The Yellow Suitcase

The first thing Willa bought after selling her car was a yellow suitcase large enough to contain a different woman. She had imagined this woman travelling lightly, reading on platforms, accepting invitations. In practice, the suitcase held fourteen jumpers and a toaster wrapped in a bath towel. At forty-three, Willa was moving into a flat three streets from her old house, and the left wheel had already broken.

She was dragging it across the pavement when a man outside the hardware shop said, “You’ve lost something.”

He held up a small black wheel. His sleeve was dusted with plaster. Willa looked from him to the suitcase, which leaned against her knee like a disappointed relative.

“My elegant new beginning,” she said.

“This part of it, anyway.”

His name was Lewis. He offered a temporary repair involving a bolt from the shop and ten minutes on the bench outside. Willa nearly refused. Since the divorce, every offer of help seemed to come with a story about how she would eventually meet somebody. Her sister could turn a boiler inspection into a prophecy.

But Lewis was already examining the broken fitting, interested in the problem rather than her left hand. She sat down. He asked her to hold the wheel steady and explained which piece had snapped. By the time the suitcase could roll again, she knew he fitted kitchens, disliked black taps and had once bought an armchair that would not pass through his front door.

“I still own it,” he said. “My brother keeps it. Every time I visit, he asks whether I’m enjoying my chair.”

Willa laughed for the first time that day without making herself do it. She thanked him and wheeled her belongings towards the flat. At the corner she looked back. He was putting the damaged piece in a bin, already occupied with his own afternoon.

Three days later, she returned to the shop for picture hooks. Lewis stood at the counter arguing cheerfully about a shade of white. He recognised her suitcase before he recognised her.

“The repair holding?”

“Better than the rest of the move.”

He asked whether she wanted coffee. She said yes so quickly that the shopkeeper smiled at his receipt printer. They went to a bakery where the chairs were too low and talked for ninety minutes. Lewis was forty-six, divorced for six years, with a daughter at college. Willa worked in payroll and had no children. She told him she was learning the geography of a life in which nobody moved her keys.

“Mine are usually in the fridge,” he said. “I can’t blame anyone.”

At the end he asked for her number. She gave it to him, then walked home with the hooks clinking in her pocket, absurdly aware of her own face.

They met on Sunday for a walk around the old reservoir. Lewis brought sandwiches wrapped in paper. Willa brought a packet of expensive biscuits because she had forgotten lunch could be assembled without a committee. He listened while she described the flat’s sloping floor. She listened while he described a customer who had ordered a kitchen around a refrigerator she had never measured.

Near the gate, he kissed her. It was brief and unhurried. Willa put her hand on the sleeve that had been dusty when they met and felt the startling fact of wanting something that had not belonged to her old life.

On Monday, her sister asked how the move was going. Willa mentioned the walk. By Tuesday, two cousins had sent messages about getting back out there. Her mother asked whether Lewis owned his house. A colleague suggested a restaurant for their anniversary, then laughed when Willa said they had known each other eleven days.

She found herself telling stories about him to make their interest worthwhile. He could fix anything. He was wonderfully calm. He understood everything about starting again. None of these claims was entirely supported by two coffees and a sandwich, but they sounded reassuring. She wanted the people who loved her to stop looking worried when they said her name.

On their next date, Lewis forgot the restaurant booking. They stood beneath a dripping awning while a waiter apologised for having no free tables. Willa heard herself say, “That’s all right. You’re normally so organised.”

Lewis looked puzzled. “Am I?”

They ate noodles from cartons on a covered bench. He apologised twice, then told a funny story about his daughter teaching him to use his calendar. Willa smiled, but a small disappointment had arrived which seemed larger than a missed reservation. She had needed him to be the man she had described.

Later, he asked whether she was angry. She said no, too brightly. He grew quieter. The evening ended politely, which frightened her more than an argument would have done.

At home she opened the yellow suitcase to put it away. The toaster was still inside. She had eaten cold breakfasts for two weeks because she could not bear to unpack the last thing and admit the move was finished. She carried it into the kitchen, plugged it in and burned two slices while staring at her phone.

Lewis called the next afternoon. “I liked being with you until I started feeling as though I’d failed an examination I didn’t know about.”

Willa sat on the floor beside a box of books. He had said it gently, which left her with fewer ways to defend herself.

“I told everybody you were calm and organised,” she admitted.

“I’m fairly calm. My van’s a disgrace.”

“I think I wanted them to believe I was all right.”

