Original fiction · Chapter 1 of 2
The Suitcase on the Bench
I had already checked the departures board three times when the station attendant put a brown suitcase on the bench beside me.
“Your mother said you'd recognize the clasp.”
I did. Dad had replaced it with a brass one from the hardware store after the original broke on a family trip. I remembered him working on it at the kitchen table, holding a screw in his teeth while my mother told him not to swallow it.
My train left in twenty-three minutes. I was heading back to the city after selling the bungalow where I grew up. Mom had died in March. Dad had died when I was twelve. In the years between, my mother had taken me to this station exactly twice, both times to meet somebody arriving. She always waited outside.
The attendant introduced himself as Arthur. His name was stitched into his cardigan, low enough that I hadn't seen it. He took a little key out of his pocket.
“I told her I could just mail it to you,” he said. “She wanted you to see where it had been.”
“Where was it?”
He pointed to the baggage office at the end of the hall.
I asked why she'd kept a family suitcase at a railway station. Arthur looked at the ceiling for a moment, the way people do when they're trying to remember somebody's exact words.
“She said the house was too quiet for it.”
I thought that sounded like my mother. She would say a kettle needed company if she wanted you to stay for tea.
Arthur carried the suitcase to a table beneath the windows. I set my phone face down beside it. Before I could turn the key, he asked whether I remembered my first winter without Dad.
“Some of it.”
“Do you remember the red coat?”
I remembered hating the coat because the lining caught on my watch. I'd lost it before Christmas and told my mother somebody at school must have taken it.
It was the first thing I saw when the lid came up. Under it was a stack of children's drawings held together with string. A scrap of paper had been tucked into the top knot. It said, in my mother's handwriting, Things she left while waiting for him.
I looked up at Arthur.
He slid into the chair beside me. “You came here every Thursday for nine weeks,” he said. “I thought you knew she was sitting on the other platform.”
