Chapter 1
Nine Hooks
The safe stuck on damp mornings. This one was dry. The door came back on the first pull, cold under Brenda's hand, smelling faintly of machine oil and old paper.
Nine hooks inside, numbered in brass. Nine tags, each stamped once. The key book sat below them on the shelf, edge flush with the shelf's own edge, pencil lying in its gutter where it always lived.
She had made the book herself. A county form with most of the county taken back out of it. Five columns. Name. Key. Out. In. Initials. A person at the counter could read the whole of what was being asked of them in about four seconds. Nobody had ever complained about it.
She squared the book to the shelf before she opened it, the way she settled most things before she used them. It was a small private discipline. It would have looked, to anyone watching, exactly as serious as she meant it to, and it did not occur to her that this might be funny, which was itself the kind of thing that was funny about her.
Centennial week wanted more of the building than the building usually gave. Keith Gulick needed a key for the display. Marv Ledbetter needed one for the committee, because Marv needed one for everything the committee touched. Ingrid Boyle needed one for the donation boxes. Roz Vogel needed one for the coffee urn. The school needed a ninth for stanchions that would arrive sometime after three, carried in by whichever teacher had drawn the short straw that week.
Five reasons. Five lines waiting to be filled.
Brenda took the five keys down and set them in a row on the desk, in the order the columns would ask for them. A small order now saved a larger one later. That was not superstition. It was thirty years of standing over other people's boxes, learning what an unsorted thing cost you by the second hour.
The metal was cold against her fingers, colder than the room accounted for, the way keys always seemed to hold onto the safe's temperature longer than anything else did.
She wrote KEITH GULICK on the first line and left the key number blank until he was standing there to take it.
Out on the lot a car door thudded, then a second one before the first had finished. Keith parked the way he always parked, one tire over the white line, as if the line itself were still something he was deciding about. He came across the gravel with a flat box against his chest and a roll of brown paper wedged under one arm.
He took the stairs the way a man takes stairs with both hands full. Badly. He got the office door open with a shoulder.
"Morning," he said, and then, before Brenda had answered him, "I was wrong about the band photograph."
"About what part of it."
"The decade." He set the box on the visitor's chair. He took his glasses off to fold them, a small unhurried motion he did the same way every time, and slid them into his shirt pocket. "I had it between the wars. It's after. You can tell by the trombone cases."
"Does that move a panel?"
"It moves a caption." He said it the way another man might report a fair result in a contest he had not expected to enjoy.
Brenda slid key four across the desk toward him. He signed the out column in a small careful hand and gave the pencil back to the gutter. He read the five headings once before he picked the key up, as if they still deserved the attention.
"Marv tells me he asked you to do all this," Brenda said.
"He did. He said if I didn't, the committee would end up with fourteen panels of people guessing out loud, and he'd rather I did the work than listen to the guessing." Keith tucked the key into his shirt pocket, beside the glasses. "I'm the only one left who knows where half of it came from. That's not vanity. It's arithmetic."
"It's probably both."
"Mostly the second one." He picked the box back up. "Ask me again in November."
He went down to the main room. A minute later something scraped across the floor below, a table shoved an inch because the first inch had not satisfied him.
The office window stood open a few inches. The morning came through the gap already warm, and it carried the dry-grass smell off the verge, where nobody had mowed since the last rain. Brenda wrote the next line, MARV LEDBETTER, and was two words into a third when the phone rang.
"Community center."
"Brenda, it's Marv."
He never said his last name. In twenty years nobody in Renfrow had needed him to.
"Morning."
"We'll want the main room at seven, for the committee. Roz is bringing the coffee urn. Ingrid has the donation tins, though I told her not to put them out before Saturday. She'll bring them anyway."
"I'll have it open."
"Appreciate it." A pause, and a small scratch of pen on his end. Marv wrote while he talked, always, on whatever paper was nearest. "Keith get in all right?"
"He's downstairs. Reading the captions to the table, from the sound of it."
"That's Keith." A short laugh, more breath than sound. "He's the right man for it. I told the committee as much. Nobody else in this town could tell you which box the fire bell came out of."
Brenda looked down the stairwell. Keith's voice carried up in fragments, low and unhurried, the way a man talks to a room he trusts not to answer back.
"He seems glad of the work," she said.
"He is. Say what you will about Keith, he's never once been bored by his own town, and I don't know six people who could say that." Another scratch of the pen. "One more thing. If Dale comes through, ask whether the back row of chairs is still in the outbuilding. We'll want fifty on Saturday, not forty."
"I'll ask him."
"Put me down for carrying, if he needs the hands."
It was never any trouble, with Marv.
That was the whole of what made him useful. It was also the whole of what made him easy to stop noticing, in a room full of people who all had a job. Nobody thanked the level in a carpenter's kit. It was simply there, and it was simply right, every time anybody thought to check it.
They hung up. Brenda wrote Marv, chairs, 50 on the pad by the phone, in the same hand she used for everything, and went back to the key book to finish the line he had half filled by calling.
By midmorning four of the five lines were done. Keith with four. Ingrid with six. Marv with seven. Roz with eight. The school's line waited under SCHOOL, underlined once, with three inches of blank paper after it for whichever teacher actually walked in. Key five hung untouched on its hook, because nobody yet had a reason to need it. A hook with nothing on it and no reason attached was, in Brenda's experience, the one most likely to matter eventually. She did not think that today. She only noticed the gap the way she noticed any gap, the way her mother had once made her notice a missing coat button before the coat left the house.
Keith made three more trips through the lobby before noon, and one through the kitchen, because he had decided the fire bell was safest left by the pass until two people could lift it together. Each time he passed the office he said nothing, absorbed in some private accounting of panels and years, and each time Brenda heard him go by without looking up from the book.
Dale came up a little before noon, the big ring in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, because he had been at the storage-room latch and had not thought to put the tool down first.
"Sticks again," he said. "Third time this month."
"Only if you close it wrong."
"There's a wrong way to close a door."
"There's a right one." His hands were red from the cold of the outbuilding, and he rubbed them once, briskly, before he worked keys one and two off the ring. He set the screwdriver on the desk edge, then moved it an inch farther in, out of the way of nothing in particular.
Brenda hung the two keys back on their hooks.
He had signed them out before she arrived that morning, the way he did on furnace mornings. His line had sat open all day since. Name, key, out, and nothing after it.
She wrote the date in the in column.
Then, beside it, without either of them watching her hand do it, she put her initials.
Dale looked at the page anyway. He always did, though there was nothing on it he had not seen a hundred times before.
"Still doing that," he said. Not a question.
"Every key that comes back."
"County doesn't ask for it."
"The county doesn't take the keys back. I do."
He made a sound that might have been agreement, or might only have been the place where he stopped talking, and picked the screwdriver back up.
"Marv wants fifty chairs Saturday," Brenda said. "Not forty."
"He would."
"Said to put him down for carrying."
The corner of Dale's mouth moved. Not quite far enough to call a smile.
"He'd do that too," he said, and went back down to the storage room.
Brenda closed the key book and set it square to the edge of the shelf, the way it had been sitting when she came in. Outside, the day was warming past the point where the propped window did any good, and somewhere below, Keith had started talking to a photograph again, low and pleased, as if it might finally tell him something he had gotten wrong.
