The Second Set of Keys
Monday morning at seven fifteen I sat in the district engineer’s office with the door shut and told her the entire thing.
Not the marriage. The marriage was not her business and I would rather have gone off a deck than said it out loud in that room.
But the facts of jurisdiction: that the property in question was the premises of a club my husband belonged to and had helped build, that a lien held by that club encumbered my residence, that I had entered the property in a private capacity on Saturday and observed the wall from an interior window, and that I was requesting either reassignment or a co-signature.
She listened without interrupting, which is one of about four reasons I have stayed in that department for seventeen years.
“How bad is the wall,” she said.
“I have eleven photographs through a dirty window.”
“How bad.”
“If it is what I think it is, there is a right of way at the base with a foot trail on it that people use to get to the river, and eighteen feet of stone above it that has rotated four to six degrees at the cap.”
She wrote something down.
“Massek co-signs,” she said. “You do the work, he puts his name on it, and if it goes anywhere I will say in writing that you disclosed on day one. Vera.” She looked up.
“You could have said nothing. That wall is a mile from any of your assigned structures. It would have sat there for another decade and nobody would ever have known you saw it.”
“I know.”
“Just so we are both clear that you know.”
Ed took it about how I expected.
“Let me get this straight,” he said in the truck. “We are going to go stand behind a motorcycle clubhouse with a total station and tell forty bikers that their back yard is going to fall on somebody.”
“Yes.”
“On a Tuesday.”
“On a Wednesday. Tuesday is their church.”
He laughed until he had to cough. “Prusak,” he said, “you are the most frightening woman in this county and I have known three of your bosses.”
That evening Cal was in the kitchen when I got home, which he had not been since the night of the list.
He had made pierogi. Not made. Boiled the ones from my mother’s freezer, which is the only cooking he has ever been permitted to do, and he had done the onions properly, in butter, slow, which takes forty minutes and which he knows I notice.
On the table, next to the plates, there was a ring of keys.
Not his truck keys. A ring the size of my palm, thirty or forty keys on it, the kind a man accumulates over twenty years of buildings.
“Sit down,” he said. “Eat something. Then I want to go through those with you.”
So we ate pierogi in near silence, the first meal we had eaten in the same room in twelve days, and then he cleared the plates and put the ring in the middle of the table and started, one at a time, saying what each key was.
Yard gate. Yard shed. Office trailer. Torch cabinet.
The Ohio buyer’s warehouse in Struthers, which he should have returned in 2019.
The bank on Penn Avenue, which does not exist anymore.
Saint Stanislaus basement, from when he rebuilt the steps.
Front door of this house. Back door of this house.
My mother’s house. The clubhouse front. The clubhouse back.
The clubhouse propane cage. The clubhouse office.
Then he came to a brass key with a green plastic cap on it and he stopped.
He did not take it off the ring. He did not palm it. He put his finger on it and he said, “Tessa’s back door.”
I looked at it.
“You could have taken that off before you brought it in here,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Why did you not.”
“Because taking it off would have been the forty-second thing,” he said.
We sat there with the keys between us.
“When did she give it to you,” I said.
“She did not. Dev gave it to me in 2011 when they went to Myrtle Beach and needed the dog fed.”
That was somehow the worst detail of the entire winter. Not a key given by a woman in the dark. A key given by a friend for a dog.
“Take it off,” I said.
He worked it off the ring, which took a while because his hands are too big for a key ring, and he set it on the table.
“Now what,” he said.
“Now nothing. It sits there. I am not going to make a ceremony out of it and neither are you.” I pushed the whole ring back toward him except the one. “Cal, why did you do this. The keys.”
“Because you said I decide, alone, in my own head, what you can carry.” He put his hands flat on the table.
“So I am giving you everything I have got locks on. The yard, the books, the accounts, the building. You can look at any of it any hour of the day and I will never once ask you why you are looking. That is what I have got. I know it is not the thing you want.”
“What do you think the thing I want is.”
He was quiet a second.
“For it not to have happened,” he said.
“No,” I said. “That is not on the list. That is not a thing anybody can give me and I am not a child. Do you want to know what the thing is?”
“Yes.”
“I want you to be the one who leaves a room,” I said.
“You told me in the yard that you have never been able to be the man who walks out. That is the whole finding, Cal. Not her. Not twenty-two months. You cannot leave, so you stay in everything at once until the thing you are standing in comes apart. I am not asking you to prove you love me. You loved me the whole time, which is somehow the most insulting part. I am asking you to go stand in one place and let the other one fall.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“You mean the club,” he said.
“I did not say the club.”
“You mean the club.”
“I said one place, and I am not going to name it for you, because if I name it then it is my decision and in six years you will look at me across a table and it will be a thing I took from you.” I stood up and put the plates in the sink.
“Name it yourself. Then do it. And do it before somebody makes you, because doing it after is not the same and you and I will both know the difference for the rest of our lives.”
He sat with the keys.
At the door of the kitchen I said, “Wednesday morning I am inspecting the wall behind that building.”
“I heard.”
“From who.”
“Bish,” Cal said. “He got a call from the county about access. He would like me to talk to you.”
“And?”
My husband picked up the brass key with the green cap and turned it over once and set it back down.
“I told him he has met you,” he said.