The Stairlift She Rode to Her Cake

The Room Upstairs

The spare room was at the top of the stairs, and the stairs were the whole problem.

Our house sits into the side of the hill the way a lot of houses do back here. You come in at the road level into the kitchen and the front room, and the bedrooms are up a straight flight of thirteen steps.

Thirteen. I counted them a hundred times that winter.

For a while Lena managed them, slow, one hand on the rail and one on the wall, me behind her with my hand spread between her shoulder blades.

But her knees were going and her wind was short. Every trip up or down was a gamble I did not like the odds on.

We tried keeping her downstairs. We put a daybed in the front room. She hated it.

She said she felt like company that would not leave, parked out in the middle of everybody’s living, with no door to shut and no window that was hers.

“I had my own room since I was a bride,” she told me. “I would like to go to sleep behind a door.”

So back up the stairs she went, and back down every morning. The whole time my stomach was in a knot waiting for the sound I finally heard that gray morning in the fall.

After the fall I knew we could not keep gambling. I did the arithmetic at the kitchen table with my little notebook open.

I want to be honest about why I did not just report anybody or take anybody to court over the money they owed. There was nothing to report.

Grown brothers breaking a handshake is not a crime you can call the law on. It is just a sorrow.

And I was not about to turn Lena into a lawsuit between her own boys. I would not make her sit in the middle of her sons fighting over the price of her while she was still alive to hear it.

That would have hurt her worse than any fall.

So I quit thinking about what we were owed. I started thinking about what she needed, which was a way down those thirteen steps that would not kill her.

I got on the computer at the library. A brand-new chair lift for a straight staircase ran three to four thousand dollars installed, and we did not have that, not with the second column in my notebook still empty.

But I found a man up near Ashland who reconditioned used ones. He took them out of houses where somebody had passed, cleaned them up, and sold them with a ninety-day promise.

He had a battery model that would fit our run of stairs for nineteen hundred dollars if we hauled it and set it ourselves.

Nineteen hundred dollars. I looked at that number a long time. It was most of what we had put back, and it was exactly the kind of thing four brothers had shaken hands to help with and had not.

I told Russ that night. He did not even finish chewing. He just said, “Call the man. We will go get it Saturday.”