Lock and Key(61)
Author: Sarah Dessen

In the end, it took Nate a full twenty minutes to get Lyle in the carrier and to the car, where I was waiting with the others. When he finally slid behind the wheel, I saw his hands were covered with scratches.

“I hope you get combat pay,” I said as he started the engine.

“I don’t scar, at least,” he replied. “And anyway, you can’t really blame the guy. It’s not like he’s ever been given a reason to like the vet.”

I just looked at him as we pulled away from the curb. From behind us, someone was already yowling. “You know,” I said, “I just can’t get behind that kind of attitude.”

Nate raised his eyebrows, amused. “You can’t what?”

“The whole positive spin—the “oh, it’s not the cat’s fault he mauled me” thing. I mean, how do you do that?”

“What’s the alternative?” he asked. “Hating all creatures? ”

“No,” I said, shooting him a look. “But you don’t have to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.”

“You don’t have to assume the worst about everyone, either. The world isn’t always out to get you.”

“In your opinion,” I added.

“Look,” he said, “the point is there’s no way to be a hundred percent sure about anyone or anything. So you’re left with a choice. Either hope for the best, or just expect the worst.”

“If you expect the worst, you’re never disappointed,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but who lives like that?”

I shrugged. “People who don’t get mauled by psycho cats.”

“Ah, but you did,” he said, pointing at me. “So clearly, you aren’t that kind of person. Even if you want to be.”

After the group vet appointment—during which Lyle scratched the vet, the vet tech, and some poor woman minding her own business in the waiting room—we went back to Sabrina’s and re-released the cats to their natural habitat. From there, we hit the dry-cleaners (where we collected tons of suits and dress shirts), the pharmacy (shocking how many people were taking antidepressants, not that I was judging), and One World—the organic grocery store— where we picked up a special order of a wheat-, eggs-, and gluten-free cake, the top of which read HAPPY FORTIETH, MARLA!

“Forty years without wheat or eggs?” I said as we carried it up the front steps of a big house with columns in the front. “That’s got to suck.”

“She doesn’t eat meat, either,” he told me, pulling out a ring of keys and flipping through them. When he found the one he was looking for, he stuck it in the lock, pushing the door open. “Or anything processed. Even her shampoo is organic.”

“You buy her shampoo?”

“We buy everything. She’s always traveling. Kitchen’s this way.”

I followed him through the house, which was huge and immensely cluttered. There was mail piled on the island, recycling stacked by the back door, and the light on the answering machine was blinking nonstop, the way it does when the memory is packed.

“You know,” I said, “for someone so strict about her diet, I’d expect her to be more anal about her house.”

“She used to be, before the divorce,” Nate said, taking the cake from me and sliding it into the fridge. “Since then, it’s gone kind of downhill.”

“That explains the Xanax,” I said as he took a bottle out of the pharmacy bag, sticking it on the counter.

“You think?”

I turned to the fridge, a portion of which was covered with pictures of various Hollywood actresses dressed in bikinis. On a piece of paper above them, in black marker, was written THINK BEFORE YOU SNACK! “Yes,” I said. “She must be really intense.”

“Probably is,” Nate said, glancing over at the fridge. “I’ve never met her.”

“Really? ”

“Sure,” he said. “That’s kind of the whole point of the business. They don’t have to meet us. If we’re doing our job right, their stuff just gets done.”

“Still,” I said, “you have to admit, you’re privy to a lot. I mean, look at how much we know about her just from this kitchen.”

“Maybe. But you can’t really know anyone just from their house or their stuff. It’s just a tiny part of who they are.” He grabbed his keys off the counter. “Come on. We’ve got four more places to hit before we can quit for the day.”

I had to admit it was hard work, or at least harder than it looked. In a way, though, I liked it. Maybe because it reminded me of Commercial, driving up to houses and leaving things, although in this case we got to go inside, and often picked things up, as well. Plus there was something interesting about these little glimpses you got into people’s lives: their coat closet, their garage, what cartoons they had on their fridge. Like no matter how different everyone seemed, there were some things that everyone had in common.

Our last stop was a high-rise apartment building with a clean, sleek lobby. As I followed Nate across it, carrying the last of the dry-cleaning, I could hear both our footsteps, amplified all around us.

“So what’s the story here?” I asked him as we got into the elevator. I pulled the dry-cleaning tag where I could see it. “Who’s P. Collins?”

“A mystery,” he said.

“Yeah? How so?”

“You’ll see.”

On the seventh floor, we stepped out into a long hall lined with identical doors. Nate walked down about halfway, then pulled out his keys and opened the door in front of him. “Go ahead,” he said.

When I stepped in, the first thing I was aware of was the stillness. Not just a sense of something being empty, but almost hollow, even though the apartment was fully furnished with sleek, contemporary furniture. In fact, it looked like something out of a magazine, that perfect.

“Wow,” I said as Nate took the cleaning from me, disappearing into a bedroom that was off to the right. I walked over to a row of windows that looked out over the entire town, and for miles farther; it was like being on top of the world. “This is amazing.”

“It is,” he said, coming back into the room. “Which is why it’s so weird that whoever it belongs to is never here.”

“They must be,” I said. “They have dry-cleaning.”

“That’s the only thing, though,” he said. “And it’s just a duvet cover. We pick it up about every month or so.”