My Late Father Warned Me About the Stairs

My father was a careful man, a fixer, the kind who tightened every screw in the house twice and warned you about hazards you had not noticed yet. He died suddenly, and for a year the house felt wrong without his voice telling me to mind the step, watch the ice, check the smoke alarm.

About a year after he passed, I had a dream so vivid it did not feel like a dream. I was standing at the top of our basement stairs, the steep old wooden ones, and he was standing at the bottom in the dim light, looking up at me with the serious face he used for real warnings, not jokes. He said, clearly, "Not tonight. Not those stairs." That was all. I woke up with the words still in my ears at three in the morning.

I lay there unsettled. In the morning I remembered it and felt foolish, but the feeling would not shake. I usually go down to the basement first thing to start the laundry, taking those stairs fast, half asleep, coffee in hand. That morning, remembering the dream, I did not. I went down slowly, both hands free, holding the rail, watching my feet, feeling ridiculous the whole way.

The top step, the first one down, was loose. Not a little loose. The board had pulled up at one end, its nails backed out, so that it rocked and tipped the second any weight came onto it. In the dark, fast, with my hands full, the way I always went, I would have gone straight down the whole flight.

I do not know how it came loose overnight. That house did not move; my father saw to that for thirty years. I only know he stood at the bottom of those stairs in my sleep and told me not to take them, and that if I had not listened, I do not like to think how the morning would have gone. I fixed the step myself. He would have told me I did it wrong. I would give anything to hear it.