Keeper of the Keys (3 page)

Jacki was definitely working up to something, Kat could tell by the thoughtful way she dropped her ice cube in her coffee and swished it around. Finally she cocked an eyebrow and said far too casually, “What happened to that Internet guy you were dating?”

“That didn’t work out.”

“Really? You said the sex was so hot and he had the potential to become real someday.”

“I never.”

“You implied it.” Jacki’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t even remember who I’m talking about, do you? How many men do you see in a given month?”

“Make up your mind, willya? First you insinuate I’m a drudge. Now you’re mad that I do just wanna have fun.”

“Okay, intervention time.”

“Not again.”

“Kat, you have to be careful. It’s crazy—in these times—for you to be running around like a…like a…”

“Hooker too stupid to demand her money up front?”

“You prowl mindlessly. It’s not going to get you a man who loves you and wants to spend the rest of his life with you. You have to know that.” Lunch plates appeared. Jacki hunkered down to her Shrimp Louis, crunching loudly, not like a single woman, but like a complacent one.

“You’re just jealous, stuck for life with an accomplished egghead who loves you madly,” Kat said.

“Take the advice of your wise older sister, who, yes, figured out what it takes to be happy. And it isn’t all Raoul’s doing, I’ll have you know. A person has to achieve a certain integration of self.”

“You know it all, big sister.”

“I do know a few things—”

“You’re getting smug.”

Jacki smacked her hand down on the table, spilling a few shreds of dressing-soaked lettuce. “I’m worried, okay? I can’t tell you what’s going to make you happy. I know what makes me happy: a solid relationship. I love Raoul. He holds me up. I don’t have to spend all my time trying to find renters to lodge in my heart, like you do. You exhaust yourself and you waste your time being unhappy.”

“How else am I going to find love? I don’t know anybody in my condo development. I quit going to church when I was fourteen; going clubbing alone is dangerous. I don’t have friends except you—at least, you were my friend up to five minutes ago. I’m rethinking that now. Everybody meets online these days. It’s safer than you might think.”

“I figured it out,” Jacki said, with the infuriating gaze of an older sister who
had
figured it out. “You don’t know what will make you happy, do you?”

“You’re about to let me know, though, aren’t you?” Kat’s turkey sandwich was huge enough to satisfy King Kong, and was accompanied by a vast pile of fries. Kat poured on the ketchup, hungry.

Her sister speared a soggy shrimp, her steady chewing implacable. “Well, do you? Know?”

“Sure.”

Jacki put her fork down and folded her arms. “Okay, then. What will make you happy?”

Kat said, “Questions are demands, did you know that? Like e-mails. You have the right not to respond. In fact, I recommend that strategy. You can’t imagine how annoyed people get when you don’t respond to e-mails; ergo, fewer e-mails, fewer demands on your time. In other words just because you ask doesn’t mean I have to tell you.”

Jacki smiled evilly. “Meaning you don’t know the answer.”

“It’s insulting, you implying I’m unhappy, you know.”

“Tell me you’re happy. With a straight face.”

“Quit nagging, Jacki.”

“Like you said, I’m your only friend. It’s what friends do. Plus, hey, I brought you something. Damn, where did I put that thing? I cut it out for you.” She pulled out an enormous wad of cash, receipts, gum wrappers, hard candy, coins, and pens from her tiny Chinese silk purse and sorted through it. “Guess I forgot it,” she said, stuffing everything back in somehow. “It was in the
Times
real estate section last week, this article about a mansion being built at Laguna Cliffs. Ultramodern, you know, mucho concrete-o, geometric palm trees, and an infinity pool. Probably list at around four and a half million.”

“What about it?”

“It’s being designed by her husband. Leigh Hubbel’s. Remember, we heard he was an architect? Now I can’t remember his name—sort of common like Jones or Johnson. Shoot. His firm is doing really well. They designed the new history museum in Pasadena, the one with the Native American mummy. Did you know the Chumash buried people in urns, all curled up in a sitting position?”

“No stranger than draining their blood and replacing it with fixative, putting makeup on their poor dead faces, stretching them out in a coffin in some fine outfit, then burying them surrounded by concrete.”

“Geez,” Jacki said, placing a hand on her tummy. “You’ve given this entirely too much thought. So listen, to return to my actual point, Leigh’s husband is described in the news as the next Hockney.”

