The Gray-Leather Bag

As I clutched my hands to my chest, I squeaked a response to a shocking statement from my husband. He had zero emotion in his voice and stared at the TV without casting a glance my way. “What do you mean it’s over, Miller? We’ve been married for twelve years! Together through dozens of tragedies… your mother dying, my father, Bo’s cancer diagnosis, so much more. Miller, don’t say it’s over. You’re wrong! We need each other!”

“Dana, I don’t need you anymore.” Miller gestured air quotes with the fingers of both hands. “Actually, you are interfering with my plans.”

“Plans for what? A young, Barbie-doll girlfriend? A yacht sailing on the Mediterranean? What plans don’t include your wife and son?”

“I’m burning down the house. That’s the first part of the plan.” Such a flippant comment, so casual, yet it carried the weight of three lives.

“Burn it down? What the hell are you saying?”

Miller chuckled and raised an eyebrow. “Well… not for the insurance money. I’m burning what we had. Our history, our memories, our bond. I want to put the past behind me.”

“In a fire? Miller, are you crazy?” I stood to pace the room, then stopped, turned, and put both hands on my hips. “You’d be burning the present and future, too, not just the past.”

“Ashes to ashes…”

I blew a sarcastic laugh though fear was rushing through my blood, oozing from every pore. “Have you been drinking or something? You’re talking crazy!” Miller didn’t respond and kept his eyes on the TV, watching a basketball game. Incredulous, I stomped toward the bedroom.

Then I heard it. Crackling sounds, a whoosh, more crackles.

I felt the heat on the doorknob and, though I should have known better, I opened the door. The sound of a roar overwhelmed me as the fire sucked itself forward, so close I could feel the heat on my face.

Panicked, I turned and ran, down the hall, through the living room and upstairs to Bo’s bedroom. Scrambling down the stairs with a struggling, sleepy four-year-old, I rushed into the foyer. As I opened the front door to leave, Miller shouted in a sing-song voice, “Don’t sell the golf clubs! You’ll be sorry if you do!”

###

The Fire Department was quick to arrive, the papers said, though it seemed like a lifetime before I heard the sirens. Miller had stayed inside, presumably dying while seated in his recliner, where he sat during our so-called conversation.

“A total loss,” said our State Farm insurance agent, and there will be no payment on the life insurance because Miller’s death was deemed a suicide.” With the agent following, blubbering apologies, I left the office in a daze and returned to the site of the fire.

A river of tears flowed. All our memories were now wet ash, along with grandmothers’ china, Bo’s christening gown, and every family photo taken over the past twelve years. The gas tank in my van had exploded, taking the garage.

The only thing standing was the red-brick chimney, a lonely monolith amid the ruins. Curiously, in what had been the downstairs mudroom, a gray-leather golf bag stood intact, the clubs and pom-pom covers in perfect condition.

###

“Two-hundred and a bargain at twice the price,” I said, meeting a rotund man in the Walmart parking lot. As my Craigslist ad specified, he paid cash, and smiled as he stowed the gray-leather bag in the trunk of his Buick. I watched him turn left from the parking lot, driving toward the center of town.

The money paid for Bo’s new clothes, including a dinosaur shirt, which he loved. I folded the clothes neatly and stashed them in the drawers of our hotel room’s maple dresser.

To keep the mood light, I took my traumatized son to McDonald’s and he played on the outdoor playground for almost an hour. With great satisfaction, I noticed his hair had fully returned after the radiation treatments and now stuck out in multiple blonde cowlicks. Bo met a friend, and I smiled watching the two boys play together.

Though I had every reason for sadness and anger to consume me, I found gratitude in seeing my son play happily, like a normal kid should. I whispered “thank you” to a God I didn’t know.

We returned to the hotel at dusk, then stood in the parking lot to watch the rear corner of the building burn. The fire had started in our room, the Fire Marshall said, and the cause was a chemical reaction with the fabric dye in the dresser's folded clothes. Somehow, I knew the origin was the dinosaur shirt. In the shower, crying alone, I cussed T-Rex.

###

Our new home was just miles from the house that burned. Bo was now a healthy ten-year-old and our life had returned to something resembling normal.

In the back corner of the downstairs mudroom stood a gray-leather golf bag and clubs with pom-pom covers. The man who bought them from me via Craigslist gladly accepted double the purchase price for their return.

Once, about two months after we moved in, the creepiness of the bag got under my skin and I threw a white cotton blanket over it. I stood mesmerized by the peaks and valleys of the muted texture and memories of life with my son’s father flooded my mind. When I returned to the kitchen, the French bread in the oven burned in angry flames, melting the oven’s stainless-steel frame. I rushed back to the mudroom and removed the blanket from the gray-leather bag with a flourish. Only then did I call 9-1-1.

Years later, as my young boy’s sports equipment and science projects crowded the mudroom, a skillet of eggs burst into flames on the stovetop. There was no damage to anything but my psyche, peace of mind, and left eyebrow.

Now I live in Arizona, re-married to a wonderful man named Paul, and Bo is at Florida State University, thanks to a full-ride baseball scholarship. Life is good. The cracked gray-leather golf bag sits in the back corner of the garage, lurking. My new husband threatens to throw it away often, despite my warnings.

“Crazy Miller still lives in that bag. 'Don’t sell the clubs because you’ll be sorry if you do.' That’s what he said and I believe it.”

While we in Florida for Bo’s college graduation ceremony, the fire started in the garage, in the back corner where Paul kept the gas can, where the gray-leather bag stood before and after the fire.