Two attendants lowered a wheelchair ramp and helped Grandma down into it, and seeing her outside hit me harder than I’d expected it to. She looked smaller than she ever looked in bed — her shoulders narrow under a cardigan someone had buttoned for her, her white hair brushed back, a little color rubbed into her cheeks. Knowing Grandma, she had probably demanded the blush herself.
There was something almost unreal about it. A woman who had spent nearly two years confined to one room was sitting in my driveway in the open air, on my daughter’s first birthday, blinking up at a sky she hadn’t seen in longer than I wanted to think about.
And strapped to the back of the wheelchair was a small red suitcase.
It looked ancient. Scratched leather gone dull at the corners, brass fittings gone soft with tarnish, and a tiny padlock hanging from the clasp like an afterthought that wasn’t an afterthought at all.
I noticed it instantly, because it made no sense. Grandma hadn’t packed an overnight bag. She hadn’t brought a purse. She had brought one strange little suitcase that looked older than my own parents, and she’d had it strapped to her wheelchair like it mattered more than she did.
Bryce noticed it too. “What is that?” he murmured.
“No idea.”
“Maybe it’s a present for Sophie.”
“If it is, she wrapped it like evidence.”
He laughed. I didn’t, because I couldn’t stop looking at that lock.
The attendants rolled her toward us, and I finally got my legs moving and hurried out to meet her.
“Grandma.”
Her eyes moved slowly over my face. “Don’t make that face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you’re deciding whether I’m about to die.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
I bent down and kissed her cheek. She smelled faintly of lavender powder, and for one unguarded second I was eight years old again, sitting on the edge of her bed while she told me stories about people I’d never met.
Bryce stepped up beside me. “Good to see you, Evelyn.”
She studied him. “You’ve gotten thinner.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It wasn’t one.”
That made me laugh out loud, and even Bryce smiled, before his eyes drifted back to the suitcase.
“Here, let me get that for you,” he said, reaching for the strap.
