The Spare Key

She learned, over the next weeks, that the cut of the key changed where the door went. A few thousandths off the third pin and she opened onto a flat where she'd painted the kitchen yellow. A deeper fourth cut and there was an Ima who played the cello — the instrument leaned in the corner where Ima's own ironing board stood, and the wrong-her had calluses Ima's fingers ached to imagine. She never stayed. She never spoke to them. She only looked, the way you look through a lit window in winter, and then she shut the door and went back to her own quiet rooms and her own untouched kettle. It became the thing she did instead of living. She told herself she was studying. She filed key after key, finer and finer, hunting the lives where she had been braver, kinder, less afraid — and every one of them had her face, and every one of them had stayed somewhere she had run from. Because that was the pattern, once she let herself see it. In every flat the difference was the same difference, dressed in different clothes. The yellow kitchen, the cello, the baby on the beach — all of them belonged to an Ima who had not packed a single suitcase, eleven years ago, and left the only town she'd ever loved. There was one cut she had been avoiding. She'd known its shape from the start, the way you know the one number you don't dial. She filed it on a grey Sunday with her heart going like a cut