The Suitcase I Carried Back Upstairs

He dried every pan and put it away in the wrong cupboard, and Lorraine let him, and later moved them all back.

Before we left, Lorraine stood in the kitchen with me while I wrapped up leftovers. She looked at the fork on its nail for a long time. Then she touched the handle with one finger.

“I couldn’t leave it,” she said. “Isn’t that silly. I could leave the whole house, but I couldn’t leave Dale’s fork.”

“It’s not silly,” I told her. “It’s the most sensible thing anybody did all day.”

She laughed a little, and then she was crying, and I held onto her in the kitchen while the dishwater went cold.

She smelled like sage and coffee. She said into my shoulder, “Thank you for putting my dresses back.”

Matt and I took Lorraine home with us that night anyway, because none of us wanted her alone in that house, and because she had the look of someone who had not slept.

She stayed in our spare room through the weekend. Matt drove her out every morning to feed her cats and check the furnace.

On Saturday Hannah came by our house in Chariton. She sat at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee she didn’t drink.

She told me she had half known since Halloween. She had overheard her parents fighting through the wall and had not been sure what she heard.

“I should have said something,” she said. “Before. I should have told Grandma, or Uncle Matt, or you. I just kept hoping he’d change his mind.”

“You said something when it counted,” I told her. “You moved your chair. Everybody saw that. Your grandmother saw that.”

Hannah turned her coffee cup around and around. “The Brandts don’t know,” she said. “Do they? They can’t know. Pat Brandt goes to church with Grandma. She’d never buy a house out from under her.”

I didn’t know. I said so. Hannah sat there another minute, and then she put on her coat and drove out to the Brandt place on the gravel road west of Russell.

I didn’t ask her to. I didn’t even know she was going until she called me from their driveway afterward.

Gene and Pat Brandt are in their sixties. They farm about six hundred acres of corn and beans and run some cows.

Their son, Cody, had just married a girl from Albia, and they wanted a house close by so he could help with the farming.

Lorraine’s place, half a mile down the road, looked like an answer to a prayer.

Doug had told them his mother was ready to move to town. He told them she was looking forward to an apartment with no stairs and no yard.

He was not entirely making that up. Lorraine had once said, after a bad winter, that she didn’t know how many more of these she had in her.

Hannah sat in Pat Brandt’s kitchen and told her exactly what had happened at that table. She told her about the turkey, and the announcement, and the suitcase, and the dresses going back on their hangers.

She told her about the carving fork. She did not make her father sound like a monster. She told me later that was the hardest part.

Pat Brandt cried. Gene went out to the machine shed and stayed there a while. When he came back in, he picked up the phone and called Doug while Hannah sat at the table.