“Mom, her parents are here early. They want to rest. Where is the key to your room? We can’t get the door open.”
I showed the message to Helen, who chuckled and handed me a plate of warm cookies.
At my house, Susan was already complaining. She was the kind of woman who wiped her finger across door frames to check for dust.
She would have walked into my living room, dropped her heavy leather bags onto my hardwood floor, and demanded to be shown to the master suite immediately.
Leo, sweating through his shirt, would have grabbed the handles of her suitcases and dragged them up the stairs.
He would have approached my bedroom door, reached for the brass knob, and given it a twist.
Nothing.
He would have jiggled it, his panic rising.
Sarah would have marched up the stairs behind him, shoving him aside to try it herself. But the dead bolt was solid steel.
There was no spare key under a mat. There was no hidden trick. The door was an absolute, unyielding boundary.
Susan would have stood in the hallway, her arms crossed tightly across her chest, tapping her expensive leather boot against the floorboards.
“Well,” Susan’s voice would have echoed in the tight space. “Are we supposed to sleep in the hallway? Sarah, I thought you said you had this house perfectly organized for us.”
The situation in my upstairs hallway rapidly deteriorated.
Leo later confessed the details to me, though I could have guessed most of it myself.
Sarah, desperate to save face in front of her demanding mother, ran down to the kitchen and returned with a metal butter knife.
She shoved the dull blade into the keyhole of my commercial gradede deadbolt, twisting it frantically. She scraped the paint and scratched the brass, but the lock didn’t so much as click.
With a sharp snap, the tip of the knife broke off entirely.