The Spare Key
My mother kept the spare key under the third flowerpot for forty years, and for forty years she told visitors it was under the second. I never asked why. In our house you did not ask why; you noticed, and you put it away somewhere, and years later you understood it in a supermarket queue for no reason at all.
When I came back that August she had moved it to the fourth pot, and she told me so twice in the first hour, once at the door and once over tea, as though the information might not have stuck. The garden had gone to seed. There were three unopened letters from the surgery on the hall table, propped against the fruit bowl where I could not fail to see them, and she talked about the neighbours' extension for twenty-five minutes.
“You've had a haircut,” she said at last. I had not. I said it suited me, and she laughed, and we sat in the good chairs in the front room that nobody ever sat in, and neither of us mentioned the letters again all week.
Glossary
- gone to seed
- — become overgrown and neglected
- the surgery
- — in British English, a doctor's practice
- propped against
- — leaning on something so that it stays upright and visible
- it might not have stuck
- — the other person might not have remembered it