Lock and Key Read Free Page A

was, I was doing just fine on my own, or at least as well as I’d ever done with my mom. Which wasn’t saying much, I know. Still, in a weird way, I was proud of myself. Like I’d finally proven that I didn’t need her, either.
    As it was, though, the dryer did die, with a pop and a burning smell, late one October night while I was making macaroni and cheese in the microwave. I had no option but to stretch a clothesline across the kitchen in front of the space heater I’d been using since the propane ran out, hang everything up—jeans, shirts, and socks—and hope for the best. The next morning, my stuff was barely dry, so I pulled on the least damp of it and left the rest, figuring I’d deal with it that evening when I got home from work. But then Ronnie and Alice showed up to replace some supposedly broken front-porch slats. When they saw the clothesline, they came inside, and then they found everything else.
    It wasn’t until the day they took me to Poplar House that I actually saw the report that the person from social services had filed that day. When Shayna, the director, read it out loud, it was clear to me that whoever had written it had embellished, for some reason needing to make it sound worse than it actually was.
    Minor child is apparently living without running water or heat in rental home abandoned by parent. Kitchen area was found to be filthy and overrun with vermin. Heat is non-functioning. Evidence of drug and alcohol use was discovered. Minor child appears to have been living alone for some time.
    First of all, I had running water. Just not in the kitchen, where the pipes had busted. This was why the dishes tended to pile up, as it was hard to truck in water from the bathroom just to wash a few plates. As for the “vermin, ” we’d always had roaches; they’d just grown a bit more in number with the lack of sink water, although I’d been spraying them on a regular basis. And I did have a heater; it just wasn’t on. The drug and alcohol stuff—which I took to mean the bottles on the coffee table and the roach in one of the ashtrays—I couldn’t exactly deny, but it hardly seemed grounds for uprooting a person from their entire life with no notice.
    The entire time Shayna was reading the report aloud, her voice flat and toneless, I still thought that I could talk my way out of this. That if I explained myself correctly, with the proper detail and emphasis, they’d just let me go home. After all, I had only seven months before I turned eighteen, when all of this would be a moot point anyway. But the minute I opened my mouth to start in about topic one, the water thing, she stopped me.
    “Ruby,” she said, “where is your mother?”
    It was only then that I began to realize what would later seem obvious. That it didn’t matter what I said, how carefully I crafted my arguments, even if I used every tool of evasion and persuasion I’d mastered over the years. There was only one thing that really counted, now and always, and this was it.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s just gone.”
    After the tour, the pond reveal, and a few more awkward moments, Jamie and Cora finally left me alone to go downstairs and start dinner. It was barely five thirty, but already it was getting dark outside, the last of the light sinking behind the trees. I imagined the phone ringing in the empty yellow house as Richard, my mother’s boss at Commercial Courier, realized we were not just late but blowing off our shift. Later, the phone would probably ring again, followed by a car rolling up the drive, pausing by the front window. They’d wait for a few moments for me to come out, maybe even send someone to bang on the door. When I didn’t, they’d turn around hastily, spitting out the Honeycutts’ neat grass and the mud beneath it from behind their back wheels.
    And then what? The night would pass, without me there, the house settling into itself in the dark and quiet. I wondered if the Honeycutts had