Do Not Duplicate

Bridie Twomey sells fetches from behind an orange door on the third floor of a Public Storage in Maspeth. She runs the roll-up door with one hand, rrrrack, and the corridor light falls across a card table, a space heater, a folding chair, and a Key Food bag with the receipt stapled to the handles.

"Every one of you says he only wants to talk to her," she says. "Sit down."

Gideon sits and keeps his parka zipped. Bridie is well past seventy, with Galway still in her vowels after half a century of Queens, and she wears a quilted housecoat over corduroys and a pair of men's Rockports. She holds her palm out flat across the card table.

He puts the hair tie in it. The tie is black elastic with a gold clasp, the kind the CVS on Roosevelt Avenue sells by the card, and long brown hairs are wound into the coil. Hannah pulled it off her wrist at his counter to put her hair up while he cut her keys, and when she shook her hair out to leave, she left the tie by the bell. He kept it in the drawer with the blanks.

Bridie works a hair loose with her thumbnail and holds it up to the corridor. "Off her head or off the floor?"

"Off her wrist."

"That'll do." She takes a candle out of the Key Food bag. It is a Ner Mitzvah memorial candle. The squat tin holds white paraffin, and its paper band says 1 DAY in blue. Gideon lit the same candle on his stove for his father eleven years ago and let it burn while the neighbors brought kugel in foil pans. Bridie strikes a kitchen match and warms the top of the wax until it goes wet, and she lays the hair on it in a loose coil and smooths it under with the back of a spoon.

"Cash," she says.

He sets the envelope on the table. It holds twenty-two hundred dollars in fifties from the Chase on Queens Boulevard. She drops it into the pocket of her housecoat without opening it.

"She comes when you light it, and she goes when it's out," Bridie says. "It burns the one time. Blow it out and you've thrown your money in the river. She'll want what you want, all day long, every bit of it. That's the whole of the spell, so mind what you want."

"And when it's out?"

"She goes home."

"Where's home?"

Bridie winds the hair tie around her fingers. "Where did you get the hair?" She hands it back, and he works it onto his wrist.

He puts the tin in his parka pocket, where it rides cold against his hip. At the door she says, "Light it in the morning."

"Why?"

"Because in the morning they're lucky."

"And at night?"

She hauls the door down between them.

The shop is a slot on Roosevelt Avenue under the 7, wide enough for a counter, an Ilco duplicator, a heel bench, and a pegboard wall of blanks, and every train overhead shakes grit down onto the counter glass. The sign above the gate says SAUL'S KEYS & HEELS. Saul has been dead eleven years. The customers call Gideon Saul, and he answers to it, because the sign is older than he is and a correction takes longer than a key.

He runs the duplicator the way his father taught him. The customer's key goes in the left vise and the blank goes in the right, and a steel tracer rides the cuts of the original while the cutting wheel walks the same path into the blank. The tracer copies everything it touches. A key that has ridden in a woman's coat pocket since her first apartment has a rounded shoulder and soft peaks, and the machine gives the new key the same soft peaks, because a tracer can't tell wear from intent. A copy keeps the day it was cut. You can take brass off a blank, and you can never put it back.

Two weeks ago Hannah ducked under the half-lowered gate at closing in a green raincoat with the hood up. She put a ring of keys on the glass, knocked twice on the counter with one knuckle, tok tok, and pushed her hood back.

"I know you're closing," she said. "I need two of the brass one for the movers, and I work every hour God sends. Please, Saul."

The brass one was her landlord's Schlage, and DO NOT DUPLICATE was stamped into the bow. Do Not Duplicate is a request. Gideon clamped it in the left vise and cut her two copies on SC1 blanks, and while she stood at the counter writing TAPE and PORTLAND on the back of her hand with his ticket pen, he cut a third and dropped it in his apron. He ran the first copy on the deburring brush. She took the second off the tray before he could brush it, and the burr opened the side of her finger, and she laughed and put the finger in her mouth.

"You're a lifesaver," she said around the finger. She wrote her phone number on his ticket and paid eight dollars cash.

The third key hangs on his own ring now, between his house key and the key to the gate.

He tries to wait for morning. He lives on Fifty-eighth Street over a nail salon, close enough to the el that every passing train turns the kitchen window to a shiver, and he sets the tin on the back burner of the stove like a pot he plans to cook in later. He heats a can of lentil soup, eats it standing up, and washes the saucepan. He sits at the table in his parka with the Bic in his hand, and the trains go over, and the salon pulls its gate down, and the window above the sink goes from blue to black.

At the end of the news he gets up and lights it. The Bic catches, tchk, and the wick takes the flame and holds it straight up in the tin. The hair lies under the wax as a dark thread in the white. A 7 comes through toward Manhattan, and the window shivers and settles, and he takes off his parka and hangs it on the hook by the door, beside his key ring.

Two knocks come at the door, one knuckle.

She is standing in the hall in the green raincoat with the hood up and rain on her shoulders. She pushes the hood back, and it is Hannah, with the brown hair coming loose from its knot, and the sleeve falls back from the stripe an oven rack burned across her forearm. The back of the hand that pushed the hood says MOVERS SAT 9 in blue ballpoint.

"Hi, Gideon," she says.

His name is on nothing she has ever touched.

"How do you—"

"You wanted somebody to say it," she says, and she comes in past him, and she smells of rain and cardboard and packing tape.

She goes through the kitchen without asking where anything is. She fills his kettle and puts it on the front burner beside the tin, takes his mug off its hook, and reaches the red box of Swee-Touch-Nee down from the cabinet over the refrigerator, where nobody but Gideon has looked for it since his father died. She drops the bag in the mug and pours the milk in after it. His father made tea that way, and so does he. She looks at the candle.

"That's me," she says.

"I only wanted to talk to you."

She laughs the laugh from the counter, high and short, and it finishes in a cough. "No, you didn't." She turns the burner off under the kettle before it can whistle. "You want me to tell you what to do. You've wanted that since I brought you my boots."

He stands with his hands at his sides.

"Take my coat off."