Sitting-Ronnie looked to the coffee grounds in ground-beef blood under plastic on Styrofoam. She tossed her keys lightly back and forth between her hands close to her chest. She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply. The dead mouse smell was gone. It’s not gone. I’m too in the middle of it, can’t smell it. Dawn and Judy’s laughter, stabbing.

First she removed the house keys from the chain, took off the front door, the back door, the garage. Slid them off one by one around the ring, through the pinch of the ring and off. She laid them neatly down next to each other. She took off the key to her locker at the hospital. She laid that down next to the others. She read them left to right – front door, back door, garage, locker.

She had a key to a file cabinet in the laundry room that she hadn’t opened in years. She unwound that from the ring and laid it down at the end of the line. She had two keys to Nana’s. She laid those down next.

There were two keys she’d been carrying around who knows how long, no idea what they opened. What doors could she go through before that she no longer had occasion to, something of Nana’s? Couldn’t be a car key with its oblong swoop. The other one, small, she might’ve once been able to open a desk drawer or a briefcase.

She put them down on the table. The keys lined up in front of her, she straightened them out so all their tops were lined up straight across and they all reached down to different lengths. She flipped some so their teeth all pointed left – bronze, silver, silver, round and small, bronze and smaller, silver, silver, lop-sided and small.

When she locked the front door behind her, she had only two keys left on her ring, the two keys for her car.