The Suitcase I Carried Back Upstairs

Matt didn’t like it. He told me so in the truck on the way home. “It’s not that I don’t trust him,” he said. “I just don’t know why it has to be him and not both of us.”

But Lorraine wanted it simple, and Doug was the one who knew insurance and paperwork, so she signed.

It was recorded at the courthouse that same week. So on paper it was Doug’s house, and Lorraine would never in her life take her own son to court.

That is the plain answer. There was nobody to call. She had handed him the keys herself.

So there we sat on Thanksgiving with the paper already signed and the turkey already carved. Matt was across from me. I watched his jaw work. He put both hands flat on the table.

“Doug,” Matt said. Just that. Matt is a mechanic and a quiet man, and when he says your name that way it usually means you have about one more chance to stop doing whatever you are doing.

“The offer’s in, Matt. It’s done.” Doug did not look at his brother. He looked at the turkey. “It’s the best thing for her. That house is too much. The stairs alone.”

I looked at Lorraine. She had climbed those stairs every night for fifty-four years. She climbed them that morning to change out of her housecoat before we got there.

She was not frail. She was seventy-three and grieving and tired, and that is a different thing.

Lorraine folded her napkin in half, then in half again, and laid it beside her plate.

She pushed her chair back. The legs scraped on the wood floor, and that was the loudest sound in the room.

She did not say one word to Doug. She did not say one word to anybody.

She walked out through the kitchen and we heard her stop for a second by the stove, and then we heard her on the stairs, one step at a time, her hand squeaking on the rail.

Nobody at that table moved. Tina, Doug’s wife, was staring at her own plate, and her face had gone white. Aunt Jean had her hand over her mouth.

Walt Hendricks, the widower from the next place over, who had eaten Thanksgiving at that table every year since his wife passed, put down his glass.

Over our heads we heard Lorraine’s closet door open. Then the sound of hangers sliding on the rod, one, then another, then another. Every person in that dining room was listening to an old woman pack.

Hannah was sitting next to her father. She is twenty-two, Doug and Tina’s oldest, in her last year of the nursing program at Indian Hills. She leaned toward him and whispered one word. “Dad.”

Doug didn’t answer her. He looked at the platter. He still had that carving fork in his hand, and I don’t think he knew it.

It was maybe ten minutes. It felt like an hour.

My daughter Emma, who is sixteen, reached under the card table and took her little brother’s hand, and Jake let her, which tells you how bad it was.

Then we heard Lorraine on the stairs again, coming down slower than she had gone up.

I could see the front hall through the wide doorway from where I sat. She came down into the hall light with her cardigan on and a suitcase in her hand.