The Suitcase I Carried Back Upstairs

I hung each dress back on its hanger. I smoothed the navy one, the one she wore to Dale’s funeral, and put it back where it had been, at the end.

I put the nightgown back under her pillow because I knew that was where she kept it.

I set Dale’s picture back on the dresser. There was a clean rectangle in the dust where it belonged.

Lorraine kept a spotless house, but she hadn’t dusted that dresser since he died, and I understood why without anybody having to tell me.

I put her glasses on the nightstand and the Bible on top of them.

Then I reached into the bottom of the suitcase for the slippers, and my hand hit something hard, wrapped in a dish towel.

I unwrapped it. It was Dale’s carving fork. The old one, with the bone handle gone yellow and the two long tines.

For as long as I had been in that family, twenty-two years, that fork hung on a nail beside the stove.

Dale carved every turkey and every ham at that table with it for forty years.

When Doug carved that day, he used the stainless set from the drawer, the one Hannah gave her grandparents for Christmas once. Nobody had touched the old fork since the funeral.

That was the sound we heard when Lorraine stopped in the kitchen on her way up. She had taken it off the nail.

She was willing to leave the house, and the furniture, and the garden, and the bed she shared with her husband for fifty-four years. She was not willing to leave that fork.

I sat down on the edge of her bed with it in my lap and I cried for about a minute. I am not ashamed of that.

Then I wiped my face on the dish towel, because I was not going to walk back down those stairs looking like I had been crying.

I closed the empty suitcase, latched it, and slid it under her bed, back where it had lived for years.

I folded the dish towel over my arm. I carried the fork down with me in my hand.

Matt had left the table while I was upstairs. He was standing at the foot of the stairs with his arm around his mother.

He had his good flannel on, the one I make him wear on holidays, and his beard was trimmed for once, and he was holding her like he was afraid she might blow away.

My husband is not a talker. He is a man who fixes things, and he cannot fix anything until he has looked at it long enough to understand it.

He looked at me coming down the stairs with his father’s carving fork, and I saw him understand.

He nodded at me once. That was all. But I have been married to him a long time, and I knew that nod meant he would stand where I stood, whatever came next, and whatever it cost.

I went through the kitchen first. The nail by the stove was empty, a little ring of grease on the wallpaper where the fork had always hung.

I hung the fork back on it. It swung once and settled. Then I folded the dish towel and put it back on the oven door handle.

I came back to the front hall and took Lorraine’s arm from Matt. Her hand was cold.

I walked her through the doorway and around the table to her chair, the one at the foot of the table nearest the kitchen, where she always sat so she could get up for things.