Chapter 2: The Keys
I got close enough to the open door to smell the inside of the car.
I want to be clear, because of the version that went around later. I never sat in it. I never put a hand on the wheel.
Vanilla and something citrus. A cardboard tree on the mirror.
My mother bought that car used with eighty-one thousand miles on it, the summer I turned eighteen. She drove it three years, then signed it over to me at the kitchen table and made me read the transfer form out loud.
Two coffee cups in the holders. Same lipstick on both lids.
New tires. The little rubber hairs were still on the sidewall of the front left.
The stereo was different. Mine had a volume knob you pressed in to turn. This one had a screen.
The dent in the quarter panel was still there. Nobody had bothered.
I walked the length of it, bumper to bumper, and counted the things that were not mine.
Six. Air freshener, tires, stereo, floor mats, a sun shade on the back seat, a phone mount on the vent. None of them cost much. All of them were decisions somebody made in a car that used to be mine.
Then I stood at the rear window and looked at the sticker longer than I needed to.
“You can keep that on,” Bree said. “I like it. It's vintage.”
It was nine years old. I could have told her the month I put it on.
“Where's the shoebox,” I said.
Four words. My voice came out low and flat. I had not used it at that volume in a long time.
“What shoebox.”
“Hall closet. Top shelf. Pell Street.”
She made her mouth smaller and held it. Her mother does the same thing.
“The house got cleared out,” she said. “There was a lot of stuff.”
“Cleared out by who.”
“Cass, it's cold. Get in and I'll drive you.”
I did not move.
She had two rings on, worn together, a band and a stone.
I did not recognize either. That is not what stopped me. What stopped me was that she turned her hand so I would see them, and then turned it back.
“We got married in April,” she said.
I counted. April was eleven months earlier.
Eleven months earlier I was in the day room on the second tier watching a court show with the sound off, because the sound is always off after nine.
“April,” I said.
“It was small. At the courthouse, actually.” She laughed and then stopped. “Renata came. That's it. Twenty minutes.”
Courtroom 4 is on the second floor of that courthouse. Marriages happen on the first, in a room with a plastic ficus in it. I walked past that room on my way to be sentenced.
“He wanted to tell you himself,” Bree said.
“He had thirty-one minutes.”
She did not ask what I meant.
She looked toward the fence. A car came into the lot and an officer got out and looked at us twice, the way they do.
“So,” Bree said. “The car.”
She took the keys out of her coat pocket.
They were my keys. Same steel ring. Same brass tag from the hardware store on Delaney, which my mother put on to hold the spare.
She held them out flat on her palm.
“Dean says you should have it,” she said. “For now.”
I reached.
Bree closed her fingers.
She did it fast, and she did it looking straight at my face, so it would not read as an accident. It did not read as one.
“There's just a couple of things,” she said. “First.”
“Say them.”
“The title's in his name. It went over in the second year. There was a thing with the insurance, they wouldn't cover a car registered to somebody who's—” She stopped. “It was easier.”
“Say the rest.”
“You'd have to sign a couple of things. That's all. He has them at the house. Ten minutes and it's done.”
The keys shifted inside her fist when her fingers moved.
And I heard my mother, in a kitchen with a yellow wall clock, holding a pen across the table toward me.
Before you sign anything, read the date three times.
She said it about a lease. About a phone contract. About a form from my school. She said it for years, the same eight words, until it stopped being advice and became the sound a pen makes.
I did not think of her once in that courthouse when I was twenty-four. I have gone back over that room many times and she is not in it.
“What things,” I said.
“I don't know, Cass. Paper. Ten minutes.”
The officer was still by his car, forty feet off, not walking away.
Bree's fist was at the level of her stomach, closed, my keys inside it.
Above the fist, on her left wrist, my mother's bangle had slid down and caught on the bone.