The Stairlift She Rode to Her Cake

The plan was simple. Everybody would gather downstairs in the front room in the evening, with the cake on the table at the foot of the stairs.

Lena would be up in her room getting dressed. When everyone was there, she would ride her lift down into the middle of her whole family.

I told the four brothers to come at six. I told them it was their mother’s eightieth and I did not want to hear an excuse out of a one of them.

Maybe something in my voice had changed, because not one of them gave me an excuse. They all four said they would be there.

Russ was quiet about the whole thing the week before. He knew what I was doing.

One night in bed he said, “You are going to make my brothers feel like two cents in front of the whole church.”

“I am going to let your mother ride down to her cake,” I said. “What they feel is between them and the lift.”

He was still a minute. Then he said, “Good,” and he rolled over. I knew he meant it, and I knew it had cost him something to mean it about his own brothers.

The Night of the Party

They came. All four of them, and their wives, and a front room so full of people that the heat of them fogged the windows against the October cold.

Danny came in his good shirt with a card for his mama. Roy drove over from his two counties away, which I will give him credit for. Kenny brought his two kids scrubbed and combed.

Tim, the baby, came last and alone, his wife home sick. He stood off to the side near the kitchen door the whole evening like he was not sure he was allowed to be there.

The house smelled like caramel and coffee and too many perfumes. The quilting women set out their deviled eggs. The feed store man told the same story he always tells. Children ran the hall.

It was a good party before the main thing ever happened, and I want that remembered too, because Lena earned a houseful of people who loved her.

At a quarter to seven I went up the back way to help Lena dress. She had on her navy dress with the little white collar, the one she wore to weddings.

She had put her good brooch on crooked, and I fixed it, and I did her soft white hair. She gripped my hand hard.

“Is everybody here,” she said. “Did they all come. All my boys.”

“All five of your boys are standing in that front room,” I told her. “Waiting on you.”

Her eyes filled up, and I told her not to, or she would have us both a mess and her powder would run.

I walked her to the top of the stairs and folded the seat down and buckled the belt across her navy dress.

I went down first, quick, down the thirteen steps and around to stand by the cake with the rest of them. I called up, “Whenever you are ready, Lena.”

The whole room turned and looked up the stairs. Somebody hushed the children.

And at the top of that staircase my mother-in-law pushed the little lever toward the wall. The lift hummed to life, and she started down.