The Stairlift She Rode to Her Cake

The Lift We Bought Ourselves

We drove to Ashland in Russ’s truck on a cold bright Saturday. We brought that stairlift home in pieces wrapped in moving blankets in the bed.

The man had been good to us. He showed Russ how the rail bolted down onto the treads and how the chair rode it on a battery that charged at a dock at the bottom.

He showed us how the seat swiveled at the top, so you could get off facing the hall instead of facing the drop.

He gave Russ a bag of hardware and a diagram and his phone number. “Your mama will love it,” he said. “They all do. It gives them back the top of their own house.”

Russ installed it the next day, and I will remember that Sunday the rest of my life.

He laid every section of rail on the stairs and marked his holes with a pencil he kept behind his ear. He drilled into the oak treads my father-in-law had put down himself fifty years before.

I held the level and read him the bubble while he turned the lag bolts down tight. It took us from church-time to dark.

My knees were sore from the stairs and his knuckles were skinned. About halfway up we got the giggles the way you do when you are tired and doing something hard together. We had to stop and sit on the steps and laugh.

Lena stayed in the kitchen the whole time with the radio on, pretending she did not know what we were building. I think she was afraid to hope.

When it was done, Russ wiped it all down with a shop rag and clicked the seatbelt shut and open, shut and open, checking it. Then he went and got his mother by the hand.

“Come here, Mama,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

She stood at the bottom and looked up that rail and put her hand over her mouth. “Son,” she said. “You did not.”

“Sit down right here,” Russ said. He folded the seat down and held it, and she sat, and he buckled the belt across her lap himself, gentle, the way you would with a child. “Now push that little lever toward the wall.”

She pushed it. The chair hummed and started up, slow as a cloud. Lena rode up her own staircase for the first time in months with her feet off the ground and her face coming apart.

She was crying before she got to the top. I was crying at the bottom. Russ walked up beside her the whole way with his hand on the back of the chair, not because she needed him to but because he could not stand not to.

At the top she swiveled the seat and stepped off into the hall by her own door. She turned around and looked down at us.

“I can get to my own bathroom in the night now,” she said. “You do not know what that is. You do not know.”

I did know. That is the thing. I had spent eleven years knowing exactly what that is, and I had never once been able to give it to somebody I loved until that Sunday.