The Key in the Shoe Bag

It stayed overcast and mild, which is my favourite kind of October day — no sun sitting out there making you feel you’re wasting it. So I took the good brown shoes out to the step with the tin of polish and a rag. They’d been in the cloth bag under the bed since spring and were grey in the seams with dust. Newspaper down, tin open, brush first to get the dust out of the stitching, then the polish, and then the waiting — it has to sit a few minutes and go dull before you buff it, which is the step I always rush and always regret. Twenty minutes and they looked like somebody’s shoes again. When I went to put the brush and rag away, my fingers found something in the bag’s little side pocket: a small brass key, clean and worn at the teeth, that I have no memory of putting there. It isn’t the front door and it isn’t the cantina. I hung it on the nail by the door, where I keep the ones still in service. It can sit there until it tells me what it opens.

My father polished his shoes on Sunday evenings, newspaper spread on the kitchen floor, and I can still hear the brush going in short strokes. He said you know a man by his shoes before he opens his mouth, which I thought was vanity when I was fifteen and now think is mostly just true. That’s the habit he left me, the brush and the waiting, and I notice it most on the days I actually use it.

The key made me think of something I lean on more than I admit: stat. You can ask a file when it was last touched. stat lettera.txt prints the times — last modified, last read, last changed — and on macOS stat -f "%Sm %N" * gives you the modification date of everything in the folder at once. When something has changed and you don’t know when, or you want to know whether a file has been opened since you put it away, it’s the difference between knowing and guessing. I spent years being a woman who guessed.

The afternoon went slow and I let it. I read a chapter or two, swept the step, and watched the light leave at about six, the way it does now. Supper was bread and oil and the end of a piece of pecorino, eaten standing at the counter, because the shoes had been the whole event of the day. The key is still on the nail. If it’s there in a week I’ll throw it out, which is what I said about the last one.