A Locksmith's Reason to Refuse a Job

Here is how you find someone who taught a child a grammar and then let the wish outrun them: You don't. You find their locks. That's the trade instinct talking, and the trade instinct is the last part of me the street hasn't billed. A person hides. A note hides. A hand can go untraceable for eleven years and then some. But a hand that taught letters left *installations* — every book on Marrow Street where the page goes forward instead of getting grieved. Marguerite's rent book. My ledger. The three books already confirmed as mine. Somewhere, a first book, with a lock I've never fitted. Dark windows, lit books. I said that a lifetime ago, curbside, thinking it was a theory. Now it's an address list I can't read. So I go to Ozzie. Not because he knows anything. Because the laundromat's yellow door — the one at child-height in the back wall, the one that wore his sister's blur before I inked *MAUVE* into truth — that door is the oldest thing I turned that still has a witness who *chose* to keep it. And I need to test something my hands already suspect and my chest won't confirm, because my chest went quiet somewhere around Del's sewing. "You wrote the note," Ozzie says, when I come in at four in the morning smelling of nineteen nights. Not an accusation. He turns it over like a coin he's decided to keep. "The true part still stands." "The true part still stands," I agree. It's our grammar now — the one thing on this street that turns backward without cost. I put my palm on the yellow door's frame. Read it the way I read all of them: honestly, which is worse than words. And there it is. Under the letters I lettered as a child. The same fourth layer Marguerite felt through the leather. The light won't take it here either. But the *door* takes it. The wood carries a shape my eyes can't spell — a warmth, a handedness, the way you can tell whose lock you're picking by how the pins were worn before you. Whoever taught me pressed a pen into my fist somewhere near *here.* Not a face. A pressure. A which-way. "You've gone somewhere," Ozzie says. "I found a lock I didn't cut." I take my hand off the frame. "It's mine now, but I didn't cut it. Someone fit it first and handed me the key while I was too small to know it was a key." He's quiet the way he gets before he clings to a small certainty. Then: "Mauve had a coat like Del's. Gray. I only remember because you made her real enough to hang a coat on." I write that down. *Mauve — gray coat — real, remembered.* The pen doesn't fight it; it never fights the saves that are already anchored. It fights the ones I'm about to attempt. Because here's the reason a locksmith refuses a job. You refuse when the client's hand is on the lock too. When opening it doesn't free anyone — it just tells the door where to bite. I've spent nineteen nights hunting whoever taught me, and I understood it as pursuit. It isn't. If I find them — if I read them — the low door in Marguerite's hallway finally gets edges to bill. My teacher's name is the collateral that won't hold still. Finding them makes it hold still. Finding them is how I open my own door. Finding them is the price and the door at once. I said I didn't want to and I'd go anyway. I meant it as courage. Standing in Ozzie's fluorescent hum with a coat I saved and a hand I can't picture, I finally read the wrong lock right: wanting to find them and dreading to find them are the *same tumbler.* The teacher I'm chasing is the confession I've been walking toward since I lettered Iris into the dark. "Wren." Ozzie folds a shirt that isn't his. "When you find whoever it is. What do you do?" The honest answer is I don't know if there's a person left to find, or only a wish that got loose — a resident who once begged to forget and never stopped being granted it. A landlord made of somebody's mercy. You can't arrest a wish. You can only agree to feel what it refused to. "I don't do anything," I say. "I write them down. Real and remembered. Edges and all." He looks at me like he already knows what that costs, because he watched it cost me Mauve's price and kept me anyway. "That's not finding them," he says gently. "That's turning yourself in." I put the pen away. Outside, north of here, an ordinary house at address 12 is still just a house, inert, nobody's. My true door is two miles south, low-handled, patient, waiting on a name the light won't take — and now I know why I've been walking toward it and away from it in the same step for nineteen nights. I close the ledger. The ribbon marks nothing. I've started, lately, to let that mean *I'm coming back.*