“I doubt that. Hockney’s the artist, the swimming pool painter, photo-pastiche master. Could you mean Michael Graves?”

“That’s our man. I swear”—Jacki stretched down and rubbed her foot—“all the blood flow gets hijacked down to here.” She tapped her stomach. “I can’t think straight anymore.”

“Did you ever?”

“But let me tell you, the universe is conspiring and even you should listen when that happens. It must say something in your Buddha studies about how the universe tells you things and you should listen.” Jacki, who attended a Quaker church, treated Kat’s interest in Buddhism as an aberrant phase.

“I haven’t got to that part yet, I guess.”

“Anyway, last Friday I went to the cemetery. You know, it’s been six years since he died?” She wiped away a sudden tear as easily as someone brushing off a fly.

“Oh, Jacki. Was that such a good idea?”

“It doesn’t make me sad. It makes me happy to visit him and the folks. You never go, do you?”

Kat did go at times, although never with her sister. She had marked that awful anniversary in private again this year, at home where she could howl into a pillow observed only by the birds outside her window. Death made her so angry. She would never make her peace with it, never.

“Anyway, I wasn’t the only one, turns out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, I was gathering up a bunch of chrysanthemums from the back seat, and who should I see in the car window?”

“You saw Leigh.”

“Yep.” Jacki sat back, smiling as if delivering a wonderful gift. “I got out as quick as I could, but she took off. It takes me a long time to get out of a car these days, you know. Anyway, I thought she looked like hell, haggard, her eyes all swelled up. I know she saw me, but she left anyway. When I got to Tommy’s grave, I found the most beautiful bouquet of irises. She must have left them there. He liked them, remember?”

The bouquet of irises in his kitchen had wilted and died by the time Kat and Jacki had gone to clean out his apartment. “Of course.”

“You two used to be close. You should call her,” Jacki said.

“Oh, you do make it irresistible, reconnecting with a haggard, crying former friend who—Tommy never would have died if—!”

“You’re too harsh—”

“She’s old business. Not your business, by the way. I haven’t seen Leigh since his funeral.” However, the image of Leigh standing by Tommy’s grave did rise up like a ghost before her, strange, unwelcome and compelling, a blurry image seen through a screen of tears.

“Exactly.” Jacki ate her last shrimp. “So I saw her at the cemetery, then I read this article, and I started thinking about the three of you, how golden you were. I was always jealous of how close you and Leigh were, and I don’t think I’ve seen you happy, not really, since Tommy died and you and Leigh quit being friends.”

Kat rolled her eyes and motioned to the waiter. “Margarita, no salt,” she said. “I get it, Jacki, I’m an antisocial flake. Can we move on?”

“Oh, get over yourself. I’m not going to compliment you for your terrific professional success, your ability to be independent and strong and fun and”—Jacki reached over and stroked the edge of Kat’s blazer—“fashionable and loyal and the best friend I could have on earth. But see how cranky you got just then? You have issues and they’ll never go away until you deal with them. What’s the harm in giving her a call?”

“I don’t want to see her. I hate her.” She threw cool margarita down her throat.

Jacki shook her head. “You hate yourself.”

“I gotta go.” Kat put a lot of cash on the table, because although Jacki and Raoul were okay financially, she knew they worried about the baby coming and how they could survive without Jacki working for a while. She reached down and pulled on the leather stacked-heel shoes. “I gotta rush now, off to the liquor store to stock up for the evening’s debauchery. Give the clerk my phone number while I’m at it. Thank goodness wine’s so cheap in California. I’m not yet reduced to drinking plonk from someplace in the world where you wouldn’t even drink the water.” She drank the rest of her drink standing up.

Jacki patted her hand. “You deserve much, much more out of life than a little apartment, a stressful job, and the memory of our brother to keep you company.”

Kat jumped up, hugged her sister, and said, “Enough, okay? You give good advice. If I were an integrated person like you, I would do whatever you say. I’d have two-point-six kids, an eight-hour workday, and a kindly rich fella by my side, hanging on tight to make sure I didn’t slip on an old banana peel.”

