Bette did not want to go there. The simple solution would be for her to have Eddie return the keys. When Paul came home her son would scamper over and do the good deed and Bette would be inside her own house and that would be that.
She reached down and picked up the keys. There was a fob with the seal of Burham Community College, a couple of house keys and two industrial types with serial numbers stamped into them, a bike-lock key, and, the largest item on the ring, a plastic poker chip held in place by a hole drilled through its rim.
The chip was worn down, its serrated edges smoothed over. It had once been red but now was only flecked with faded spots. Still visible in the center was a big number 20. Paul must have won twenty bucks at one of the fake riverboat casinos at the state line. Or maybe the chip was all that remained of a two-thousand-dollar stake. She turned the chip over and saw NA on the other side. The letters were exotic and stylized, like a tattoo, sitting inside a square set on its corner like a baseball diamond. In the fading evening light, she saw some writing in the open areas of the chip, but it, too, was worn down and illegible save for a few letters—a g here, an oc, and what looked like vice but could have been roit or ribs or any four-letter word.
Across the street, the kids were playing Punch Ball against the Patel garage door. Bette took the keys inside to hold on to until she could assign Eddie the mission to return them.
Dale was on her laptop in the living room, watching YouTube videos of horse jumping.
“You busy?” Bette asked her. Dale did not answer. “Hey, kid-o-mine,” she said, snapping her fingers.
“What?” Dale did not look up from her computer.
“Can you google something for me?”
“Google what?”
“This poker chip.” Bette held up the key chain.
“You want me to google ‘poker chips’?”
“This poker chip.”
“I don’t need Google to tell you. That is a poker chip.”
“Where is it from?”
“A poker chip factory.”
“I am going to bounce this off your head if you don’t google this.”
Dale sighed and looked at her mother and the key ring and the poker chip and rolled her eyes. “Okay! But can I just finish this?”
Bette showed Dale the detail of the chip—the faded red, the 20, the NA on the other side with the rubbed-out letters—leaving the key chain behind to go wash her hands of pizza crumbs. She was loading the dishwasher when Dale hollered something from the living room.
“What?” Bette called back.
Dale came into the kitchen carrying her laptop. “It’s a thing for narcotics.”
“What is?” Bette was putting silverware into the top rack of the dishwasher.
“The poker chip,” Dale said, showing her mother a collection of images on her computer. “NA is for Narcotics Anonymous. Like AA, but for narcotics. I entered poker chips with NA and a site came up, then I searched for images and there you go.”
Bette was looking at the same design as was on the key ring. NA was in a baseball diamond, with the words Self, God, Society, Service in the open spaces.
“They give them out to celebrate ‘sobriety,’” Dale said. “That means for not doing drugs. For thirty days on up.”
“But this one says twenty.” What was Paul Legaris doing with a poker chip from Narcotics Anonymous?
“I think that means twenty years,” Dale said. “Where did you find these keys?”
Bette hesitated. If Paul Legaris had anything to do with drugs or Narcotics Anonymous, she didn’t want Dale to know until she knew more herself.
“Found it someplace,” Bette said.
“I need to google anything else? Potato chips or the rules for poker?”
“No.” Bette went back to loading the dishwasher. When she was finished she called Maggie.
“Sure, Narcotics Anonymous,” Maggie told her. “AA for drunks. CA for cokeheads. They have an Anonymous for everything.”
“NA is for junkies?”
“Not narcoleptics.” Maggie was curious. “You sure they are his keys?”
“No. But they were in his driveway, so let’s assume—which will make an ass out of you and me…”
“Guys in twelve-step programs always sleep with someone else in the twelve-step program. Sarah Jallis had a niece who married a guy from her AA group, but I think they divorced later.”
“If Paul Legaris is in NA, has been in NA for twenty years, I wonder what for.”
“Well.” Maggie paused. “I’d guess narcotics had something to do with it.”
Eddie and Sharri came in an hour later, wet from the Patels’ garden hose. An hour after that, all three kids were bathed and in front of the PlayStation watching a movie in HD. Bette was in the kitchen on her iPad, looking up Narcotics Anonymous on website after website. She did not hear the knock on the front door.
“Professor Legaris is here.” Eddie had come into the kitchen. Bette looked at her son with no reaction. “He’s at the front door.”
And there he was, on the porch, just on the other side of the doorway, dressed in jeans and a white shirt with leather deck shoes on his feet. Bette closed the door slightly behind her to block the sound from the movie.
“Hi,” she said.
“Sorry to bother you. I wonder if I can use your backyard to access my backyard.”
“Why?”
“Because I am a knucklehead. Locked myself out of my house. I think my sliding door is unlocked. I’d go over my own fence but I’d land in my garbage cans.”
Bette looked at Paul, at the same face that had brought her a HoneyBaked ham a month before, at the same guy who washed his car on Friday and thought her kids were a hoot, the neighbor who made his own telescopes and fixed old typewriters. Pop! Paul Legaris is sitting in a circle of men and women, all on folding chairs. He is listening to Daniel, the skinny redhead, talking about his days scoring heroin. Paul nods his head, recognizing his own behavior of twenty years prior.
“Wait right here,” Bette says.
She returned seconds later with the key chain in her hand.
“My keys,” Paul murmured. “You swiped my keys? That’s a joke.”
“They were in your driveway. I thought it was a big bug, but nope.”
“My car remote must have fallen off without me noticing, one more event to which I am oblivious. I had no clue where I’d lost them, so thanks.”
“Credit Greene Street and its good neighbor policy,” Bette said. Now would have been the time for her to close the door on any more interaction with the guy who lived next door, the guy who wore flip-flops, the guy whom she had been avoiding since she had moved in. But she surprised herself with a question. “What happened to that Daniel fellow with the red hair and the lofty vocabulary?” she asked.
Paul had turned to go but stopped, facing Bette in the doorway. “Ah, Danny.” Paul paused. “He’s in Kentucky.”
“Kentucky? He from there?” Bette was now leaning in the doorway, casually, comfortably. She found herself relaxed with Paul in her doorway, something she had never felt, not since that first Are you doing anything tonight?