On Fords the door key would also turn the ignition, but not on GMs. After that I was in over my head.
Wanda made coffee. Ibrahim gave her money and she went out after noon and brought back things to eat. Lunchtime was working with food in your mouth.
“Enjoy,” she said. “Put some meat on your bones.”
“Wadiya,” they said, and sometimes they spoke in their own language, hard dry sounds and soft dry sounds, deep in the throat, rapid. There was a word you heard over and over. Yusuf apologized. He said it was nothing personal, it was just easier that way sometimes. I didn’t mind, but hearing them made me thirsty.
“Shufi,” it sounded like.
A key has a shank and a post, it has lands and grooves. A lock has a bible. The air conditioner made a lot of noise but didn’t do much else. And there was the phone.
A stocky guy in a gray workshirt came in with a skeleton key he wanted us to copy. Ibrahim said we’d have to make it by hand but it isn’t called a skeleton key, it is called a ward or bit key—a skeleton key is a master of the type. The guy said he’d come back. Meantime he needed a padlock, something for any kind of weather. I told him I was new. Wanda pulled something off the wall. Chrome-plated, steel shackle guard, interior dust cover.
I took his money, forget his face.
“Stop saying you’re new,” Wanda said. “Just ask. You’re sweating.” She stood close when she talked to you and smelled like cinnamon.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
I said something about boils, went home and changed, came back and took their money. If I didn’t look them in the eye when I asked for it, my hand wouldn’t shake when I touched it. There was no register, only a calculator, a drawer under the counter that opened when you pushed. And suckers for their kids. Count it up at the beginning of the day and at the end. At the end of the day cash went into an envelope in a desk drawer in the office. There was a safe. There was a basement.
The suitcase was full of pornography and dirty underwear. “What half do you want?” the old lady asked Ibrahim.
Cramped and dusty down there, the floor buried. Stock, tools, spare parts in clear plastic drawers, pinning kits, things you could only look for. Mice. Glass block windows. A workbench where they rekeyed locks, cut special kinds of keys like flat or bit keys, which you think is called a skeleton, which is also called a pass key. Sometimes an inch of rain.
Ibrahim held a flame to the blank till it was black. He put it in the vise and used tinfoil and a warding file. In the basement.
The man with the newspaper read an article about a two-thousand-year-old computer found at the bottom of the Aegean Sea. Bronze gears and plates, a hand crank.
A customer came back and said the key I’d made didn’t work. It was one o’clock.
Some of them were transparent and you could see a transistor chip embedded in the blade between the shoulders. You have to measure the resistance of the chip to know which blank to use. Another machine.
A woman who managed apartments, a pound of metal on half a dozen rings. When she tossed them in the air they made a single shining sound. Five of this one and five of this one. She’d need her name on the receipt and it was still one o’clock.
The ignition off a moped. A schoolkid who’d forgotten his combination. Ibrahim threw him out because his shirt said a dirty word.
Just one of this one, two copies of this one, and she lost me. I was new. I gave her suckers for her kids, and when it was slow I cleaned the bathroom.
WANDA said something. Yusef and Ibrahim were out on service calls. They were always out on calls.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” Wanda said.
I told her what I thought she’d said.
“It’s not a word I use casually.”
“Who?” I said.
“Rikki.”
“Doris,” the man with the newspaper said.
“Doris,” I repeated.
“That big fat station wagon that keeps rolling by out front?”
“Now that you mention it.” I wasn’t sure. “What about it?”
“Just keeps rolling by like she’s got nothing better to do?”
“Maybe she doesn’t,” the man with the newspaper said.
“I would if I didn’t have to work.”
“Me too,” the man with the newspaper said. I’d had no idea he was employed.
“She is hooked up, I’m telling you. Set for life. She must have noticed we hired someone—probably checking you out.”
“Probably is,” the man with the newspaper said.
“Who is she?”
“Calls herself a Jehovah’s Witness.”
“Seventh Day Adventist,” the man with the newspaper thought.
“I know what she is,” Wanda said.
“Seventh Day Adventist can do worldly things on Sunday.”
“Rikki’s wrong all week. Nothing against Puerto Ricans but you saw those scratches.”
“Are we talking about one person or two?” It was kind of interesting not knowing who Doris or Rikki was.
“If we are they’re both from hell,” Wanda said.
“She can’t have kids anymore,” the man with the newspaper said.
“Thank God,” Wanda said. “I’m terrible,” she said. “You wouldn’t think I was brought up Catholic.”
“The boy isn’t so bad.”
“Ibrahim treated them like his own.”
“So they were married,” I said.
“Family,” Wanda said. “That’s Ibrahim.”
“Quiet kid,” the man with the newspaper said. “Just sits there with his word puzzles.”
“That’s what broke them up—not what she claims.” With her finger Wanda drew a line in front of herself she would never cross. “I don’t sleep with my employer. That’s rule number one.”
“Maybe she is a Witness.”
“Ten years,” Wanda said.
“Eight.”
“. . . one of those green card things at first . . . they built all this together out of scratch.”
“She’s a good head for business,” the man with the newspaper said.
“I’ll give her that,” Wanda said, “but does that entitle her to an arm and a leg?”
“She got the shop?” I said.
“Everything but,” the man with the newspaper said. “Doris.”
“Sawed-off heifer,” Wanda said. “Goddamn soap opera . . . the house,” she said, “the car.”
I said something just to say something. I wished the phone would ring or a customer would come in, but we were dead in there.
“A lump sum. Child support—let her keep the kids.”
“The boy is nice,” the man with the newspaper said, “but the girl is a bill of goods.”
“But nothing is final.” Wanda sighed. “She won’t sign. Ibrahim goes to court and she isn’t