Downsized Dining Room

The flight to my family home in the Seattle suburbs takes thirteen hours. The home is at the end of a long cul-de-sac where the neighbors do their best to landscape around all the evergreen trees. The house is on a hill, so it was always too hard to ride my bike up its steep concrete driveway. My brothers would have to walk their bikes up too. 

You can see the house and front lawn from the road. The chicken coop and garden are at the bottom of the hill next to the small basketball court. A lot of the neighborhood kids think it’s a public park. We don’t correct them. The old Suburban is also parked at the bottom of the hill. We like to tease our youngest brother that the Suburban has been in the family longer than him. 

Not much has changed about the exterior of the house. The biggest changes have happened inside. The house is silent when I step through the front doorway. Nobody is screaming with laughter at something on the TV, no food is being rustled around in the fridge, no music is competing with the sound of the shower in the bathroom. The silence in the house is jarring at first. I don’t want to be alone in the house. It doesn’t feel right. 

Parents whose children move away from home are called “empty nesters,” but is there a word for the loss that siblings feel when all their brothers and sisters are gone? My parent’s new kitchen table only seats four now, but they still keep a big table in the dining room in the hopes that all their children come back at the same time someday. My mom made my favorite banana bread, but there’s no more junk food in the house. 

My brothers and I have all laid claim to the coveted downstairs bedroom at some point. The room has its own entrance that my parents thought they could keep us from using by placing a heavy chair in front of the door. Ha! Now, it’s Grandma’s room. There are three bedrooms upstairs, where we’ve also all slept. The grandchildren sleep in one when they spend the night while the other two stand ready for whatever child wants to visit.

My parents’ room is also upstairs. We were never allowed in without permission, which was rarely granted (this may be one of the keys to a long, happy marriage), but I break the rules and peek in today. It smells like Mom’s Dolce & Gabbana perfume. The bed is made. Dad has floss on his nightstand, along with a copy of Oliver Twist. Mom has a stack of novels on her side of the bed. She’s probably deciding which ones she’ll have her AP English students read next school year.

And then there’s the rumpus room where my brothers and I spent hours wrastling, watching TV, and entertaining our friends. It’s uncharacteristically clean these days. The coffee table where one brother split his eyebrow open doesn’t have any half-drunk juice boxes or empty bags of pretzels. There are no loose-leaf papers, history notes, or math textbooks on the floor. No socks are in danger of being lost forever between the cushions of the oversized couch. All the pictures on the wall are straight and all the remote controls can be found in the drawer of the TV stand where they belong. 

My dad is in the backyard, watering the grass by hand. We like to tease him that none of us inherited his OCD. Mom is trying to hang the laundry, but is being pestered by a bee. My brothers and I used to play elaborate games of cops and robbers back here until dusk, which can be as late as 9:30 p.m. during summers in Seattle.

Our oldest brother came home from his first tour in the Iraq War with a sixth sense. He said our stairs were haunted. We all made an unspoken pact to never again turn off the lights on the stairs. After his second tour, he said my room was haunted also. I can’t help wondering what he might say about our ghost problem if he were to stand alone and listen to the silence. I think the ghost might be lonely with no one to terrorize. Does the ghost even exist anymore? Maybe the ghost has fallen victim to the Tinkerbell effect. All that remains of the supernatural world in this house is the spirit of our childhood.

Downsized Dining Room was first published in the February 2024 Issue of The Banshee.