The shop did what a barbershop does when a child runs into it shouting. It went quiet in pieces. Quentin’s clippers stopped. Odell stopped somewhere between Eddie Murray and the windshield. Big Ray woke and thumbed his hat back off his eyes. The teenager in Quentin’s chair took one earbud out. Only the television kept talking, and the two phones, gospel and not-gospel, still negotiating their peace.
Leon switched off his clippers. He did it slowly, because he had learned a long time ago, in a part of his life he did not visit, that when something in a room was moving fast, the best thing a grown man could do was move slow. He set the clippers on the counter beside the blue jar. He laid a hand on the shoulder of the young man in his chair, a silent apology, and stepped around.
Jayden was holding the string out from his chest with both hands, so that the thing on the end of it hung in the air between them like an offering at an altar. Leon bent down to it.
It was a key. A small brass key, old-fashioned, the kind with a round bow and a short, blunt shaft and three square teeth. The brass had gone the warm brown of an old penny in places and was rubbed bright in others, where somebody’s thumb had worried at it for years. On the bow, stamped in tiny numerals, was the number 7.
“What is that?”
He heard his own voice and did not like it. It had come out lower than he intended, and harder, and Jayden heard it too, because the boy’s face, which had been full of the importance of his errand, began to waver.