The Suitcase I Carried Back Upstairs

“You should have come to me,” she said. “Two years ago. Five years ago. Whenever it started. You should have sat right here and told me, Douglas. I’m your mother. Did you think I would stop loving you over a business?”

“I thought you’d be ashamed of me,” he said. “Dad never owed anybody a dime in his life.”

“Your father owed the bank on this place for twenty-six years,” Lorraine said. “He lost his whole bean crop in 1983 and we lived on eggs and my egg money. He cried in the machine shed where he thought I couldn’t hear. You were too little to remember.”

She patted his head. “Nobody in this family is ashamed of being broke. We’re only ashamed of lying about it.”

Doug put his face in his hands. His shoulders shook.

Hannah got up from her chair and went and stood on his other side and put her arm around his shoulders, and that was the first time all night he made a sound.

Matt was quiet through all of it. Matt is always quiet.

But I saw him look at me across the table, and I knew what he was asking, because we had talked about it in bed the week before, after he stood on the sidewalk outside that closed office.

We had twenty-eight thousand dollars put away. Matt had been saving it for six years for a second lift for his shop, so he could take on more work and maybe hire a kid out of the community college.

It was most of what we had besides the house and our retirement.

I nodded at him. That was all. The same nod he had given me at the foot of the stairs on Thanksgiving.

“Doug,” Matt said. His brother looked up. “We’ve got twenty-eight thousand in savings. We’ll put it on the note, first thing after Christmas. I’ll go to the bank with you and co-sign a new note for the rest. I know Jim Beckman over there. We’ll stretch it out to ten years. It’ll be a payment we can make.”

Doug just stared at him. “Matt, I can’t. That’s your lift money. That’s years of your life.”

“It’s money,” Matt said. “I can save it again. I’ve only got one mother and one brother.”

He picked up his spoon. “And you’ll pay your half. That’s the deal. You’ll take a job, any job, and you’ll make your half of every payment, and you’ll never tell Mom another lie as long as she lives.”

“There’s an opening at the agency in Osceola,” Doug said slowly. “The one that took my accounts. The manager called me in October. He wants somebody who knows the farm business. I said no. I was too proud.”

He laughed, and it came out wet. “I guess I’m not too proud now.”

“Good,” said Lorraine. She went back to her chair at the foot of the table and sat down. “Then that’s settled. And the house goes back in my name, Douglas, for as long as I’m alive in it. After that, you boys can fight over it like normal people.”

“First week of January,” Doug said. “I’ll go to the courthouse with you myself, Mom. Whatever papers it takes.”

He did, too. I’ll say that for him. The second of January, he picked his mother up at eight in the morning, drove her to the courthouse in Chariton, and stood beside her while she signed.

It took about twenty minutes. She said the clerk gave her a candy cane.