My daughter rummages through my kitchen looking for the deadbolt key that's supposed to hang by the back door. The one I’ve lost. Again. Her disappointment is apparent: tight jaw, nasal exhale. Did she learn that from me? My mother? Passive aggressiveness, taut like a string, linking generations.
She looks in the drawer with the wooden spoon that I smacked her chubby toddler legs with when she stole Swedish Fish from Woolworths all those years ago. Sticky residue on her palm, circle of scarlet on her thigh. Me in the bathroom afterward, blood in the toilet, the sibling she never had. No matter how many details I can recount from that day, I can’t remember my dinner last night.
I wonder if it would’ve been different if the baby had lived, if it’d been a boy. Maybe her father would’ve stayed for a son. I sit at the table now, do my crossword. Perhaps brain exercises can stave off memory loss, but what about other losses? I want to apologize to my daughter for losing her father, her brother, the key.
She reminds me about the lady down the street who was robbed last week. Scolds me for not being careful enough. Careful? I want to say. I got you birth control pills when you were 16.
She gives up and goes to have another key cut, hurrying before the hardware closes. I tell her thank you. I write XO on my crossword, but I keep the words locked away. I ready for bed, and in my bathrobe pocket, I find the key. I hang it on the hook, but I leave the door unlocked. Let the thieves come. Let them take what little’s left while I’ll still know it’s missing.
Lisa Ferranti's fiction has been a Best of the Net Finalist, nominated for Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions, and on the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. Her work has appeared in Fractured Lit, Literary Mama, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. She lives in Ohio with her family.
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