Jacki looked her in the eye. “I’m telling you, the stars are aligning. I dreamed about us as kids last night, you and Leigh swinging in the backyard on Franklin Street. You pushed her, and she—oh, she laughed in this itty-bitty-little-girl voice, and then she tickled you until you fell. It’s precious, what you had.”

2

E
smé Jackson bustled around, wiping down the granite countertops in her kitchen, slipping a serrated knife through tomatoes. Her son, Ray, was due for their usual Sunday meal. She had considered something elaborate for dinner but rejected the idea, settling on strata—baked layers of bread, eggs, cheese, vegetables, cooked sausage, and crumbs. Peasant fare. He liked that sometimes.

Fifty-nine, tall, still strong except for occasional breathing problems, she swung around her generous kitchen feeling lucky, so lucky to have a son like Ray, who loved her, who still came to dinner once a week. He was as dutiful as she had been to her own mother, sometimes at great personal risk. Her mother’s old flowered apron, stained with curry from last night’s dinner—or was it the night before’s—covered her carefully chosen slacks and blouse.

She flipped open the cupboard where she kept baking ingredients. She would make chocolate pie, his favorite, she decided, pulling out a box of graham crackers along with a pudding mix. He had eclectic taste in food, liking boxed macaroni and cheese as well as homemade pasta with a creamy béchamel. He loved pudding pie. Big baby, she thought, smiling to herself, stirring whole milk into the pudding mix in her non-reactive aluminum pot.

Humming a show tune, she turned the fire down to medium, stirring with a wooden spoon so that the pudding would not burn. When she finished, she crushed graham cracker crumbs with butter and sugar into a glass pie plate. She dusted the top with crumbs, too. Make it look fun. Ray needed bucking up. Her job made it hard to do the things she had done for him when he was young—she always tried so hard to make him happy, had devoted her life to it, in fact.

Ray filled a glass of water at the sink, then opened the cupboard door and peered underneath. “I sent Lamont over to fix that leak. He said you sent him away. It’s running down the back wall, Mom. Probably down behind the bricks in the basement by now. That’s going to be hard to fix.”

Esmé bristled. “I don’t need your fancy plumber, although of course, I really appreciate how you always want to help me. But as I told you, let me take care of my own home, okay? I’m not entirely useless, you know.”

A dozen maintenance problems always hung like spiders behind the newly painted exterior of the fifty-year-old house on Close Street, Whittier. In the past year, Ray had designed a garage to replace the sagging carport. He had built a gazebo in the backyard, had established plants in the front yard, and added shutters to the windows, creating what he jokingly called “curb appeal.” The house did look good, better than most old houses. However, the chimney blew smoke. The floors were so uneven you could roll a ball up and down them.

“I could build you something nicer,” Ray said, looking around.

“Admit you love this place.”

“Kind of. This kitchen. The old range. Even though the outside changes, the inside stays the same.”

He always said that. Although he wished she would move on, he took comfort from what didn’t change, just like she did: the pink and green bathroom tile, the checked curtains above the kitchen sink, the linoleum on the floor of the den. This was the place where they had stopped moving and Ray had finally made some friends.

For his own home, he had designed a showplace.
Architectural Digest
had featured it last spring. Of course, Ray’s house had too few lamps, Esmé thought. The couches weren’t comfortable. You couldn’t leave a book lying around without the place looking messy. Too big and too clean, it was no wonder Leigh had problems with it.

Ah, but here they could relax. Home.

Leigh never did understand Esmé’s house on Close Street. So many times she had harped on replacing the fixtures in the bathroom, installing a new stove, insulating the attic, removing the old asbestos, rebricking the uneven basement walls. Esmé had refused and Ray had backed her. “Leave it true to its time period,” he said.

“Why not cherry it up?” Leigh had persisted. “A Nelson sunburst clock. Basket chairs. Let’s turn the back patio into a real lanai, with netting and colored-glass balls.” This was not long after she and Ray had married, and their hands had always touched as their bodies leaned toward each other.

“No, thanks, Leigh, although you are always so full of helpful suggestions, aren’t you?” Esmé had said as kindly as she could considering how upset these suggestions made her. “I come home after a long day of checking out people’s groceries and water the sweet peas against the back fence. I run the water in the sink, which fills up a lot quicker than your water in your fancy new house. My toilets don’t spare the water, either, and the wall furnace may be rusty, but by God it heats the place in two minutes flat.”