Episode 212 · The House Key

By seven on Saturday evening, Soles had packed enough for a week and put everything else back in the drawer.

The train left at nine. He had allowed half an hour for the walk and another half for finding the right platform. Packing for three months meant washing the same clothes more often. He could manage that.

The bag lay open on his bed. Shirts, socks, a sweater folded around his wash things. He packed the good gloves last. His fingers still ached from the river when he bent them. Downstairs, a spoon struck the side of a bowl. Maxim was feeding the dogs.

Soles tried the zip. It caught halfway around the corner.

He eased it back, felt along the teeth and tried again. Same place. A small fault, with a cause he could find and a remedy that would work whether anyone agreed with him or not.

I could stay here and fix this all night.

Maxim appeared in the doorway carrying an older canvas bag.

— Take this one.

— Mine’s fine.

— Yours has been fine since you showed it to me last summer. It still doesn’t close.

He put the canvas bag on the bed and stood back while Soles transferred the clothes. The buckle worked. Soles checked it twice.

— Don’t put anything valuable in the side pocket, Maxim said. There’s a hole.

— What do you use it for?

— Invoices. It’s excellent.

Soles had an answer ready about the accountant. He kept it. Maxim rubbed a thumb along the seam of his pants, then went downstairs, leaving his bag open on the bed.

Soles put on his coat. The blade settled against his left ribs; beside it, the agency phone made a hard rectangular weight. The blank card was still in the pocket too. He took it out and left it on the chest of drawers. They had other ways of reaching him now.

The ticket had arrived on the agency phone that afternoon, with a coach and seat number. Even the place he would sit had been arranged.

In the kitchen, Maxim had laid a folded sheet beside Soles’s keys.

— Deliveries, he said. I’ll come before the first one. Tesa can do the evenings. Food’s in the cupboard by the stove, yes?

— Yes. Mina sometimes leaves hers. Give her time.

— I know.

— Tesa hasn’t called back about the evenings, Maxim said. I left her two messages.

— She’ll call. She always does, in the end.

— She always does, Maxim agreed, and looked at his phone anyway, as if it might have changed its mind.

Soles thought of the grit worked into the hem of Krista’s coat, the mortar under the bridge. He could ask where she had gone after she left. He had asked her last night where she had been, and it had cost him her chair at his table.

She asked you to leave it there.

He left it there. It sat in him like a stone in a shoe.

— If you don’t hear from them, Soles said, keep calling.

— I’ll call until they answer just to make me stop.

Soles studied the delivery times. Maxim had fitted the visits into the gaps, leaving himself twenty minutes here, half an hour there. Beside the earliest one he had written Mina’s name. Soles reached for a pen to move that visit later, then put it down. Maxim had customers waiting after it.

He separated the house key from the ring. The split metal resisted his left thumbnail; his right he did not trust with anything that small. Maxim held it open for him. Their hands met over the table, briefly, doing a job.

— There’s a spare under—

— The loose board. I know that too.

— Right.

Mina slept on her blanket by the stove, one paw over her nose. Lucky had planted himself beside the bag. Every time Soles moved it, Lucky moved too, and sat down against it again. He knew the shape of a departure, and so far nobody had done anything to persuade him it was an ordinary one.

— I’ll drive you, Maxim said.

Soles had expected it. In the truck Maxim would complain about the traffic until they reached the station. It would be an ordinary ride until the moment he had to get out. He pictured Maxim waiting while he took his bag, giving him time to say something worth having come for.

— I’ll walk.

— It’s cold. And you’ll have to carry that.

— Slowly, then. I’ve got time.

Maxim folded the paper along its existing crease and put it by the key. Soles wanted a stretch of road on which nobody needed anything from him, including the friend who had come to feed his dogs. He picked up the bag before he had to hear himself say it.

— Thanks for this.

— Bring it back.

— I will.

Maxim pressed the house key flat beside the paper. Soles gripped the buckle until its edge hurt his palm, waiting for another instruction he could agree to.

Maxim went to the sink. Soles stood with the key ring in his hand until Lucky nudged his knee, then put the remaining keys in his pocket and opened the back door.

The path was slick where snow had melted and frozen again. Lucky walked ahead to the gate, stopped at the latch and turned, waiting for the part where Soles let him through.

Soles set the bag down and crouched by the gate. Lucky pushed his nose under his hand. His fur was warm at the neck, thick enough to keep the cold out. Soles scratched the place behind his ear until the dog’s weight leaned into his fingers.

— Stay here.

Lucky leaned harder.

The back door opened. Maxim stood in the light.

— Lucky. Come on.

The dog stayed while Soles rose and opened the gate. When it closed between them, Lucky pressed his nose through the bars. Soles touched it with two fingers, then took the bag and turned toward the road.

At the corner of the yard he stopped and took out his own phone. He wrote The train is at nine. and looked at it. Then he added I’m telling you before. and sent it before he could make it better.

He heard Maxim call again. This time, behind him, claws clicked back along the path.