The Blue Suitcase
I buried my husband, and nobody knew that in that very same week I bought a ticket for a one year cruise. When my son left three cages in my living room as though I were his housekeeper, I understood that my mourning was finished. My daughter in law did not even greet me. She pushed the cages onto my rug and said, “There are your instructions.” I smiled at her. And by dawn, when the ship pulled away from the Port of Miami, my absence was going to rearrange their entire lives.
My husband Ernest died on a gray Tuesday in February.
I buried him in his white linen shirt, the good one he only wore to weddings, with his rosary wound between his fingers and the photograph from our trip to Key West tucked into his breast pocket. He is smiling in that picture, and I am laughing at something he had just said, and neither of us knew we were being photographed. It was the last thing I put on him before they closed the lid.
I cried for seven days. Real crying, the kind that empties you out and leaves you sitting on the bathroom floor at three in the morning with no idea how you got there.
On the eighth day, I bought the ticket.
Not out of caprice. Out of survival. I want that understood before I say anything else, because people hear a story like mine and they think it is about revenge, and it is not. It is about a woman who realized she had approximately fifteen good years left and had already given away forty.
For four decades I was a wife, a mother, a nurse, a cook, a driver, a nanny, a bank, and a crying towel. When Ernest got sick, I sold my wedding earrings to a jeweler on Flagler Street to cover a month of medication his insurance had decided not to approve. He never knew. I told him I had lost them at the beach and he scolded me gently for being careless and I let him. When my son Austin lost his job at the dealership, I gave him my savings, the whole of it, eighteen thousand dollars I had scraped together over eleven years. When his wife Chloe had the baby, I slept on their couch for three months, waking at two and at four and at six, so that she could rest.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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