What the Locksmith Keeps

Ovie fixes locks for a living, which is a way of saying he decides who gets to come and go. He is good at it. He has never once locked himself out. The door showed up in his shop on a Thursday, propped against the workbench like a customer waiting for an estimate. Pale blue. A brass knob worn smooth in the shape of a hand that wasn't his. He knew what it was. Everyone in Vantage Hollow knew — the census woman came for these, clipboard and all, and you left them alone. He should have called it in. Instead he crouched and listened. Locks talk to him the way birds talk to some people. This one had no pins, no cylinder, no tumbler to trick. It was already open. It had been open the way a wound is open. Behind it, faintly, a kitchen radio. A woman humming a tune he didn't recognize but somehow could have finished. Ovie's shop was full of keys he'd cut for doors that no longer existed. Houses demolished. People moved on, or died, or stopped answering. He kept every duplicate. He told himself it was thrift. It was not thrift. He reached for the blue door's knob and found it warm — impossibly, insistently warm — and pulled his hand back as if scalded. That was when the bell over his front door rang. A woman stepped in from the rain, clipboard under her arm, olive coat, tired eyes that had counted more thresholds than any person should. "Don't," Marisol said quietly. She was looking at the blue door, not at him. "Not yet. I made that mistake on Tuesday." Ovie looked at the warm knob. Looked at his wall of orphaned keys. "Then what," he said, "am I supposed to do with all this waiting?" Marisol didn't answer. She wrote something on her clipboard, and her hand, he noticed, was shaking.