Original fiction · Chapter 1 of 2
The Key That Didn’t Fit
My brother changed the locks while I was still wearing the shoes I’d worn to bury our father.
The key went halfway in. I tried it upside down, which made no sense, but I wasn’t ready to admit that the brass around the keyhole was newer than the flowers on Dad’s grave.
“You looking for Daniel?” a man said.
He was kneeling by the porch steps, sorting screws into the pockets of a canvas bag. Dad’s old deadbolt lay beside him. There was a strip of blue painter’s tape around it, the way Dad marked everything he thought he might need again.
“I’m looking for my father’s house,” I said. “I thought I’d found it.”
The locksmith, whose name was Al, put down the screw he was holding. He told me Daniel had called him that morning. Someone had taken a key from the hook in the kitchen during the funeral, Daniel said. He wanted the doors secured until the estate attorney could tell him what to do with the place.
The missing key was mine. Dad had asked me to take it from that hook the week he went into hospice.
Daniel pulled up as Al was packing his drill. My brother still had a black tie on, loose enough to turn sideways in the wind. He had taken off his good coat and wrapped it around a grocery bag of leftover rolls.
“I was going to call you,” he said.
“I was going to make tea in my father’s kitchen.”
For a second we stood there like children being made to repeat the rude things we’d said to each other. Then Daniel put the rolls down. “Come inside. There’s something we have to talk about.”
I could see the old kitchen table through the front window. Dad had cut a notch into the edge so I could clamp my pencil sharpener to it. I had spent years telling people I didn’t care what happened to that house. What I meant was that I’d never let myself picture anybody else sitting at that table.
Before Daniel could turn his new key, Al called my name. He had picked up something from the seat of his truck.
“Your dad gave me this,” he said. “Last spring, when I put a rail in his shower. He said if I ever came back to change the locks, I ought to hand it to you myself.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“I didn’t know if you were the daughter or the neighbor. And I’ve had a long afternoon listening to people tell me what your dad would have wanted.”
He handed me a cream envelope. One corner was folded down, a habit Dad had picked up in the parts warehouse so he could open envelopes with his thumb. I expected to see my name. Instead, in the center, where a return address had been crossed out twice, Dad had written another address by hand.
Above it was my mother’s name.
Eighteen years earlier, when she disappeared from our lives, Dad had told us she’d left without saying where she was going. Underneath her name, in his unmistakable handwriting, was a much more recent note.
She still has a key.
