The Suitcase I Carried Back Upstairs

Doug laid the last slice of white meat on the platter, wiped the knife on a paper towel, and kept the carving fork in his right hand.

He stood at the head of his mother’s table like he had a speech in him, and I suppose he did.

There were fourteen of us in that dining room. Lorraine had put both leaves in the oak table and set a card table at the end for the kids, and still Uncle Ron had to sit sideways so his knee would clear the table leg.

The turkey was twenty-two pounds. Lorraine had it in the oven by six that morning, and I had watched her baste it every half hour while I peeled potatoes at her sink.

She was seventy-three and moved slower than she used to, but she would not let anyone else touch that bird.

“Before we start,” Doug said, and he tapped the fork against his water glass. Two clinks. Everybody looked up. My son Jake set down the roll he had already been sneaking.

“Mom, I’ve got some good news. I’ve got a buyer for the house.”

Nobody passed anything. The gravy boat sat in front of Aunt Jean with steam coming off it, and she did not move to pour.

I remember the furnace kicking on under the floor register, that low rumble every old farmhouse in Iowa makes in late November.

“The Brandts want it for their boy and his new wife,” Doug went on.

He said it fast, like a man reading a rate quote. “Good people. Fair price. So you’ll need to be out by New Year’s, Mom. There’s a nice apartment in Chariton, close to the clinic and the Hy-Vee. You’d like it.”

Lorraine had a fork halfway to the cranberry sauce. She set it down very carefully on the edge of her plate, the way you set down something you are afraid you might throw.

I need to tell you how it got to that point, because I know what you are thinking. I thought it too, later, lying awake. Why didn’t somebody just say no?

My father-in-law, Dale Kessler, died two Octobers ago.

He was out checking the gutters on the machine shed, came in for coffee, sat down in his chair by the window and did not get up.

Seventy-six. The doctor said his heart just stopped, the way you would want to go if you got to pick.

Lorraine and Dale had lived in that two-story white farmhouse at the edge of Russell for fifty-four years.

They rented the ground out after Dale’s knees went, but they kept the house, the machine shed, and the five acres around them. That house was the whole of what they owned.

The spring after the funeral, Doug came out on a Sunday afternoon with a folder. Doug is Matt’s older brother.

He was forty-eight then and had his own insurance agency on the square in Chariton, a little brick office with his name on the window.

He sat at that same oak table and explained Medicaid to his mother. If she ever needed a nursing home, he said, the state would make her spend down everything she had.

The house would go. But if she deeded it to him now and the five years ran out, the house would be safe.

Some of that is even true. People in Iowa do it all the time.

I am a dental hygienist, not a lawyer, but I have cleaned the teeth of enough farm widows to know that a deed to a son is a common thing in Lucas County.