The Cookie at Grandma’s Table

The key

At the stop sign where the gravel meets the blacktop, I looked down at the keys hanging from the ignition.

There were five keys on my ring. Our house. The van. My classroom at the elementary school, where I am a teacher’s aide in the second grade. The padlock on our shed. And one brass key with a strip of pink nail polish painted across the top.

Diane had given it to me the week Owen was born. She had painted the polish on herself so I could tell it apart from the others. “So you can come and go,” she had said, “like a daughter.”

I had used that key a hundred times. To let the dog out when they were at the state fair. To drop off a casserole when Dale had his knee done. To sit in her kitchen by myself one winter afternoon when Nick was on the road and I needed somewhere warm that was not my own house.

I put the van in park at that stop sign. There was nobody behind me for a mile in any direction, only the beans standing brown on both sides.

I worked the brass key around the ring with my thumbnail until it came loose. I dropped it in the console with the gas receipts and the loose change. Then I put the van in drive and pulled onto the blacktop toward Highway 71.

It took me maybe twenty seconds. I did not cry and I did not say anything. I just knew, the way you know when a fever breaks, that I was not going to walk into that kitchen again on my own.

Owen asked from the back seat, “Mama, are we going to the hospital?”

“We sure are, buddy.”

“Can I have a popsicle there?”

I laughed then, a real laugh, and it came out of me sounding like a sob. “If the nurse says yes, you can have two.”