There is one spare key to our house now and it does not live with family.
It lives at number nine, with a woman called Oyin who is seventy and who has been on that street since 1988 and who waters things when we are away.
Maia asked for it that way in the February, when she came home, and she asked for it in one sentence, standing in the hall with a car seat in her hand.
She said: “Keys are mine to give.”
Not we’ll decide together. Not is that all right. A statement, in her own hallway, about her own front door.
And I said yes, and I did not say anything else, because the correct number of words for me in that conversation was one.
And there is one more thing about keys that I have not been able to let go of.
In 2023 I had that key cut at a shop on Ferrow Road and it cost four pounds fifty, and I remember being pleased with myself in the car.
My mother never once used it in an emergency. Not in two years. There was never an emergency.
She used it eleven times that we can account for, and every single one of those eleven is in her notebook, and every one is on a day when I was at work.
