Claimed By
Episode 2 of 3 of Property of Nobody by June Whitaker
“They’re closing you,” Dev said.
He dropped the afternoon bin on my counter hard enough to make the tags jump, which was how Dev Osei delivered news, and then he stood there with his arms folded like he had written the memo himself and wanted to be thanked for it.
“November first, and don’t look at me like that, I heard it off Ruthie in scheduling who heard it off her brother-in-law, so it’s real. Everything goes to a warehouse off Baltimore Pike. You file your claim online, you book an appointment, some kid in a safety vest walks your bag out to your car in a parking lot, and that’s it, that’s the whole human part of it gone.”
“It’s a consolidation,” I said.
“It’s a parking lot, Tess.”
He was right, and I signed for the bin anyway, because the bin did not care.
I did not tell him what I had been doing since June. On the first Thursday after the platform I took Owen Ferris’s items off the public shelf and started putting them in the safe, which was for wallets and phones and the occasional handgun, and not for a paperback. I told myself it was about theft. The safe had a log too. I filled a page of it with one man’s belongings.
The objects got quieter as the summer went. A wristwatch with a cracked crystal, stopped at ten after four. A hearing aid in a drugstore case, the tan kind, the kind an old man wore. A mass card from a funeral home in Havertown, folded twice.
The second week of September the bin came down with a key ring in it. Two brass keys, one small mailbox key, and a red plastic tag from Ferrante Realty with 1109 Winona printed on it in white.
He came at four fifty, before the rush, which he had never done.
“Key ring,” he said. “Two brass. Red tag.”
“It’s in the safe.”
“The safe.”
“I’ve been putting yours in the safe since June.”
He did not ask why. He put his license under the glass and waited, and I did not move to get it, and the fluorescent tube over the counter buzzed the way it had buzzed since 2019.
“House sold,” I said.
“Settled Tuesday.”
“Congratulations.”
“It’s not that kind of thing,” he said.
I opened the safe. I put the keys on the counter between us and kept two fingers on them, which was not procedure, and we both looked at my hand doing it.
“You leave them on purpose,” I said.
“That’s not a question.”
“No.”
“Then I don’t have to answer it.”
He said it without heat. That was the part I could not get past, that there was never any heat in it. A man caught out either got defensive or got charming, and Owen Ferris just stood there being neither, one hand flat on the counter, waiting for me to finish.
“Twenty-three times,” I said. “April through September. Every one of them the 5:41 out of here, car three, and every one of them back in my hands inside two days. You want to tell me that’s careless.”
“I’m careless.”
“You’re the least careless person who has ever stood at this window.”
“Can I have my keys.”
“They aren’t your keys anymore. That’s a realtor’s tag.”
He looked at the keys. He looked at them for long enough that the woman behind him gave up and left, and I heard her shoes going away up the corridor, and still he had not said anything, and I understood that I was going to have to either give him the keys or say the rest of it.
“They’re closing this office,” I said. “November first. After that there’s no window and no ledger and no me. There’s a warehouse in Clifton Heights and a kid in a vest. So whatever this is, you’ve got about seven weeks of it.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay,” he said. “Thank you for telling me.”
He signed the form. His signature came out the same as it always did, slow, pressed too hard, the O closed all the way around. He put the keys in his coat pocket and did not put them in the tote, and I noticed that, and I thought about it for longer than it deserved.
Then he said, “Don’t hold them for me anymore,” and went up the stairs to the 5:41.
I worked the rest of the shift. I logged a stroller, two laptops, a wedding album, and a bag of groceries that had gone over in the heat. I went home to Fishtown and ate standing up at the sink and did not think about it, and the not thinking took about four hours.
The next Thursday the two o’clock bin came down with one item in it.
It was in a small manila envelope the Malvern conductor had written CAR 3 on. A gold wedding band, a man’s, plain, worn thin on one side the way they go after forty years.
I logged it at 2:14. I put it in the safe.
He never came back for the ring.