The Suitcase I Carried Back Upstairs

Their offer was in writing, but Doug had not signed it back yet. He was waiting until after the holiday, he had told them, to get it to the title company.

An offer is not a sale until both sides sign, and even then nothing closes for weeks. Gene told him plainly they were withdrawing it.

“I won’t buy a house with a widow in it who doesn’t want to leave,” Gene told him.

Hannah heard every word through the receiver. “Not Lorraine. Not anybody. I’m sorry for whatever trouble you’re in, Doug. But it won’t be on my account.”

The next afternoon, Pat Brandt drove out to the farmhouse with a sour cream raisin pie and sat with Lorraine for two hours.

Lorraine never told me what they talked about. She just said Pat had always made the better pie, and that was a hard thing to admit at her age.

We didn’t hear from Doug for most of December. He did not call his mother. He did not come to church.

Tina’s car was at her sister’s in Ottumwa more often than it was in their driveway, and in a town the size of Chariton people notice a thing like that.

Matt went by the agency on the square one afternoon in early December. The blinds were down.

There was a small sign in the window that said the office was closed and listed a phone number for an agency in Osceola. Matt stood on the sidewalk and read it twice.

He came home and sat in the truck in our driveway for a long time before he came in. When he did, he sat down at the kitchen table without taking his coat off.

“His office is closed,” he said. “I don’t know for how long. I don’t think he’s told Mom. I don’t think he’s told anybody.”

“Are you going to call him?” I asked.

Matt shook his head. “Not yet. If I call, he’ll lie to me, because that’s what he does when he’s scared. He’s done it since we were kids. He has to come to it himself, or it won’t stick.”

I wanted to argue with that. Every part of me wanted to drive over there and make Doug sit down and say it.

But Matt knew his brother, and I knew Matt, and so I let it sit.

Lorraine went home after that first weekend. She said she would not be run out of her house by anyone, including her own fear.

She was back in her kitchen every morning by six, the radio tuned to the farm station out of Shenandoah, the farm report and the obituaries.

She did not take the suitcase out from under her bed again.

I know because I asked, and she told me she would not even look at it. “It can stay under there till they carry me out,” she said. “And when they do, they won’t need a suitcase.”

The week before Christmas, Lorraine called and asked if we would all come out for Christmas Eve like always.

All of us, she said. I asked her if all meant Doug. She was quiet on the line a moment.

“He’s my son,” she said. “I set a place for him every Christmas Eve since he was born. I’m not going to stop this year because he’s acting like a fool. If he comes, he comes. If he doesn’t, his plate will stay empty, and he can live with that.”

Christmas Eve came in with a skiff of snow and a wind out of the northwest that rattled the storm windows.