There was a pause. “Are you?”

She looked at the books waiting for shelves, the newly unpacked toaster, the patch of afternoon sunlight on the crooked floor. “Sometimes. More often than I expected. Less often than I tell people.”

“That’s an answer I understand.”

He did not offer to repair the whole month. He said he wanted to see her again, but he could not become evidence that her divorce had turned out well. Willa felt ashamed, then relieved that he had named the strange extra person who kept arriving on their dates: the reassuring new boyfriend everyone had already invented.

They arranged to meet on Friday at the municipal greenhouse. It was an odd choice, made because neither had been and admission was cheap. Before going, Willa called her sister. She asked her to stop circulating updates. Lewis was someone she was getting to know. She did not know what would happen. Her sister sounded hurt, then said she had only been excited for her.

“Be excited about my curtains,” Willa said. “I hung them myself.”

“Are they straight?”

“Absolutely not.”

At the greenhouse, Lewis arrived carrying two tickets and wearing a shirt with a missing cuff button. Willa noticed it with affection rather than alarm. They walked through humid rooms full of enormous leaves. He admitted he killed houseplants by overwatering them. She admitted she had never liked hiking, despite walking around the reservoir with apparent enthusiasm.

“So the sandwiches were your main interest?”

“You were a close second.”

They sat beside a shallow pool. A child on the far side announced that a fish looked like his headteacher. Lewis laughed so suddenly that Willa laughed too. The sound carried between the glass walls. For several minutes they did nothing useful and produced no story she needed to tell anyone afterwards.

Then his phone rang. His daughter had missed a bus and needed to discuss three possible routes home, each apparently worse than the last. Lewis asked whether Willa minded if he answered. She waved him towards a quieter corner. She watched him listen, frown, laugh and look mildly exasperated. This was part of his life she had not created, a relationship older than their acquaintance and full of details she could not yet understand.

When he returned, she asked whether his daughter was all right.

“On a bus. Annoyed with all transport.” He sat down. “I should tell you something before your family asks. I don’t want to live with anyone again soon. Maybe ever. I like my house when I can find the keys.”

Willa considered the remark. A month earlier, she would have heard it as a warning that she was already being refused. Now she thought of her flat, the curtains, the small freedom of leaving a book open on the kitchen table.

“I have only just started living by myself,” she said. “I’d like to find out whether I’m good company.”

“Early findings?”

“Promising. Poor breakfast service.”

They kissed beside a plant whose name neither could pronounce. Afterwards, Willa suggested that he come for supper the following week. She would cook something she knew how to make. He could bring pudding. He asked whether she had enough plates, and she said yes, though one was shaped like a fish.

Before supper, Willa hung the final picture in her hallway. She had bought it years earlier and never found a place for it in the old house. Now she tried three positions, made two unnecessary holes and chose the spot she had liked first. She almost sent Lewis a photograph to ask what he thought. Instead she stood back, decided she liked it and put the hammer away. When he arrived, he could have an opinion. It did not need to determine where the picture lived.

The evening they chose was windy. Lewis arrived with an apple crumble and a small bag containing the proper replacement wheel for her suitcase. Willa opened the door in an apron stained with tomato sauce. Behind her, the smoke alarm was issuing a furious opinion about garlic bread.

“I can come back when the restaurant opens,” he offered.

She handed him a tea towel and pointed at the alarm. “Wave that underneath it. This is participation dining.”

They ate pasta slightly later than intended. Lewis broke the crust of the crumble while serving it and announced that presentation had never been included. Willa gave him the fish plate. At some point she began describing a difficult afternoon at work, then stopped herself from turning it into proof that she was coping beautifully. She told him she had cried in the stationery cupboard because an old shared password had appeared on a form. He did not look frightened by the information.

“I once got upset by a supermarket offer for two,” he said. “Bought the second pie anyway. Ate it for breakfast.”

When supper was over, they repaired the suitcase together at the kitchen table. Willa tightened the final nut while Lewis held the wheel. The old temporary bolt lay beside their empty glasses. She rolled the case down the hallway and back. It travelled straight this time.

“Ready for an actual journey,” he said.

“Eventually.”

He left at ten because he had an early job. Willa watched him go down the stairs, then closed her own door. The flat was quiet. Two plates waited in the sink. Her suitcase stood by the wall, empty at last. She took a photograph of the crooked curtains and sent it to her sister, then put her phone aside. There would be another date. There would also be breakfast here tomorrow, and she had bought bread.