Eleven Keys Under the Christmas Tree

Agnes’s key

There was one key I still had to take care of.

At the end of January I went to the hardware store on Main and had one more cut from my own. It cost two dollars and forty cents.

I asked the kid at the counter for a red ring to put it on, and he found one in a drawer.

I put a cup hook into the wood trim beside the front door, right above the little hall table, at a height where a woman with a walker could reach it without bending. I hung the key there.

The next Sunday, Jordyn picked Agnes up after church, the way she had started doing every week. When they got to the front door, I was standing inside the glass, and I did not open it.

Agnes looked at me through the glass and frowned. Then Jordyn leaned down and said something in her ear, and Agnes looked at the doorknob, and then down at the red ring on the key in Jordyn’s hand.

Agnes put the key in the lock with her own hand. It took her a minute, because her fingers are stiff and the old mortise lock is heavy. Nobody helped her. It clunked. She pushed the door open herself.

She stood in the hall breathing a little hard, with snow on the shoulders of her good wool coat, and she looked at me. “Whose key is this?” she asked.

“Yours, Grandma,” I said. “It lives on the hook, so you don’t have to carry it. Every Sunday. No charge. Not ever.”

She did not cry this time. She just reached up and hung the key back on the hook herself, and patted it the way she pats everything she approves of, and said, “Well. All right then. What’s for dinner?”

She has come every Sunday since. Jordyn picks her up after the late service.

Agnes opens the door with her key, hangs it back on the hook, and sits in the front room in her late husband’s chair while Jordyn makes dinner in the yellow kitchen.

Some Sundays Curt and Deanna come too. They knock. Curt knocks the way a man knocks on his own childhood, two soft raps and then a long pause, and when I open the door, he always says, “Is it a good time?”