At Jean Mercer’s, important objects always ended up in the same glass bowl, between pizza flyers and dead batteries she swore she would recycle. That Sunday, Clara found her keys there, two coins, a hair clip that belonged to no one, and the white hospital wristband she had removed in the car but been unable to throw away.
She picked it up before the keys.
The plastic had kept the curve of her wrist. Her name, date of birth, an interminable number, and the cardiology unit’s letters were still legible beneath a thin scratch. Nothing extraordinary: a five-gram object saying only that she had been admitted to Manchester Royal Infirmary one Sunday evening and allowed out the following Friday.
“Planning to frame it?” Lucy asked from the kitchen.
“I was looking for my keys.”
“They’re under the traumatic keepsake.”
Clara lifted the key ring. The small flat key to her apartment clinked against the trash-room key. There was a third, heavier one, with a yellow cap around its head.
She recognized it too late.
Ben, crouching by the couch to put Alfie’s shoe back on, looked up.
“That one’s mine.”
His house key. He had given it to her in June, in a Chorlton pub garden, with a solemnity Clara immediately defused by asking whether it opened the drawer where he hid the good chips. Since then, she had kept it in an inside pocket of her bag rather than on her key ring. On Friday, when Ben brought her things back from the hospital, he must have put it with the rest.
“I know,” she said.
“Well, that’s reassuring.”
Jean came in with a dish of roast potatoes and set it on the table as though gravity depended on her.
“Can we avoid memory jokes for one meal?”
“Memory’s funny,” Lucy said. “People, less so.”
Alfie, eight, looked up from his shoelace.
“Aunt Clara, how long were you dead?”
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