The Key

Grace idly glanced at her shiny white gold wedding band, as she handed the customer his keys. “This is your original and this is your new cut”, she said smiling, whilst holding the keys up to the customer’s gaze. He smiled back at Grace and reached across the counter for his keys.

The customer held the keys up to the light and demonstrably checked one against the other. He squinted at the keys, in a manner that made Grace wonder if he actually wanted to find an error that he could complain about later. Apparently satisfied, he smiled again and put both keys in his navy blue zipped jacket pocket. In any case, she doubted very much that his elderly corrected eyesight would have been able to spot a mistake, should one have actually been there.
Why customers so often inspected the keys she could not fathom, and she pondered this question for about the third time that week. She found it extremely unlikely that any layperson’s naked eye would be able to detect a cutting error and wasn’t even so sure that she herself would be able to detect a cutting error either.

Grace enjoyed cutting keys and still experienced immense satisfaction from the end product, thus it bothered her a great deal that so many customers appeared so keen to find mistakes in her work. In quieter moments she found herself observing the reaction her husband received from customers when he handed over the finished key. She had silently concluded that the discernible inspection which had become ever so familiar to her was almost completely absent when Justin dealt with frontline trade.

There was also the other issue, her age. At 28, she was ten years younger than Justin - and probably looked around fifteen years younger - and lately found herself wondering if her age was another issue that led people to doubt her skill.

In fact, in the last year she had probably cut double the number of keys that Justin had – she enjoyed doing it more than he did but could not really articulate well enough, the immense satisfaction derived from operating the equipment and then admiring the finished key. It allowed her to completely drift off into another world whilst simultaneously giving complete and utter focus to the task at hand. There weren’t many moments in life that allowed this but Justin didn’t understand, he had grown to resentfully detest the task.

The shop was noisy for a Wednesday morning; two elderly ladies were gossiping loudly at the far end of the counter and a small white West Highland Terrier dog tied to the gate outside was barking loudly and often. The shop next door was being refurbished and the drilling and banging relentlessly continued for most of the morning. It was astonishing how on the odd occasion the shop could get so busy and intrusively noisy, whereas at other times she could stand for hours quietly cutting the keys that required cutting, happily ignoring the world operating around her.
She put some pens in a drawer by the till and straightened the keyring stand. They were almost out of the dark purple keyrings; she made a mental note to reorder more in this colour at some point when they were less busy, later on that morning.

Grace was pleased that the purple keyrings were so popular. Grace liked purple a lot; much to her husband’s ever increasing panic. He called her compulsive and he wasn’t the first. Last year it had been red and the year before that blue. Grace had what Justin called, “a colour obsession”, though Grace herself called it a “hobby”. Nevertheless, she would openly relay to him details of her evenings spent after work, involving the mass purchase of purple goods.

It all started about three years ago, around the time that she discovered she was unable to bear the children that she had so dearly wanted. Given the burning longing that dated back as far back as she could remember, she’d handled the news pretty well, she’d thought. Her husband however, did not. Justin hypothesised that there was a direct link between this news and the beginnings of the “obsession” with the various colours that had played such a prominent role in her life since.

Grace glanced over at the keys waiting collection and found herself reflecting upon the different people, and how many different homes and offices, these keys would serve. Thoughts like these allowed her to feel happy and content. She enjoyed considering the importance of her profession and liked to believe that her job was worthwhile. Imagine a world without keys, she suddenly contemplated as she turned towards the counter and greeted her next customer with a smile. She doubted very much that her next customer had ever considered a keyless world. She thought about home time and what she might buy and sighed at the realisation that the evenings were too short and the days too long.