The Graduation Trap novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: A Bed on Alder Street

The bed did not fit up the stairs.

Sullivan had measured the stairs, he said, and he had measured the bed.

He had not measured them against each other.

"Turn it," his mother said from the bottom step.

"I'm turning it."

"Turn it the other way."

"There is no other way, Mother. It's a bed."

"Your father got ours up the stairs in Pruitt Street."

"Dad had help."

"He had me," said his mother. "I held the other end and told him which way."

She was standing on my mother's hall rug in her green coat, with a clipboard she had brought from home.

I do not know why she had a clipboard.

I stood in the kitchen doorway with a mug of tea I had poured myself.

I watched a grown man with a brand-new degree wedge a mattress into a stairwell.

It was a very large mattress.

It had folded itself against the wall at the landing, and Sullivan stood beneath it with his arms raised.

"Joanna."

"Yes?"

"Stop smiling."

"I'm not smiling."

"You're doing it with your whole face."

"I am extremely sorry for your trouble," I said. "Would you like tea?"

"I would like a window."

I looked at his mother.

His mother looked at the window.

It took four people and a length of clothesline, in the end.

First they dragged the mattress back down and out onto the lawn.

The woman with the lawn chair came over in her slippers and said her late husband had once put a piano through that exact upstairs window.

The man across the road in the bathrobe came over and said that was a lie.

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