This one sits on the nexus of strange and tragic.

On a Sunday morning the phone woke me at 7:30. I didn’t answer it, but it scuttled my chances of sleeping in. It rang again from the same number at 9:00. Still being Sunday, I again let it go to voicemail. This time the caller followed up with a text explaining she needed new mailbox keys at her house in Brier. It seemed like one of those cases of someone not being able to distinguish between what is urgent and what is inconvenient.

So I called back on Monday morning. The customer reminded me that I’d replaced a front door lock for her about six months prior, and explained that now she needed a new key to get into her mailbox. Her phone manner was strange. Every time I asked a question she would take a long pause before answering, to the point that I kept looking at the phone to see if the call had cut off.  I got to suspecting she was either on drugs or trying to prank me. With some effort, we got through the entire scheduling process.

“Oh, by the way,” she told me, “I also need a new front door because mine was broken down.” I was puzzled that she hadn’t led with this damaged door inquiry, which sounded like the more pressing issue. I told her I could do the mailbox and offered her a couple of numbers to call about a new door. After we ended our call I looked to see if I had any notes from the last job with her and my log just said, “Weird.”

Later that day I got to her house and didn’t know what to make of what I found. The front door, which looked to be in fine condition, was unhinged and leaning against the garage, completely failing to serve its purpose. I went to the front porch and hollered into the house. My customer came to the open doorway looking like a hacker. She was a slight middle-aged woman in sweats and a black hoodie covering a pixie cut. She smiled and greeted me warmly.

“It’s nice to see you again! Thank you for squeezing me in.”

The house matched her appearance better than her sunny demeanor: every light was out, all the shades were drawn, and the few pieces of furniture sat at odd angles to the walls. I thought I could detect a faint odor of diaper bin wafting out.

I did not have a lot of time for this last-minute addition to my schedule so I made quick work of the mailbox and returned to the customer’s doorway with keys and a bill. She wasn’t in sight.  I ventured into the foyer and called up the stairs for her. The diaper smell was unmistakable inside the house. I heard rustling and waited until she came bouncing down the stairs with the explanation that she’d been lining up a handyman to install a new door. I tried subtly to draw her out to the front porch, where the air was fresher. She stopped short at the doorway so we stood on either side of it, me in the light and her in the dark. I wondered then if she suffered from agoraphobia. She pointed to her garage and back doors—both visible from where she stood—and asked if I could rekey their locks. Not eager to be made late for my next one or to spend much time in this strange smelly home, I reluctantly agreed and got straight to work.

When I was done with that I really wanted to leave but a thought gnawed at me. If she hadn’t been outside the house, maybe she did not even know there was a perfectly good door leaning on the wall outside. As I added the extra rekeying work to her bill, I debated asking her about the door. Obviously something strange was going on. I didn’t want to pry into her business and I really didn’t want to invite more work to further delay me. But odiferous home or not, she was a small woman in a house missing its most basic security feature, and I doubted she had lots of extra money to spend on unnecessary doors.

So I asked her what was wrong with the door outside. She looked surprised and said, “There’s a door outside?” That confirmed my suspicion that she had not been out past the front door. She excused herself to go call the handyman back and revise her request, disappearing from view before I could object. I waited for what felt like fifteen minutes for her to come back and pay me for my work. When she did, she asked me to install a new lock on the detached door, which I’d set by the empty door frame as I waited. I was already late and sternly declined. She smiled, said she understood, and issued me some crisp bills that she pulled from a thick envelope. I left feeling both annoyed by the delay and guilty for not having been more helpful.

The next morning she called me at 6:30. It got me up again but I sent it to voicemail and called her back at the start of business. This time she wanted me to come back and put a different deadbolt on her now-reinstalled door. When I arrived her house smelled unquestionably worse, since the front door had been shut and there was no gaping hole in the wall to allow for circulation. I replaced the deadbolt on the front door in spurts, going outside to draw a breath and then working for as long as that serving of oxygen would sustain me. Once it was installed I went out to my van for a tool to make an adjustment to her hinge so the door would fit better in the frame. I was looking down at my phone as I walked back to the house and was startled when I bumped into someone who had stepped into my path. It was a sheriff’s deputy.  Another one stood a few yards away. The only thing I’ve ever seen sheriff’s deputies do is execute evictions, so immediately everything clicked into place for me.

“Please go knock on the front door for us,” the nearer deputy said.

“I don’t really need to knock. I’ve been going in and out.” I considered asking if I could take back the brand new deadbolt I’d just installed on the door, since it didn’t look like I was going to be paid for this work.

 “Just go back into the house, please.”

I complied. Back in the house I started to fiddle with the hinges and tried very hard to focus on the work. But the scene behind me—the deputies brushing past me and grappling with my customer just a few feet from where I stood as she struggled and shrieked—was distracting. At this point I felt a little bit like a collaborator. She entrusted me with access to her home and I basically held the door open for these most unwelcome visitors. I don’t have any philosophical objection to evicting deadbeat tenants but the situation made me consider my duty of loyalty to a paying customer.

Apparently she didn’t hold it against me, since while they dragged her out of the house she was pleading with me to find her phone upstairs and call her adult daughter. When it became evident to her that this wasn’t feasible, she started begging me to call the local police department and tell them she was being abducted by strangers. It took both of the deputies a few minutes to stuff all of her wildly flailing limbs into the back of their vehicle and get the door closed as she kicked, screamed, argued, and cried for help.

Once she was locked in and waiting for medical transport to a mental health facility, one of the deputies explained to me what was happening. They’d been there two days prior with a locksmith hired by the landlord to evict her. She’d shut herself in an upstairs bathroom and they put the job on pause in the hopes of executing the eviction without any injuries. The locksmith—a staple of any standard eviction—took the door off the hinges and put it outside. They spent much of the next two days staking out the house, at one point sending in a drone to see what room she was in. When they saw me arrive and realized what I was up to, they took advantage of the open door to get back in when she had her guard down. I asked about the odor and they explained that the toilets throughout the house hadn’t been flushed in months.

Before long, the landlord showed up in her car. I expected her to be annoyed with me for undoing the work of the previous day’s locksmith. Instead, she paid me for the new lock, hired me to get her some keys for the mailbox, and tried to tip me. She also explained that a decade earlier when she and the tenant signed their first lease, the tenant had been the founder of an innovative startup and in the years since she had shepherded it through an explosive IPO. Subsequently she suffered a complete mental health collapse and stopped paying rent. The landlord posited that it was stress-induced.

A few weeks after this job, my customer—the tenant, not the landlord—called me. She wanted help getting back into the house to retrieve her phone and wallet, and claimed that her eviction was the result of an Alzheimer’s-afflicted homeowner’s bookkeeping blunders. I told her that all I could do was follow up with the landlord. I did that, and the landlord told me about what I might have expected: the tenant was institutionalized with a Schizophrenia diagnosis and I should ignore future attempts at contact. It never came to that, as I haven’t heard from either of them since.

This was one of those reminders to me of the fragility of the lives we build for ourselves. You can be talented, hardworking, and sober in your decision-making for your entire life, and then, like a lightning bolt, misfortune can strike and leave you in ruins. But I suppose that, given the circumstances, this story ended as well as it could have. The sheriff’s deputies carried out an eviction without any injuries, the landlord got her property back, the tenant was extracted from an unhealthy living situation and hopefully got the opportunity for a psychological reset, and the locksmith didn’t get stiffed.