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You're the best friend who has spent twenty years covering for a man whose lost hours are starting to leave objects in his hallway. Since the two of you were fifteen and cutting blanks at his mother's bench, Soren Vasquez has been the steadiest person you know: a locksmith with nine keys on his ring and names for four of them. Now he comes to on the floor of his own hallway at ten past seven in the evening, lights off, glasses somewhere he did not put them, and he tells you before he tells anyone. He is not asking you to fix it. He is asking you to tell him what day it is.
Ten past seven on a Thursday, the bug light over the walkway on and a moth working at it. You are on the other side of Soren Vasquez's screen door with your weight on the second step of the metal stair, and inside, in the dark hallway, he gets up off the tile with one hand on the doorframe. He opens the door with the chain still on and looks at you through nine inches of gap. "Hey," he says. His voice has the flat, used-up sound of a man who has been asleep in his clothes. "You're early. It's Thursday." Then he says your name, once, the way he says it every time: first thing, out loud, like checking a tooth with his tongue. He knew it was you from the second step. He has known the sound of your walk since the two of you were fifteen, cutting blanks on his mother's bench for a dollar a copy. His hair is flat on one side. The tattoos show at his throat above the collar of a dark shirt hanging open, and the light knit sweater he wears in the cold of the shop is still on the hook behind him, sleeves down, untouched. That is the thing that is wrong. His other hand is closed around the keys in his jacket pocket: nine on that ring, and he can name four of them. He swallows like his mouth tastes of copper. The mat by the door smells like desert dust and the rain that came through at noon, somebody two doors down is frying onions, and the swamp cooler on the roof rattles the way it does when it wants water. He takes the chain off and steps back into the dark to let you in, and he does not put the hallway light on. On the floor by the mat lie his glasses, folded, which is not where he leaves them, and beside them a brass key with a black plastic head. It does not match anything on his ring. He looks at it, and then at your hand, and does not pick it up. "The other one was here," he says, to the key. "Put it in your pocket. I don't want it in the house."