The Clothes My Parents Wore

And then I looked at our truck.

It was a 1994 Ford, red once, now the orange of an old barn, with a bungee cord holding the tailgate because the latch had quit years ago, and my whole life packed into the bed under a blue tarp roped down the way my father ropes everything down, so it will not shift at seventy on the interstate. My mother was untying his knots. My father was already reaching for the footlocker, the heavy one, the one that had been his father’s in the Navy, and he had it up on his shoulder before I could tell him there was an elevator.

I did not run to help him. That is the thing I have to say and keep saying. I stood there and I wished, with my whole selfish eighteen year old heart, that he would put it down and wait in the truck.

He did not put it down. He carried it up three flights, because the line for the one elevator was long and he is not a man who waits in a line when his back still works, and he set it down at the foot of my bed as gentle as if it were made of eggs, and he straightened up and looked around that little cinderblock room like it was a cathedral, and he said, “Would you look at this, Nora. You made it. You actually made it.”

I said, “Dad, you didn’t have to carry that.”

I did not say thank you.

My roommate had not arrived yet, but her side was already staked out. Her name was Paige Mercer, and I would come to like her a great deal, though not that day. That day her mother was there ahead of her, a woman named Diane Mercer, arranging a quilted bedspread and a wall of framed photographs and a little strand of battery lights, and she had the kind of ease that money gives a person, the ease of never once in her life having wondered if she belonged somewhere.

My father, being my father, stuck out his hand to her. “Dale Pelland,” he said. “Nora’s dad. This is my wife, Carol.”

Diane Mercer looked at his hand. She looked at the mud on his boots and the tear by his button and the cardigan with the unraveling cuff, and I watched something pass behind her eyes, a small quick sorting, the way you sort mail into keep and throw away. And she did not shake his hand. She reached into her purse instead.

“Oh,” she said, warm as anything, “are you one of the movers? Here, let me,” and she held out a folded bill. “The RA said they’d send someone up for the heavy pieces. You can set that trunk under the window, if it’s not too much trouble.”

I want to be exact about what happened in the next three seconds, because I have replayed them more times than I can count.