On a Saturday morning in the middle of March, with the snow going off the roofs across the street in long wet sheets and the gutters running, Sadie came into the kitchen looking for a screwdriver and found the steel box open on the table. “Where’s the brass one?” she said.
He pointed at the empty hook on the lid, the little brass clip where the key had hung for 6 years, rubbed bright in the shape of it. “Gone. The tool went to the fire department, and a copy of the drawings went in the procedure binder, and the box doesn’t need a lock anymore.”
“Do you miss it?”
He thought about Pete Duval telling him to come back every year and say that he still had it. “No,” he said. “A key is only worth something when nobody has to wait for one man to come and open the door.”
Most of the work that holds a building up is work you will never see, done by people whose best months are the ones in which nothing happens at all. They are the easiest people in any organization to cut because their value is written in the shape of an absence. Respect should not have to be earned by an emergency. It should already be there on an ordinary morning when someone is simply doing the job well and expecting no one to notice. If Nolan’s story brought to mind someone who keeps things running quietly, subscribe and stay with us for more stories.
