The other night my phone rang at 12:30. Though I was in a deep sleep and in my jammies, I answered the phone on the second ring with pep in my voice. I enjoy late-night calls. This one was from a bartender in Duvall. She said a girl at the bar had lost her house keys and needed some locksmith help. I told her that I was pretty far away and that it could take me 45 minutes to arrive. Maybe she should try such-and-such locksmith closer to her location. That’s alright, she said. Mine was the dozenth number she’d called and I was the first to pick up. I quoted a price that was competitive but still commensurate with the task of rolling out of bed for a long drive in the middle of the night. This was followed by muffled voices. Okay, please come, she said.

I was a little apprehensive as I barreled down the mostly empty streets to Duvall, wondering what I was going to encounter. Drunk people can be…interesting. When I arrived at the bar about 40 minutes after we’d finished the call, the bartender immediately recognized me, probably because of my goatee. It’s not something I ever wore before I was a locksmith. I consider it part of my uniform. She pointed me toward the back of the bar where I’d find my customer.

She was easy enough to spot. The only person in that section of the bar was a middle-aged woman in the corner booth, reading a newspaper. She was around my mother’s age—old enough that she could be called comely, but not yet to the point that we could say she was handsome. I approached her table and gave a little wave. She looked up at me, giggled, shook her head, and tried to wave me away. I guess she thought she was out of my league. No, I’m David, your locksmith, I told her. Surprised and embarrassed, she folded up her paper and slid out of the booth.

She followed me out the door of the bar, walked toward my van, and asked if it was mine. When I confirmed that it was, she reached for the locked passenger side door and tried to open it. So it was clear now that she was expecting a ride to her house. I got more of the story once we were underway. She was not drunk. She’d locked herself out of her house and then trekked a mile and a half to the only place where she could use a phone and then sit inside for an hour in the middle of the night.

When we arrived at her house, she went directly into the open three-car garage and pointed at the service door. This is the one you need to open, she told me. Lots of times people try to tell me which specific door they expect me to open. I consider that to be my choice to make. Let me look around for an easier way in first, I say.

I began my routine tour of the outside of her house, searching for an open door or window. She gave me the routine assurances that there were none to be found. As I rounded the second corner of the house, she mumbled something about a bathroom window. I didn’t quite hear her. But when I got around to the final stretch of this lap around the house, I figured out what she was talking about. There was something I’d never run into on a lockout call: a shattered window. I looked at her and raised an eyebrow. We’d already discussed how her identification was locked inside the house and how I’d look at it as soon as we got inside.

Then she came clean, a little chagrinned. After she’d realized she was locked out, she took a hammer to the window, planning to crawl through it. This was sensible enough. It beats schlepping to a bar and waiting for a far-off locksmith to arrive. But once she saw all the jagged glass, she lost courage and decided to call for assistance.

I carefully reached through the hole in the window, unhooked the latch, and slid the window frame out of the way. From the garage, I got a doormat and a stepstool. I draped the rubber mat over the shards of glass littering the windowsill, climbed up on the stool, and slipped in through the little open window. (As a diminutive man who watches his carbs, I can often fit through spaces that are not designed for adult human passage.) Then I went through the house to open the garage door from the inside. We immediately went for her purse to look at her license and then settle up, whereupon I cut the nice lady a spare key to hide in her garage, and then set out on the long drive back to bed.