The Locksmith's Forgotten Key

There was a locksmith in a small town who kept, in the top drawer of his workbench, a single rusted key. It had no label. It fit no lock in his shop. He had inherited the drawer, along with the shop, from his father, and had, in thirty-one years of running the business, opened the drawer a thousand times, seen the key, and closed the drawer again without ever wondering what it was for.

One winter, on an unusually slow afternoon, he took it out. He was in the mood, that day, for something small and pointless to do with his hands. He cleaned it. Under the rust it was a plain iron key of a very old make, the kind his grandfather might have cut in the shop's first years. It had, he noticed, a tiny mark on the shank — three notches, cut deliberately. He recognised the mark. His grandfather, whose ledgers he still kept in a box in the back, had used it to identify keys made for the family's own use.

He spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the shop trying the key in every lock he owned. He tried it in the front door, the back door, the workshop cupboards, the drawer of the register, the old safe in the corner that he had inherited unlocked and had never bothered to change. It fit none of them. He gave up at closing time and put the key back in the drawer.

That evening, at home, he was going through a box of his mother's things — a task he had been putting off for six years since her death — and came across an envelope in her handwriting addressed simply, 'For the shop.' Inside was a note. His grandfather, it said, had installed a small strongbox beneath the floorboards in the back room of the shop shortly before he died. His mother, who had never had reason to open it, had inherited both the key and the knowledge of its existence, and had, over the years, forgotten both. She had written the note at seventy, when she was beginning to worry that she would forget everything. She had, apparently, forgotten to give him the note.

The strongbox contained no fortune. It contained a stack of letters between his grandparents from the years they were courting, a photograph of the shop the year it opened, and a small ledger in which his grandfather had recorded, on the last page, in careful copperplate, the day his son — the locksmith's father — was born, along with three lines of hopes for him. It was worth, in strict financial terms, nothing. It was worth, in the way things actually count, far more than the locksmith could easily hold.

There is, in most inherited lives, a rusted key in a drawer. You have opened the drawer a thousand times. You have closed it a thousand times. On some slow afternoon this year — not soon, not on any deadline, but at some point when the weather is dull and there is nothing pressing to be done — take the key out and start trying it in doors. Try it in the old letters. Try it in the recipe box. Try it in the phone number you have not called in twenty years. Something in your family history has been waiting, patiently, for the day someone bothered to notice a small mark on the shank.