Key Change

Ellen came in the back way, like always, and eased the Outback into the driveway in reverse until there was just enough room to open the rear hatch.

Farther down the driveway, near the street, a twenty-yard dumpster waited for pickup, already half full. From here, she couldn't make out what was inside.

The bright yellow real estate folder lay on the passenger seat beside her purse, a sticker across the front reading FINAL CLOSING. The flute case rested on the passenger-side floor beneath her jacket, where it had been since this morning, since before the first of today's stops.

Forty minutes each way. Her brother had said, "Swing by, since you're close." Her sister was in Seattle, her brother in Phoenix. Nobody else qualified. A few more stops. Then home, if she hurried, in time for rehearsal.

She picked up the folder, slipped the keys into her purse, and headed for the front porch. A gray tabby lay stretched across a square of late-afternoon sun.

"Hey, you."

One ear twitched. The cat opened an eye, watched her approach for a moment, and then lowered its head onto its paws again. Not hers. Not the last tenant's, probably, though she couldn't have known anything about it.

The aluminum storm door still caught halfway. Her hand found the handle without looking for it. The front door unlocked on the second turn of the key.

The house smelled like move-out: fresh paint, dust, and Lemon Pledge.

She set the folder and her purse on the kitchen counter. Her fingertips rested there a second longer than the task required. Smooth, no grooves left, somebody's resurfacing job, done well and recent enough that she could still smell faint sawdust.

She raised the kitchen blind. Late-afternoon sunlight spread across the floor. The window stuck before giving with a soft pop. Warm air drifted in carrying cut grass. A screen door slapped shut a few doors down.

She crossed to the back door and stepped onto the patio. Chlorine hung faint in the air.

The yard looked wrong.

It took another second before she understood why.

The pool was gone.

Fresh straw covered the broad rectangle where the lawn had been reseeded. Thin green shoots pushed through it in uneven patches, the straw already starting to flatten after a few weeks of rain.

A low hum drifted over the fence. Next door, steam curled from a hot tub beneath its raised cover. So that was where the chlorine smell had come from.

No splashing. No voices.

She'd have to call her brother and ask when, exactly, somebody had decided to fill in a pool without telling her.

A breeze stirred the dry leaves outside the kitchen window. She went back inside.

The refrigerator stood unplugged, its doors propped open with folded dish towels. Cabinet doors hung open. Every drawer had been left open about an inch.

She opened the first one. Empty except for a disposable Bic lighter pushed all the way to the back. She rolled the striker with her thumb. The flame caught on the second try. She watched it for a moment, let the wheel spring back beneath her thumb, and slipped the lighter into her pocket. The cleanup crew missed one. She closed the drawer and opened the next.

Nothing.

Her hand was already reaching for the one beside it before she caught herself. The junk drawer had always been the third one, back when this was still her kitchen. She knew better. Her hand hadn't.

Behind her, soft paws crossed the kitchen floor. The cat had snuck in. It stopped a few feet away and watched her.

"Changed your mind, kitty?"

She opened her purse and took out the foil-wrapped roast beef sandwich she'd made before leaving home, the one she hadn't gotten around to eating. She peeled back one corner of the foil and tore a slice into small pieces.

One cupboard still held a handful of dishes, left behind or forgotten, she didn't know which. She found a Corelle saucer, the blue pattern faded. She wiped the dust off easily with a tissue from her purse and laid the pieces of roast beef on top. She pushed the saucer a couple feet across the floor.

The cat waited until she stepped back, then padded silently across the kitchen and began to eat.

Ellen left the folder on the counter and started up the stairs.

The runner was gone. Narrow strips of darker varnish still marked where the brass rods had held it in place decades before any tenant climbed these stairs.

She climbed to the landing. The air was warmer upstairs. It always had been.

The family room used to hold everybody at Christmas. Now it was bare boards and a strip of afternoon sun.

Her foot cleared the third tread before she realized she'd stepped over it. Some things your legs remember before you do.

She stopped and backed down one step, planting her foot on the stair. It answered with the same long creak it always had.

"No one here to fool anymore."

She continued to the top. Her parents' room was next. Fresh paint and an empty walk-in closet. Not a single thing left behind.

The bathroom door stood open. A new vanity had been installed, a new mirror, too, and the medicine cabinet had gone somewhere else along the way. The white tile floor was the same, at least. She touched the faucet. Cold, the water already off.

She checked the other two rooms on the way past, quick, both empty. Nothing to note.

Her room waited at the end of the hall. Bed gone, desk gone, and only the maple dresser left, the one nobody had bothered to haul out in years of tenants.

"Nobody wanted you either, huh?"

Sunlight reached across the floor. Somebody had patched a small hole in the wall beside the door, and the paint was close, but didn't quite match, catching the light a little wrong every time she moved through it.

She crossed the room and opened the closet. Two cedar hangers hung from the rod. That was all. The smell reached her before she touched them, sharp and clean, and for half a second she was somewhere else entirely. A cedar chest, a window, a version of this room that didn't exist on any inspection sheet. She shut the closet and left.

