“Come here,” I said. Rick crawled over to me. I scooped him up like a baby and pulled him onto my lap. I took his shirt off his head and tucked it into his pants. I held his face in my hands and rubbed the tears off his cheeks with the tips of my thumbs. “Watch,” I said. “I’ll make it better.”

Slim was squealing, cheep-cheep sounds like a bird. I put on some thick yellow rubber gloves I had under the sink—I wasn’t going to let that rabbit bite me—and after much struggle-struggle I wrapped up Slim’s leg tight between two pencils with some electrical tape. “Now, no more hopping for a week,” I said sternly, and Rick laughed.

Then I did all the right things. I took Rick into the bathroom and washed his face with a cool wet washcloth. I found a comb in the medicine cabinet and wet that too and combed his hair down straight. I gave him a pinch to make him laugh again. “Who loves you?” I said. And he said, “You do.”

I make spare keys at the True Value Hardware store downtown. I’m fast. People come to me with worried faces. They look me up and down. It makes them nervous to give up their keys, even for a minute, but they hand them over. And I think, What do they see when they look at me? I hold the pieces of metal in my hand and hear the locks turn, the doors opening, as I take them off their owners’ key chains. I point to the clock on the wall. “Time me,” I say.

I take their keys, square and round, long and short, and find a match from the wallboard behind me. Hundreds of key types hang from tiny hooks, all uncut. No teeth. They won’t let you into anything. I grab the key and clamp it in my machine. Tuck, tuck the spare into the cutting space, put my goggles on, and start the motor. The wheel spins fast and hard and makes sounds like teeth together on metal. Grind, in, out. Unclamp, shift. Clamp. Grind, in, out. Unclamp, shift. Clamp. Grind, in, out. Unclamp. Ting. “Be careful,” I say. “It’s hot.”

I was making a delivery when I met Rick’s dad. Fifty-three keys to a high-wire fence at an amusement park based on farm animals. I drove up to Farmland and they welcomed me inside. It was their semiannual county fair day, and Rick’s dad was demonstrating how a tractor works. When I saw him dragging that chained-up ton of cement blocks with his machine, the wheels churning and the mud flying up in his face, and the way he turned and smiled into it like it was a sweet spring rain, I knew it was love. Two county fairs later I was pregnant.