The Key My Husband Forgot I Had

I took it down. I held it against my face for a second, and I will admit that is the one time my eyes stung.

Then I folded it in thirds, the long way, and in half, and laid it on the counter beside the register where whoever opened in the morning would see it first.

It took me a minute to work the brass key off my ring. My thumbnail is not what it was. When it came free it left a pale mark on the ring, a little ghost where it had rubbed for twenty-six years.

I set the key on top of the apron, dead center.

I thought about leaving a note. I had a pencil in my hand. But I could not think of one thing to write that the apron and the key did not already say better.

I locked the front door from the inside, turned the deadbolt, and went out through the stockroom. The back door has a spring latch. It locks itself behind you, and once it shuts you cannot get back in without a key.

I pulled it until I heard it catch.

That was the last time I was ever inside Crandall Hardware.

Then I walked across the square.

On the south side, catty-corner from the courthouse, there is a low brick building with a loading dock and a faded sign that says Tolliver Farm and Feed. It closed two winters ago when the Mayes brothers retired. It had been sitting empty since, with a sun-bleached calendar still hanging in the window.

Ray Burton owns it. Ray has bought his fence staples from me since before Kim was born. The Friday before the hearing I had gone out to his place and stood in his barn lot and told him the truth, which was that I was about to be fifty-one years old with a ten-year-old Buick and six thousand dollars, and that I knew exactly one trade.

“What do you want it for?” Ray asked.

“I’m not sure yet. A counter, to start. I can cut keys if I can find a machine. I can fix a screen and sharpen a mower blade and tell a man what he needs.”

“You got stock?”

“No sir.”

“You got customers?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out.”

Ray chewed on that. Then he said four hundred a month, and he would turn the water on himself, and I could pay him when the check came. We shook on it over the tailgate of his truck. That was the whole lease.

So on Monday evening I let myself into the feed store with a key Ray had left under a brick. It was cold and it smelled like molasses and old burlap. There was a long plank counter, a wall of empty shelves, a potbellied stove that had not been lit in years, and a bathroom with a sink the color of weak tea.

I had a cot from my sister Brenda’s garage. I had a card table, a coffee maker, two folding chairs and a broom. I had moved out of the house on Maple in August and had been in Brenda’s spare room ever since, and I could not stand one more night of her being kind to me.

I swept until ten. Then I sat on the cot and called my daughter.