Halfway down the stairs, she stopped so suddenly she caught herself on the banister. The gray tabby was stretched across one of the lower steps, washing one front paw, then the other, unhurried.

"You're so quiet."

The cat blinked at her, slow and unimpressed. It finished washing, stood, stretched until its front paws reached the next step, and wandered downstairs as though none of this concerned it.

Ellen followed.

She crossed the small foyer at the foot of the stairs to the garage door.

Inside, the garage door opener button was exactly where it had always been. She pressed it. The old motor woke with a complaint, its chain rattling overhead. Rollers chattered along the track as the door climbed a few inches at a time. The little bulb beneath the yellowed plastic cover threw a weak circle over a portable workbench and almost nowhere else.

Gray fur flashed past her ankles. The tabby slipped beneath the rising door before it was halfway open and disappeared into the driveway.

"Well, that figures."

October air drifted into the garage. She pulled the interior door shut behind her.

The workbench stood where someone, likely a tenant, had left it. A coffee can full of screws. Paint stir sticks. A socket set with one space empty. Needle-nose pliers near the edge. She picked them up and worked the handles once.

Still tight. Better than anything in her own garage.

"You're coming home with me."

She slipped the pliers into her jacket pocket. Beneath the bench, an open cardboard box held a handful of shop rags. Under them, a flathead with the tip rounded off. A broken tape measure. Three empty paint cans stacked one on top of another.

“Not exactly buried treasure.”

Her eyes made one slow pass around the garage. Nobody had come back to finish the job. Another thing for the realtor.

Beneath the workbench stood a second box, taped shut. She crouched, pulled it into the light, and turned it so the top faced her.

ELLEN - ROOM

Her father's block printing.

The tape crackled as she peeled it back. The cardboard bowed as she lifted it, and she caught it against her hip before setting it on the bench.

Concert programs. More than she remembered keeping. Elementary school. Junior high. High school.

A marching band schedule slipped to the floor. Under it was a pair of white marching band spats, the elastic yellowed. She laughed, short and surprised.

"I wondered where those went."

A couple of sharpened pencils rolled loose. A banquet program. A name tag, the pin still fastened to the back.

She flipped open one of the high school concert programs.

Ellen Walker, First Chair.

The names beneath hers were familiar, recognizable before she could match them to faces.

Another year. A football stamped in the corner. Marching Band. Holiday Concert. Spring Concert. So many more than she'd have guessed, if anyone had asked.

A folded sheet was inside one of the programs. An adjudication form, the crease running straight through the comments. Beside her name and instrument, someone had written A- in blue ink.

"Still mad about that," she said, to no one, and put it back where she'd found it.

She set the programs aside and opened a blue music folder.

The garage light wasn't bright enough to read the penciled print. She pulled her phone from her pocket and switched on the flashlight.

Photocopied scales. Fingering charts folded into quarters. Contest music covered in notations. A circled key change. Measure numbers boxed in. A tiny star beside one note.

One page carried corrections in red. A different fingering. A slur she'd often missed.

She flipped through what was left inside. One sheet, near the back, separate from the rest.

Humoresque.

She hadn't seen the piece in years. The paper had softened, the folds worn nearly white.

She held it the way she used to hold every piece of sheet music, thumbs across the front, fingers bracing it from behind.

Of course she'd circled it. She used to check for it every time before she reached it.

Her teacher's red printing waited in the margin.

Breathe.

She laughed again. "I always forgot.”

She read the page once, then again, the garage bulb buzzing overhead and her phone's flashlight holding steady on the staff.

Her thumbs shifted against the paper. One finger settled. Then another. She reached the key change before she noticed her hands had started moving at all.

The opener ticked as it cooled. Leaves scraped across the driveway outside.

She folded the music along its old crease and slid it back into the folder. The pliers came out of her pocket and into the box first. The folder went in on top, last.

She carried the box into the kitchen and set it beside the real estate folder. The saucer by the back door was empty, licked clean. She picked it up and set it on the counter.

One last pass through the house. Windows latched. Closets open. Refrigerator unplugged, doors propped. Nothing running, nothing left behind that shouldn't be.

The square of afternoon sun had moved almost to the opposite wall.

She picked up the saucer and tucked it under one arm, then lifted the box and let herself out the front.

The door pulled shut. She turned the key and checked the knob once. The keys went back into her purse.

The tabby was waiting on the porch.

"You're still here?"

It watched her without moving.

"Take care,” she said.

The cat stared. Apparently that was plenty.

The saucer clanged once against the dumpster wall before disappearing under the broken shelving.

The box went on the passenger seat.

Three more stops. The realtor. The post office. Water for rehearsal.

The engine started on the first turn. She pulled straight out of the driveway.

At the first light, she stopped behind a pickup with a ladder strapped into the bed.

Her hands rested on the wheel. One finger moved. Then another, finding a fingering that wasn't there.

The light changed.

She turned left.