The Last Key

They closed the shop on a Tuesday because the lease said Tuesday, and Samuel Reed had never, in fifty-one years of trading, let a sentence in a document surprise him twice. He arrived early, as he had arrived early every working day of his life, and turned the sign to CLOSED an hour before he needed to, so that no last customer could catch him in the act of ending.

His daughter came to help, though there was little left to do that he had not already done alone in the small hours, meticulous as ever, as if tidiness, applied thoroughly enough, might pass for a goodbye and spare them both the other kind.

“You didn’t have to sort the screws,” she said.

“They were mixed,” he said, as though that settled a question of some moral seriousness.

The shelves stood nearly bare now. Where the good handsaws had hung for decades, four pale rectangles showed on the wall, the paint behind them a cleaner, younger colour than the paint around, a small reprieve from fifty years of daylight, uncovered too late to matter.

She had expected the loss to arrive in the large things: the sign coming down, the shutter drawn for the last time, the key turned. Instead it reached her through those pale rectangles, through the honest record of what had hung there long enough to keep the wall from ageing at the ordinary rate.

He worked without hurry, every movement habitual, wrapping each remaining tool in newspaper though most were bound only for a skip. It was not sentiment, exactly; he would have denied sentiment under oath. It was simply the one way his hands knew how to bring a day to its close, and he was not about to relinquish it now, of all evenings.

“Dad.”

“Mm.”

“You could say something. If you wanted to.”

He considered the request the way he considered a customer’s difficult problem, turning it once or twice against the grain, looking for where it would give. She had inherited his reticence, and she resented it in him precisely because she recognised it, unmistakably, as her own.

“Your grandfather stood about where you’re standing,” he said at last, “and handed me this key. I thought he would make a speech. He said, ‘Lock up properly.’ I was insulted by it for the better part of ten years.”

“And after that?”

“After that,” he said, “I understood that it was the speech.”

He did not falter. But he set the last wrapped parcel down more slowly than any of the ones before it, and she let that slowness stand, without comment, for everything the stoic old man had no intention of consigning to plain words.

At the door he put a key into her hand. It was not the shop’s, which the landlord would want returned by morning, but the spare he had carried in his own pocket since before she was born: worn smooth, fitting a lock that would soon belong to strangers, useless now, and therefore the only one worth keeping. “Lock up properly,” he said. And she found, to her considerable surprise, that she knew precisely and entirely what he meant.