What He Sewed Inside

Part One: The Couch

For twenty years, I begged my husband to get rid of that couch.

It was brown corduroy, the color of wet tree bark, with a sagging middle that swallowed you whole. The left armrest was worn through to the stuffing, and I’d patched it three times with fabric from the craft store that never quite matched. Sitting down was easy. Getting up required a running start, a rocking motion, and sometimes a prayer.

We bought it in 2005 from a furniture store in Dayton that went out of business the next year. I should have taken that as a sign.

“Let’s buy a new one, Arthur,” I’d say. Every spring, when the furniture ads came in the Sunday paper. Every Christmas, when our daughter came home and sank into it with a groan. Every time the springs poked through and tore another pair of my stockings.

Arthur would look up from his crossword. He’d pat the cushion beside him.

“This one makes you sit closer to me,” he’d say.

And I’d roll my eyes and sit down next to him, and the sagging middle would tip me right into his shoulder, and he’d smile like he’d won something.

My name is Frances Delaney. Everyone calls me Fran.

I’m seventy-one years old. I taught second grade at Fairborn Elementary for thirty-three years. I live in a small brick ranch house on Maplewood Drive in Fairborn, Ohio, a few miles from the air force base. It has a big backyard, a vegetable garden, and a maple tree that turns the color of fire every October.

I lived there with Arthur for forty-two years.

Arthur was a mechanic at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He worked on cargo planes for thirty-four years, the giant gray ones that rumble over our neighborhood so low you can feel them in your chest. He came home every night smelling of jet fuel and Lava soap.

He was a quiet man. Kind. Patient. He fixed everything in our house himself, from the dishwasher to the garage door to our daughter’s bicycle chain. He never raised his voice. He laughed with his whole face.

He liked crossword puzzles, Reds baseball, and black coffee. He liked to sing old Patsy Cline songs in the shower, terribly off-key. He liked that couch.

He liked it more than I ever understood.