Simon carried a battered blue suitcase into a repair shop and placed it on the counter. The handle had been wrapped in electrical tape, the wheels squeaked, and a luggage tag from a holiday eight years ago still hung from the zip.
“The lock’s broken,” he told the repairer, Mrs Shah.
She examined it. “The lock is working.”
“It won’t open.”
“Is that not what you wanted from a lock?”
Simon explained that the suitcase had been closed since his last trip. He was leaving again on Monday, and all his warm-weather clothes were inside. His wife had told him to buy another case, but Simon insisted this one had traveled with him everywhere.
Mrs Shah asked for the combination. Simon gave her his birthday. It failed. He tried his wife’s birthday, their anniversary and the year they met. None worked.
“Did you change the number on the trip?” she asked.
“I may have.”
“Why?”
“Airport security told me to use a number I’d remember.”
Mrs Shah opened a notebook and asked where he’d gone. Simon listed the beach, the hotel, a bus tour and a restaurant where the waiter had advised him against ordering the house special. She listened as if one of these facts might be a code.
His phone rang. It was his wife, Ellen. “Are you coming home with the case?”
“I’m at the shop.”
“Ask about the wheels too.”
“The wheels are fine,” Simon said, as one wheel rolled off the counter and hit the floor.
Mrs Shah put it back and tried the suitcase’s keyhole. There was no key. Simon had lost it on the same trip, somewhere between the beach and the airport. Ellen suggested replacing the lock entirely.
Simon hesitated. “If you cut it open, it won’t be the same suitcase.”
Mrs Shah looked at the tape on the handle. “It already isn’t.”
She offered him a practical choice: a new lock and wheels, or a new case for less money. Simon asked whether she could at least tell him what was inside before he decided. She opened a narrow gap at the zip seam, reached in carefully and pulled out a cotton shirt.
Simon recognized it. “That’s my good holiday shirt.”
Another shirt followed, then a paperback, three paper napkins and a sunhat with a bent brim. Mrs Shah set them in a neat pile. At the bottom was a small luggage label. Simon picked it up and read the handwritten number on the back: 0-0-0.
He turned the dials. The lock clicked open.
“I remember now,” he said. “I wrote the number down so I wouldn’t forget it.”
Mrs Shah looked at the label, which had spent eight years locked inside the case.
Simon smiled. “See? I knew I’d put it somewhere safe.”
“Very safe,” she said. “Your next holiday was the only thing that could get to it.”