The Aunt Who Moved In
The Hayloft
The night everything changed started with a double shift and ended in the emergency room, and I still cannot walk past a ladder without my stomach dropping a little.
I had worked a brutal double at the diner, the kind where your feet stop being feet by hour ten. I came home wanting nothing but a shower and my own bed. Bertha met me at the door already annoyed, going on about some of my mother’s old decorative boxes stored up in the hayloft of our barn, the ones with the good milk glass packed inside, that she needed down that night because the rental consultant was coming first thing in the morning to finalize the centerpiece count.
“Can it wait until morning,” I asked. “I’m dead on my feet.”
She crossed her arms in the doorway. “Don’t start being difficult, Myrtle. It’s one small thing. Unless a ladder’s too complicated a concept for you these days.”
So I climbed.
I do not remember every detail of what happened next, and I am glad of that. I remember my hand slipping on the rail. I remember the old wooden ladder jerking sideways under me. I remember the sound my wrist made when I threw it out to catch myself, and then very little else until I was on the ground looking up at the loft door still swinging on its hinge, and the whole world had gone a strange, ringing white around the edges.
I called out. Bertha’s first reaction was not alarm. It was irritation.
“Please tell me you didn’t break those vases,” she said, before she’d even crossed the yard to see how badly I was hurt.
At the clinic in town, Dr. Whitcomb told me I had a clean but serious break in my right wrist, a cast for six weeks minimum, careful on stairs, no lifting. My father sat by the exam table white faced and sorry looking the whole time, holding my other hand like he was trying to make up for something he could not have named yet. Bertha dabbed at her eyes in front of him, murmuring about how frightened she had been.
The second we pulled back into our own driveway, the performance ended like somebody had thrown a switch.