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and about, puttering in the yard or pretending to do maintenance work. As the weather got warmer you saw her more often – one summer she painted the front steps twentynine times, cordoning them off with elaborate structures of string and misspelled signs – in winter it was hopeless to try and rouse her. She didn’t like leaving the house, so sometimes I’d go on a beer run for her. I’d hung with her a few times on the porch, drinking beer, listening to her rambling on about her life. Sometimes, very rarely, a story would emerge with startling clarity, a narrative she’d told a thousand times but that still retained some kernel of real experience. There was a son, who never visited her but had a job out in Brampton, or sometimes Aurora. There was the time she dated a pro hockey player. The time she got raped by a doctor in a hospital. And every now and then she’d look at me, really see me, and the sudden intensity of her gaze would be too much. It was how I imagined an angel would look at you.
    But mostly she hid, and she drank. I slipped into the porch outside her apartment on the main floor of the house and started banging with my fist. Bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang, bang, bang. I worked the door over for a while, then for variety, leaned out and whacked on the window. “Izzie! Izzie!” Finally I gave the door a couple of kicks with my red shoes. I was rewarded by shuffling sounds and a voice on the other side of the door.
    â€œComing, jeeze, I’m coming fast as… who is it?” I heard a sort of wet-flour-sack noise as she slumped against the inside of the door.
    â€œIt’s Ruby. I’ve locked myself out.”
    â€œRuby, Ruby…” she mumbled.
    â€œI need the key to my apartment!”
    â€œI don’t got no keys. Landlord took ‘em.”
    â€œOpen your door, Izzie, let me talk to you.”
    â€œI tell you, I got no keys!”
    â€œI don’t care. Open up!”
    â€œFrank took ‘em away.” She was fumbling with the doorknob. I watched, agonized, as it turned first one way, then the other. Finally the latch clicked and the door opened toward me. Izzie’s white potato face peered out, frizzed orange hair above bulbous mascara-ed eyes, her lips pale and slack and wet. The apartment smelled of wet newspaper, old food and stale beer. Izzie herself just smelled like stale beer. I tried to look her in the eye, but the watery orb kept sliding away.
    â€œIzzie, I know you’ve got the masters in there somewhere.”
    She raised her voice. “I tell you Frank took ‘em, said he was making copies.”
    â€œYou just don’t want to go to the trouble of looking.” She started to close the door. I jammed my foot into it, but she took the knob in both hands and threw her weight into it. My foot pinched. I reached into the opening and placed my hand on hers where they knotted over the knob, patting her knuckles in what I hoped was a comforting way. “There, there. It has to be done. It’s the only way I can get back into my apartment.”
    She sagged forward, panting, then struggled back again with something between a groan and a sob. My foot pinched again. “For fuck’s sake, woman!”
    She let go the doorknob at once, and the door swung out and open. The apartment was dimly visible in the light filtering through the sheets she had hung over every window. The sheets sported children’s illustrations of fairies, all flowers for caps and dancing with mushrooms. The front room was crammed: piles of newspapers, empty beer bottles, cardboard boxes spilling more paper, a couch and a mattress on the floor. It was the first time I’d seen the inside of her place. She led the way to the kitchen at the back of the apartment, mumbling as she always did. “This way… keys might be in the cupboards… might have moved them there… working on the place, you know… that’s