The Blue Suitcase
When I was nineteen, my best friend promised that if neither of us was married by sixty, we would find each other and finally get married.
I turned sixty last Tuesday.
That evening, at 7:42, my old landline rang for the first time in months.
I almost didn’t answer it.
Nobody calls the landline anymore. Only telemarketers and the pharmacy and a woman from my church who doesn’t trust cell phones. I keep it because my mother kept hers, and because it was installed in this little house in Asheville in 1994 and I’ve never seen a reason to cancel it.
I was sitting at my kitchen table with a slice of carrot cake my neighbor Doris had brought over. One candle in it. A 6 and a 0 made out of frosting.
I’d blown out the candle by myself.
I hadn’t made a wish. I’m sixty years old. I’d stopped making wishes a long time ago.
The phone rang four times.
On the fifth ring, I picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Is this Hannah Pryor?”
A man’s voice. Young. Thirties, maybe. Tired. Careful.
“Yes.”
“My name is Lucas,” he said. “Lucas Brennan. I’m Douglas’s son.”
I stopped breathing.
“My father is in the hospital,” Lucas said. “Mission Hospital. Here in Asheville. He doesn’t have much time left.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“He asked me to call you,” Lucas said. “Today. He’s been asking all week. He said it had to be today.”
There was a pause.
“He’s right here,” Lucas said. “He wants to talk to you. Is that all right?”
I heard the phone being passed.
The rustle of sheets. A machine beeping. Somebody breathing. Ragged. Wet.
Then a voice.
“Ruthie?”
My knees nearly gave way.
I sat down hard in my kitchen chair. I knocked the plate with the carrot cake. It slid. It didn’t fall.
Douglas was the only person who ever called me that.
Ruthie. Short for Ruthless. Because when we were seventeen I beat him at Monopoly six games in a row and refused to give him a single loan.
Nobody else had ever called me that. Not in forty-one years.
Hearing it made me nineteen again. Standing under the football bleachers at Harlan Springs High School in Ohio. In August. In the dark. With his little finger wrapped around mine.
“You remembered,” I whispered.
“I remembered every birthday, Hannah,” he said.
Then he began to cry.
I need to tell you about Douglas.
So you understand why a sixty-year-old retired English teacher drove to a hospital at eight o’clock on her birthday with frosting still on her fingers.
We met when we were seventeen.
In Harlan Springs, Ohio. Population four thousand. A town where everybody knew everybody’s business before they did. Where the Methodist church and the Dairy Queen were the two most important buildings and you could get from one end of Main Street to the other in four minutes on a bike.
He moved there in the summer of 1982. From Dayton. His father, Frank Brennan, got a job managing the new Kroger.
He walked into Mrs. Ellison’s junior English class on the first day of school in a Cincinnati Reds T-shirt and sat down at the desk next to mine.
He looked at the book on my desk.
Jane Eyre. I was reading it for the fourth time.
“Is that the one where the crazy wife is in the attic?” he said.
“She’s not crazy,” I said. “She’s misunderstood.”
He grinned.
“She set the house on fire,” he said.
“She had reasons.”
We argued about Jane Eyre for the rest of the year.
And then about everything else.
We became inseparable almost immediately.
He drove a 1974 Plymouth Duster that was more rust than car. I rode in the passenger seat with my feet on the dashboard. We drove to Lake Loramie on Saturdays and sat on the hood and talked until it got dark. We ate French fries at the Dairy Queen every Friday night. I stole his. Every time. He let me.
We studied together at my kitchen table. He was good at math. I was good at everything else. We traded.
We always insisted we were just friends.
To everybody. To ourselves.
He dated other girls. Cindy Myers. Then Amy Pruitt. Then a girl from Sidney whose name I’ve forgotten on purpose.
I went to prom with Kevin Hollister. He stepped on my foot four times and spent the whole night talking about his truck.
Douglas went with Amy Pruitt.
At the end of the night, he found me in the parking lot. Sitting on the hood of his Duster. In my blue dress. With my shoes in my hand.
He sat down next to me.
“How was Kevin?” he asked.
“He talked about his truck for three hours.”
“Amy talked about her hair for three hours,” Douglas said.
We laughed until we couldn’t breathe.
Whenever our classmates teased us about getting married someday, we laughed.
Because neither of us wanted to risk losing what we already had.
That’s what we told ourselves.
My mother didn’t like him.
Marion Pryor. She was a bank teller at First National on Main Street. She was proper. Careful. She ironed her blouses on Sunday night for the whole week. She sent thank-you notes for everything.
She said Douglas was not our kind.
I asked her what that meant.
She said, “His father manages a grocery store, Hannah. His mother works at the Laundromat. They live in a rental on Water Street.”
“So?”
“So you’re going to college,” my mother said. “You’re going to be somebody. And he’s going to stay here and stock shelves like his father.”
She was wrong.
He got a scholarship to Purdue. Engineering. Full ride.
She still didn’t like him.
My father, Walter, did.
He was a high school chemistry teacher. Quiet. Gentle. He wore cardigans with leather elbow patches and smoked a pipe on the back porch and read Steinbeck.
He liked Douglas because Douglas asked him questions about chemistry and actually listened to the answers.
“That boy,” my father said once, “is going to build bridges someday.”
He did.
My father died in 1990.
A heart attack. In his classroom. During fourth period.
He never knew what happened.
The summer before college, after we’d both endured terrible dates on the same Saturday night, we ended up under the football bleachers.
August. Hot. Cicadas so loud you could barely hear yourself.
I’d been on a date with a boy named Tommy Briggs who tried to put his hand up my shirt in the parking lot of the movie theater. I slapped him and walked home.
Douglas had been on a date with a girl from Piqua who spent the whole dinner talking about her ex-boyfriend.
We met under the bleachers. Where we always met. It was our place.
We sat on the grass. In the dark. Looking up through the slats at the stars.
“I’m never dating anybody ever again,” I said.
“Me neither,” Douglas said.
“I’m going to be a spinster. I’m going to have nine cats. I’m going to teach English and grade papers and die alone in a little house full of books.”
“That sounds kind of nice, actually,” Douglas said.
I hit his arm.
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he said something.
“If we’re both still single at sixty,” he said, “we’ll stop being idiots and find each other.”
I looked at him.
He was looking up at the stars. Not at me.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“It means,” Douglas said, “if nobody else is dumb enough to marry either of us by the time we’re sixty, we’ll marry each other.”
I laughed.
But my heart was pounding.
I hooked my pinky around his.
“Deal,” I said.
He held on.
For a long time.
Longer than a pinky promise needs.
Two months later, he left for Purdue.
West Lafayette, Indiana. Three states away. Well. One state away. Indiana’s right next to Ohio. But it felt like three.
I went to Ohio University in Athens. English literature.
We wrote letters.
Real ones. On paper. With stamps.
At first, sometimes three in a single week.
His letters were long. Funny. Full of drawings. He drew his professors as cartoon animals. His statics professor was a walrus. His roommate was a raccoon.
He told me about the bridges he was learning to design. How you have to account for the load. The weight of everything that will ever cross it. The trucks and the cars and the people and the wind and the snow and the way the steel expands in summer and contracts in winter.
A bridge has to hold everything, Ruthie, he wrote. Even the things you can’t see coming.
I wrote back about Brontë and Austen and Faulkner. About my roommate, who cried every time she called her mother. About the boy in my poetry seminar who only wrote about his dog.
I signed every letter the same way.
Love, Ruthie.
He signed every one the same way.
Yours, Doug.
I kept every single one. 