Lock and Key(10)

Our night always started at the airport. Once the bags were stacked and packed in the car, she’d hand over the sheet of addresses and directions, and we’d set off, hitting the nearby hotels first before venturing farther to neighborhoods and individual homes.

People had one of two reactions when we arrived with their lost luggage. Either they were really happy and grateful, or chose to literally blame the messenger, taking out their ire at the entire airline industry on us. The best tactic, we learned, was empathy. “Don’t I know it,” my mom would say, holding her clipboard for the person’s signature as they ranted on about having to buy new toiletries or clothes in a strange city. “It’s an outrage.” Usually, this was enough, since it was often more than the airlines had offered up, but occasionally someone would go above and beyond, being a total *, at which point my mom would just drop the bag at their feet, turn and walk back to the car, ignoring whatever they shouted after her. “It’s karma,” she’d say to me as we pulled away. “Watch. I bet we’re here again before we know it.”

Hotels were better, because we only had to deal with the bellmen or front-desk staff. They’d offer us some kind of perk for fitting them in early on our route, and we became regulars at all the hotel bars, grabbing a quick burger between deliveries.

By the end of the shift, the highways had usually cleared, and we were often the only car cresting silent hills in dark subdivisions. That late, people often didn’t want to be bothered by us ringing the bell, so they’d leave a note on their front door asking us to drop the bag on the porch, or tell us, when we called to confirm the delivery, to just pop the trunk of their car and leave it in there. These were always the weirdest trips for me, when it was midnight or even later, and we pulled up to a dark house, trying to be quiet. Like a robbery in reverse, creeping around to leave something rather than take it.

Still, there was also was something reassuring about working for Commercial, almost hopeful. Like things that were lost could be found again. As we drove away, I always tried to imagine what it would be like to open your door to find something you had given up on. Maybe it had seen places you never had, been rerouted and passed through so many strange hands, but still somehow found its way back to you, all before the day even began.

I’d expected to sleep the same way I had at Poplar House— barely and badly—but instead woke with a start the next morning when Jamie knocked on my door, saying we’d be leaving in an hour. I’d been so out of it that at first I wasn’t even sure where I was. Once I made out the skylight over my head, though, with its little venetian blind, it all came back to me: Cora’s. My near-escape. And now, Perkins Day. Just three days earlier, I’d been managing as best I could at the yellow house, working for Commercial, and going to Jackson. Now, here, everything had changed again. But I was kind of getting used to that now.

When my mom first took off, I didn’t think it was for good. I figured she was just out on one of her escapades, which usually lasted only as long as it took her to run out of money or welcome, a few days at most. The first couple of times she’d done this, I’d been so worried, then overwhelmingly relieved when she returned, peppering her with questions about where she’d been, which irritated her no end. “I just needed some space, okay?” she’d tell me, annoyed, before stalking off to her room to sleep—something that, by the looks of it, she hadn’t done much of during the time she’d been gone.

It took me another couple of her disappearances—each a few days longer than the last—before I realized that this was exactly how I shouldn’t react, making a big deal of it. Instead, I adopted a more blasé attitude, like I hadn’t even really noticed she’d been gone. My mother had always been about independence—hers, mine, and ours. She was a lot of things, but clingy had never been one of them. By taking off, I decided, she was teaching me about taking care of myself. Only a weak person needed someone else around all the time. With every disappearance, she was proving herself stronger; it was up to me, in how I behaved, to do the same.

After two weeks with no word from her, though, I’d finally forced myself to go into her room and look through her stuff. Sure enough, her emergency stash—three hundred bucks in cash, last I’d checked—was gone, as were her saving-bonds certificates, her makeup, and, most telling, her bathing suit and favorite summer robe. Wherever she was headed, it was warm.

I had no idea when she’d really left, since we hadn’t exactly been getting along. We hadn’t exactly not been, either. But that fall, the hands-off approach we’d both cultivated had spilled over from just a few days here and there to all the time. Also, she’d stopped going to work—sleeping when I left for school in the morning, sleeping when I returned and headed out to Commercial, and usually out once I returned after all the deliveries were done—so it wasn’t like we had a lot of chances to talk. Plus, the rare occasions she was home and awake, she wasn’t alone.

Most times, when I saw her boyfriend Warner’s beat-up old Cadillac in the driveway, I’d park and then walk around to my bedroom window, which I kept unlocked, and let myself in that way. It meant I had to brush my teeth with bottled water, and made washing my face out of the question, but these were small prices to pay to avoid Warner, who filled the house with pipe smoke and always seemed to be sweating out whatever he’d drunk the day before. He’d park himself on the couch, beer in hand, his eyes silently following me whenever I did have to cross in front of him. He’d never done anything I could point to specifically, but I believed this was due not to innocence but to lack of opportunity. I did not intend to provide him with one.