The Suitcase I Carried Back Upstairs

It was an old brown suitcase, the hard kind with the brass latches. I knew it. She had shown it to me once when we were cleaning out the hall closet.

She carried it on her honeymoon to the Ozarks in 1971, and she had never seen a reason to buy another one.

She stopped at the foot of the stairs and put her free hand on the newel post.

That post is worn pale on top from fifty-four years of hands. She looked through the doorway at all of us.

“I’ll go to Amy’s tonight,” she said. Her voice was steady. “If that’s all right with you, honey.”

She was looking at me. “I don’t want to be any trouble. I can find something in town after the holiday.”

That was when I got up. I want to be honest: I did not have a plan. I was not thinking about deeds or offers or anything else.

I was thinking that a woman who had fed this family for half a century was standing in her own front hall asking permission to be a burden.

I didn’t say anything to Doug. I walked past his chair and out into the front hall. The hall floor creaked under my shoes.

I put my hand over Lorraine’s on the suitcase handle and took it from her, gently, the way you take something from a child who is about to drop it.

It weighed almost nothing. That is what undid me a little. Fifty-four years in that house, and she had packed what she needed in ten minutes, and it barely weighed more than my purse.

I turned around and started up the stairs with it. The treads are oak and they creak in the same three places they always have. I was on the fourth step when Doug found his voice.

“Amy.” He said it from the head of the table, and he didn’t raise it, I’ll give him that. “What are you doing?”

I looked back over my shoulder. I could see the whole dining room framed in that doorway, a dozen faces turned toward me, and Doug standing at the end of it with the carving fork, and Lorraine at the foot of the stairs with her hand still on the post.

“Putting your mother’s things away,” I said. I said it the way I tell a patient to rinse and spit. Not angry. Just the next thing that needed doing.

Then I kept going. I did not look back again.

I have thought about that a lot, and I think if I had looked back, I might have said something I would have had to apologize for, and I did not want this to be about me.

Lorraine’s bedroom is at the top of the stairs on the left, the room she shared with Dale. It smelled like the lavender sachets she puts in her drawers.

The closet door was standing open and there was a row of empty hangers swinging a little on the rod.

I laid the suitcase on the bed, on the blue and white quilt her mother made, and I opened the brass latches.

They snapped up loud in that quiet room. Downstairs, nobody was talking. I could hear that too.

Inside were three church dresses folded in tissue the way her generation folds things. A nightgown. Her slippers. Her reading glasses in their case. Her Bible.

And Dale’s picture from the dresser, the one of him in his seed cap at the county fair, grinning at something off to the side.