I stood by the kitchen rack, staring at the empty wooden hook where the keys had hung for thirty years.
I reached out and touched the empty wooden peg where the keys to the Shelby had hung since the bicentennial. The pine was slightly lighter in that small circle, protected from thirty years of grease and woodsmoke.
Karen did not look up from the kitchen table. She was sorting through a stack of white envelopes and yellow slips, her short, breathless sighs rhythmically disturbing the quiet room.
“He always kept those keys right by the door, Karen,” I said, pausing to let my voice carry across the linoleum. I turned my silver wedding ring around my right ring finger, feeling the familiar notch in the metal.
“The house is in a muddle, Gail,” Karen said, her hand moving to adjust her pearl earrings with a quick, nervous twitch. “People have been in and out. The hospice nurses, the neighbors with their casseroles. Things get moved.”
She went back to her papers, her eyes scanning a four-thousand-dollar property tax bill that had arrived in the Tuesday mail. She slid it to the bottom of the pile, right beneath a notice from the county hospital.
“He wouldn’t have let anyone touch that ring,” I said. “He was too particular about the car.”
“Well, I haven’t seen them,” she said, her voice rising slightly. “I have more important things to worry about than a set of keys for a car that doesn’t even run.”
I opened the deep utility drawer next to the breadbox, searching for the small flashlight my father kept for power outages. My hand brushed against something heavy and cold, tucked behind a box of birthday candles.
I pulled it out by the grip. It was my father’s rusted spare tire iron, its L-shaped shaft flaking dry orange scales onto my palm.
“Why is this in here?” I asked, holding it under the light of the stove hood. “This belongs in the trunk of the car.”
Karen did not look at the tool. She folded an invoice from the pharmacy and tucked it inside her apron pocket.
“He had it out last month,” she said, her voice thin. “He said the kitchen chairs were wobbling. He used whatever was handy.”
