The Locksmith

Ramon Vega had cut keys for the town of Agua Fría for fifty-one years, and he could have told you, if you had asked him and he had trusted you, who in that town slept easy and who did not. He did not think of it as knowing secrets. He thought of it as the natural sediment of the trade. A man cuts enough keys, fits enough locks, and the houses arrange themselves in his mind whether he wants them to or not. He knew which front doors had been rekeyed in a hurry, the customer not meeting his eye, asking could it be done today, today, please. He knew which old women kept four copies because they kept losing them and which kept four copies because they kept giving them away. He knew the houses with the good deadbolts and the houses where the good deadbolt was on the bedroom door, on the inside, and he never said a word about those, not to anyone, not in fifty-one years. The shop was one room on Calle Sexta with a bell on the door and a cat that belonged to no one and slept in the window like a paid advertisement for the quiet life. In the mornings the light came in low and red off the desert and lay across the wall of blank keys, hundreds of them, hanging on their little brass hooks, each one waiting to be told what door it belonged to. Ramon liked that wall. He liked that every key on it was, for now, innocent. A blank key fit nothing and betrayed no one. It only became a particular key when he set it against another and let the machine grind it into a shape, and that, he had come to feel late in his life, was true of most things and most people. On the morning this story starts, the bell rang and a young woman came in whom Ramon did not know, and not knowing a face in Agua Fría was rare enough now that he set down his coffee. She put a single key on the counter. It was an old key, a house key, worn smooth at the bow where a thumb had pressed it ten thousand times, and Ramon knew before he picked it up that it was one of his. Not just one of his trade — one of his hand. He had cut it. He could not have told you the year but his hands knew their own work the way a voice knows itself on a recording. "I need a copy," the young woman said. "Just one." Ramon turned the key over. On the bow, scratched small, were two letters, and he felt the morning go still around him, because he knew the house. He had cut the original of this key forty years ago, for a man named Esteban Carrillo, and Esteban Carrillo had died without children, and the house on the edge of town had stood empty so long that the desert had started taking it back, and Ramon had been to the auction himself and watched it not sell. "This is the Carrillo place," he said. He did not make it a question. The young woman looked at him for a moment. She had a face he did not know and a way of holding still that he did, the particular held stillness of a person deciding how much of the truth a stranger had earned. "It's my grandfather's house," she said. "I never met him. I just got the deed in the mail from a lawyer, and a box of his things, and this key was in the box." She touched it where it lay on the counter, lightly, the way you touch something that might still be warm. "I drove four hundred miles. I haven't been out there yet. I wanted to have two keys before I went. I don't know why. It seemed wrong to go to a house and only be able to let one person in." Ramon Vega looked at her for a long moment. Then he took the key, and he chose a blank from the wall of innocent keys, and he set the two of them in the machine the way he had fifty-one years of mornings, and over the grind of it, not looking up, he began — because she had driven four hundred miles, and because some doors a person should not walk up to alone — to tell her about her grandfather.