I set my tools down on the floor real slow, because there was a light on at the bottom of those basement stairs, in a house where nobody was supposed to have a key but the young couple who hired me. Then I heard, from down in the dark, an old mans voice say, I am sorry. I will go.
The man who had been coming into that basement was not an intruder; he was the man who had lived in the house for fifty years, and he could not stop tending the one thing in it he could not bear to leave.
He came up the stairs slow, hands where I could see them, an old fellow near eighty, more frightened of me than I was of him. He had sold the house to the young couple a few months back, after his wife passed and it got too big and too full of her. But he had kept a key, and he had a lock on that basement newer than all the rest, one he had put on himself years ago, and he had been slipping back in, quiet, when the couple were at work.
Not to take anything. To water her plants.
His wife had kept a little indoor garden down there under grow lights for thirty years, orchids and starts and cuttings she babied all winter. When she died, he could not bring himself to let them go dry. So he had kept coming back to the house that was no longer his, to tend the last living thing his wife had touched, and he had left the light on that day because he heard the garage and hurried out before he could shut it off.
Twenty-two years on locks, and I have opened a lot of doors onto trouble. That day I opened one onto a grieving man watering his dead wifes flowers.
I did not call the police. I called the young couple home from work, and I told them, gentle, what I had found. They were quiet a long time. Then the young wife went down and looked at that little garden, thirty years of a woman she never met kept alive in her basement, and she started to cry.
They did not take the key back. They gave the old man a new one, a real one, his own, and they told him he was welcome anytime, that the garden was his to tend as long as he wanted to tend it.
He comes on Sundays now. He taught the young wife to keep the orchids, and she has taken to it. The two of them are down there most weekends, an old man and a young woman, keeping a dead womans flowers alive.
Some lights get left on by accident. That one, I think, was left on so somebody would finally find him.