The Key to Grandma’s

I find it while emptying my pockets at the laundromat – a brass key on a faded pink ribbon. My throat tightens instantly. When I press it to my nose, her White Diamond perfume still clings to the fabric, and my eyes start to prick with tears. 

My fingers close around it until the metal bites into my palm. How many times had I reached for my phone to call her, only to set it down again, shame burning hotter than the angry words we’d exchanged? The key feels heavy as I drive to her neighborhood. Seventeen weeks since I screamed things I can never take back. Ninety-two nights of crying myself to sleep in a relationship that broke me in places no one can see.

Her voice echoed in my head, “You deserve more than someone who makes you smaller, sweetheart.” 

Her driveway looks smaller somehow. The lilacs she planted before I left for college have bloomed, their purple flowers nodding in the gentle breeze. 

“They’ll bloom for you when you need to find your way back,” she’d said. 

Rain begins to fall as I approach the door. The newspaper still sits in its plastic sleeve. The porch light is off, and the evening shadows are growing longer. My hand trembles as I slide the key into the lock. The door squeaks, as it always has. 

“Grandma?” My voice echoes through eerily silent rooms. 

There’s no muffled sounds of her television. The air feels different, still and undisturbed. On the hall table, unopened mail collects beside a vase of dried flowers. My high school graduation photo remains where it had been, though, a thin layer of dust has now settled on the frame. In the kitchen, her favorite mug sits upside down on the dish rack. The calendar on the wall is turned to last month, a doctor’s appointment circled in red. I trace my finger over her handwriting, my chest tightening. 

The neighbor finds me sitting on the porch steps an hour later. 

“I wondered when you’d come,” she says softly as she sits beside me. “She waited for you, you know. Every day she’d sit by that window.” 

“When?” I ask, though the word barely escapes my throat. 

“Three weeks ago. Peaceful, in her sleep.” She presses something into my palm. “She left this with me. Said you’d come back when the lilacs bloomed.” 

A small envelope with my name in her familiar handwriting. Inside, there was a note: “The sherbet in the freezer might be a bit old. I kept your nightlight on.”

In my old room, the small cat-shaped night light still glows in the outlet, casting soft patterns across the floral wallpaper. 

In the kitchen, I open the freezer. Behind frozen dinners and ice trays sits a container labeled in her shaky handwriting: “Orange sherbet for when she comes home.” 

My hands shake as I pry off the lid, and take out her favorite ceramic bowl and spoon. I eat it alone at her table. 

eorgia Coomer crafts stories in the spaces between midnight snacks and early morning fog. Her work has appeared in Arrow Rock and Lotto Grotto. When not wrestling semicolons into submission, she can be found collecting vintage teacups, whispering to neighborhood cats, and perfecting the art of looking profound while staring at blank pages. Her grandmother once described her writing as “quite something,” which remains her proudest achievement.