The Boot Room

We booked the Alpenrose Lodge back in October, and I had the whole weekend planned out with meticulous precision. Saturday: scatter Dad's ashes on the ridge he always talked about. Saturday: our sixth anniversary, which was the real reason for the trip. Six years married, and honestly the last two had gotten quiet. Not bad, just quiet. I figured a mountain and a sunset and maybe a little effort on my part could fix that.

Kelli was in a good mood on the drive up, which I took as a win before we even got there.

"Look at that snowline!" she said, pointing out the window. "Jim, it's still May. Why is there so much snow?"

"It's the Alps, honey. The snow doesn't care what month it is."

She laughed at that, and I felt like a genius. Thirty-four years old and my wife laughing at a dumb joke still felt like a promotion.

The lodge was smaller than the photos made it look, all dark wood and warm lights, and the woman at the desk, Alia, she said she was twenty-six and ran the place mostly by herself in the off season. She handed us a key shaped like a cow and told us the sauna rules unprompted, which I found both charming and slightly alarming.

"Breakfast is at eight, dinner at seven, and if you hear the bell at noon, that's just Hansi testing the avalanche siren. It happens every spring. Do not run."

"We won't run," Kelli promised, solemn as a judge.

We got our bags up to the room, and I did the thing where you put your bags down and look around like the room might impress you. It did. Little balcony, view of the whole valley, a bed big enough for two people who actually like each other.

Then Kelli asked the question. The one that wrecked my perfect plan in under four seconds.

"Jim. Where's Dad?"

I turned around. I already knew. I could feel it in my stomach, that cold drop you get when you know you did something dumb and your brain is just catching up.

"He's... in the car?"

"You didn't bring him up?"

Dad was an urn. A brass urn, about nine inches tall, holding the ashes of Kelli's father, who had passed last winter and who had, on his last good day, grabbed my hand and said, "Take me back up a mountain, son." Not a mountain. The mountain. The one where Kelli's parents had honeymooned, about thirty years ago, which happened to be a two-hour hike from this lodge. So the lodge was step one of the plan and the ridge was step two.

"I brought everything else," I said. "The frame with his photo, the little folding table, the..."

"You brought a folding table?"

"For the ceremony! You set the photo on it. It's respectful."

"Jim." She sat down on the edge of the bed. "He's in the car. In the parking lot. Where strangers could take him."

"Nobody's stealing an urn, Kel."

"Someone might! He's brass. He's shiny." And then she did that thing where she laughed while she was crying, which she gets from her mother, and I felt about two inches tall.

"Okay, okay. Stay here. I'll go get him. Ten minutes, tops."

I ran down the stairs, out the front door, across the parking lot, and threw open the trunk. No urn. I checked under the bags, under the floor panel, behind the seats. Nothing. I stood there in the cold doing math, and then it hit me so hard I said "you idiot" out loud to an empty parking lot.

The boot room. When we'd arrived, some guy from the lodge had offered to haul our bags in on a little sled cart, and I'd been so busy signing in and being charming at Alia that I'd let him. And I'd told him, sure, everything in the trunk, all of it, straight through to the boot room, we'd sort it later. We never sorted it later. The urn had ridden a sled through a hotel lobby and gotten dumped in a boot room with the skis.

The boot room was down a half flight of stairs off the back hall. It was exactly what it sounds like, a long room lined with cubbies, benches down the middle, boots everywhere, and a big drip mat where the snowmelt pooled off everyone's gear. It smelled like wet rubber and floor cleaner. A dusty wooden ladder leaned against the far wall, the kind you'd use for the high storage shelves, and the whole high row of cubbies went up past where a normal person could reach.

And there, on the very top row, in the second-to-last cubby, sat the urn. Gleaming. Smug about it. Lodged way back behind somebody's ski helmet, on a shelf I could not reach if I stood on a chair, a table, and my own dignity.

"Found him," I yelled up the stairs, because Kelli had followed me in and was waiting at the top with her arms crossed.

"Where is he?"

"Top shelf. Way back."

"In the boot room? Dad is in the boot room?"

"He's behind a helmet, so technically he's got head protection."

"That's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

She came down the stairs and looked up at the shelf, and I watched her face go from upset to confused to something worse, which was amused.

"How are you going to get him down?" she asked.

"There's a ladder right there."

"That's a decorative ladder, Jim. Look at it. It hasn't moved since the nineties. It's holding dust, not people."

"I'm sure it holds people fine."

"Those shelves are for the staff. There's a reason they have a pole with a hook, probably. Ask Alia."

Asking Alia meant explaining why a brass urn of human remains was wedged in the ski storage, and I was not doing that. Also, and to be honest about my own brain here, some dumb competitive switch had flipped. Kelli thought I couldn't do it. My wife, the woman who had watched me put up an entire fence by myself two summers ago, thought I could not retrieve a nine-inch urn from a shelf. That was unacceptable. This was supposed to be the perfect weekend, and a perfect weekend does not include going to ask the lodge manager for help with her dead father-in-law's location.

"Watch me," I said, and dragged the ladder over.

"Jim, your boots."

"What about my boots?"

"You're in hiking boots. You're going to climb a ladder in hiking boots on a wet floor."

The floor was indeed wet. Snowmelt had pooled along the drip mat and crept out onto the tile, and my boots were indeed chunky hiking boots with lugs on them, because I'd worn them for the drive and never changed. I looked down at them. I looked up at the urn.

"He's right there," I said. "I can practically touch him."

"You cannot practically touch him. You're practically five foot ten."

That's true, sadly. I went up anyway, boots