The Suitcase I Carried Back Upstairs

Lorraine made her oyster stew the way Dale liked it, with the little round crackers, and a ham, and the scalloped potatoes, and four kinds of Christmas cookies on the good plates.

There were eleven of us around the oak table, plus one empty chair at the head. Hannah sat by her grandmother again.

Tyler, Doug’s son, who is nineteen and works at the implement dealer in Chariton, had come with his sister. Tina had not come. Neither had Doug.

We were halfway through the oyster stew when headlights came up the lane. Matt got up and looked out the window. He didn’t say anything. He sat back down.

The back door opened, and Doug came into the kitchen stamping snow off his boots. He was thinner than he had been at Thanksgiving. He hadn’t shaved.

He stood in the kitchen doorway with his hands in his coat pockets, and I watched his eyes go to the fork on its nail by the stove.

“Merry Christmas,” he said. His voice was rough.

Lorraine set down her spoon. “There’s stew,” she said. “Your chair’s where it always is. Take your coat off, you’re dripping on my floor.”

He took off his coat and hung it on the hook by the door.

He came in and sat at the head of the table, in the empty chair, and he put his hands flat on the tablecloth the way Matt does.

Nobody passed him anything. Nobody needed to. He did not pick up a spoon.

“I need to tell you something, Mom,” he said. “All of you. I should have told you before Thanksgiving. I should have told you a long time before that.”

And then, at that same table, with the snow coming down outside and his mother’s oyster stew going cold in front of him, Doug told the truth.

The agency had been in trouble for two years. A big regional outfit had opened in Osceola and taken his two biggest commercial accounts, a trucking company and a grain elevator.

He lost a third of his book in one summer, and he kept the doors open by borrowing.

He took out a note at the bank in Chariton, and then he added to it, and then he added to it again.

By late summer he owed ninety thousand dollars, and the bank was done waiting.

He closed the office the first week of September and didn’t tell anybody. He drove to Osceola every morning anyway, so Tina wouldn’t know.

“Tina found out in October,” he said. He wasn’t looking at anybody now.

He was looking at the tablecloth. “She found the letters from the bank. She’s at her sister’s. She says she’ll come back if I stop lying to her. I don’t know if she means it.”

“And the house,” Lorraine said. She said it quietly. It wasn’t a question.

Doug’s face crumpled. “The house was going to cover it. Every dime. I told myself you’d be happier in town. No stairs. No yard. Close to the doctor. I told myself that so many times I started to believe it.”

He shook his head. “You were never going to be happier in town. I knew that. I knew it when I tapped my glass.”

Lorraine didn’t say anything for a while. Then she got up, slow, and walked down the length of the table.

She stood beside her oldest son and put her hand on the back of his head, the way you do a little boy who has fallen off his bike.