Case Study
by Skye Blaine
My father came home in a briefcase.
Mom, worn from travel and shock, plodded into the living room toward the matching wingtip reading chairs — one large, one medium — lowered herself into the larger one, and caressed the upholstered arms. She twisted her wedding band with her thumb.
My brother gingerly set the case on the slate pavers in the entryway, next to the potted Norfolk pine. He and I stood next to each other and stared down — the briefcase seemed so slender and insubstantial, surely not large enough to contain our dad, who had stood almost six-feet-three, two hundred and twenty pounds, and wore a forty-four-long suit. The case sat, lonely — attended only by our gazes — and seemed unsure of its surroundings, self-conscious of its basic, black understatement. I had the potent urge to grab it close to me, snap open its cool, chrome clasps, discover what "ashes" really meant — and a strong, opposing impulse to fling it away, deny its life in my parents' home. My father — only sixty-four years old — abruptly gone, dead of a heart attack on a Delta Airlines flight. I had not walked the bridge into companionable, adult friendship with him, and now that opportunity had flown as well.
Three days later, on a sultry August afternoon, we buried him in an urn, not the briefcase — I'm sure of that — although I cannot recall the urn's color, or size, or shape. I wonder where that case is; I wonder if a briefcase can have a life after carrying the remains of one. After twenty-seven years, that case is still alive in my memory; so vividly alive that in order to summon my father, I have to imagine him — large, stocky body, full head of parachute-white, wavy hair — striding down the street, with that very briefcase in hand.