Lock and Key(9)

“Right,” I said. “I just . . . I couldn’t sleep.”

At my feet, Roscoe suddenly coughed, hacking up something. We all looked at him, and then Jamie said slowly, “Well . . . it’s late. We’ve got an early day tomorrow, so . . .”

“Yeah. I should get to bed, too,” Nate said, reaching down to pull up one edge of his towel and wiping it across his face. He had to be on a deck chair or something, I thought. No one has that kind of upper-body strength. “Nice meeting you, Ruby.”

“You, too,” I replied.

He waved at Jamie, then dropped out of sight. Jamie looked at me for a moment, as if still trying to decipher what had happened. I tried not to flinch as he continued to study my face, only relaxing once he’d slid his hands in his pockets and started across the lawn, Roscoe tagging along at his heels.

I’d just reached the line of trees, following him, when I heard a “Pssst!” from behind me. When I turned around, Nate had pushed open part of the fence and was passing my bag through. “Might need this,” he said.

Like I was supposed to be grateful. Unbelievable, I thought as I walked over, picking up the bag.

“So what’s it to?”

I glanced up at him. He had his hand on the gate and had pulled on a dark-colored T-shirt, and his hair was starting to dry now, sticking up slightly. In the flickering light from the nearby pool I could finally make out his face enough to see that he was kind of cute, but in a rich-boy way, all jocky and smooth edges, not my type at all. “What?” I said.

“The key.” He pointed to my neck. “What’s it to?”

Jamie was going into the house now, leaving the door open for me behind him. I reached up, twining my fingers around the chain hanging there. “Nothing,” I told him.

I shifted my bag behind me, keeping it in my shadow as I headed across the lawn to the back door. So close, I thought. A shorter fence, a fatter dog, and everything would be different. But wasn’t that always the way. It’s never something huge that changes everything, but instead the tiniest of details, irrevocably tweaking the balance of the universe while you’re busy focusing on the big picture.

When I got to the house, there was no sign of Jamie or Roscoe. Still, I figured it wasn’t worth risking bringing my bag inside, and since the balcony was too high to toss it up, I decided to just stow it someplace and come back down for it in a couple of hours when the coast was clear. So I stuck it beside the grill, then slipped inside just as the shimmering lights from Nate’s pool cut off, leaving everything dark between his house and ours.

I didn’t see Jamie again as I climbed the stairs to my room. If I had, I wasn’t sure what I would have said to him. Maybe he had fallen for my flimsy excuse, aided and abetted by a pool boy who happened to be in the right place at what, for me anyway, turned out to be the wrong time. It was possible he was just that gullible. Unlike my sister, who knew from disappearing and could spot a lie, even a good one, a mile off. She also probably would have happily provided the boost I needed up and over that fence, or at least pointed the way to the gate, if only to be rid of me once and for all.

I waited a full hour to slip back downstairs. When I eased open my door, though, there was my bag, sitting right there at my feet. It seemed impossible I hadn’t heard Jamie leave it there, but he had. For some reason, seeing it made me feel the worst I had all day, ashamed in a way I couldn’t even explain as I reached down, pulling it inside with me.





Chapter Two


My mom hated to work. Far from a model employee, she had never had a job, at least in my recollection, that she actually enjoyed. Instead, in our house, work was a four-letter word, the official end of good times, something to be dreaded and bitched about and, whenever possible, avoided.

Things might have been different if she was qualified for a glamorous occupation like travel agent or fashion designer. Instead, due to choices she’d made, as well as a few circumstances beyond her control, she’d always had low-level, minimum-wage, benefits-only-if-you’re-really-lucky kinds of jobs: waitress, retail, telemarketer, temp. Which was why, when she got hired on at Commercial Courier, it seemed like such a good thing. Sure, it wasn’t glamorous. But at least it was different.

Commercial Courier called itself an “all-purpose delivery service,” but their primary business came from lost luggage. They had a small office at the airport where bags that had been routed to the wrong city or put onto the wrong plane would eventually end up, at which point one of their couriers would deliver them to their proper destination, whether it be a hotel or the bag owner’s home.

Before Commercial, my mom had been working as a receptionist in an insurance office, a job she hated because it required the two things she hated above all else: getting up early and dealing with people. When her bosses let her go after six months, she’d spent a couple of weeks sleeping in and grumbling before finally hauling out the classifieds, where she spotted the ad for Commercial. DELIVERY DRIVERS NEEDED, it said. WORK INDEPENDENTLY, DAYS OR NIGHTS. She never would have called any job perfect, but just at a glance, it seemed pretty close. So she called and set up an interview. Two days later, she had a job.

Or, we did. The truth was, my mom was not a very good navigator. I’d suspected she was slightly dyslexic, as she was always mixing up her right and left, something that definitely would have been a problem for a job that relied almost entirely on following written driving directions. Luckily, though, her shift didn’t start until five p.m., which meant that I could ride along with her, an arrangement that I’d assumed at first would only last for the initial few days, until she got the hang of things. Instead, we became coworkers, eight hours a day, five days a week, just her and me in her banged-up Subaru, reuniting people with their possessions.