I'd been behind my own wheel in three weeks. My hands knew exactly what to do.

Poppy sat in her booster in the back, swinging both purple boots, the left one home from Birchwood, and singing something she'd made up about ducks. At the stop sign by the marina she stopped singing.

"Grandma. Is Daddy going to jail?"

"I don't know, baby. That's for other people to decide."

"Is it because of me?"

I looked at her in the rear-view mirror, the way I looked at twenty-six children in that mirror every morning for thirty-one years.

"No," I said. "It's because of what he did. Not because of what you saw."

She thought about that for the length of the stop sign. Then she nodded and went back to the ducks.

I pulled out onto the lake road. The sun was coming up through the bare maples and laying gold on the water, and hanging from my ignition, where it had always belonged, a little brass school bus with the paint rubbed thin at the corners swung back and forth, back and forth, the whole way into town.