Part Four: Forty Dollars
The next morning, while Kate was at the grocery store, I took a picture of the couch with my phone.
It was a terrible picture. The light from the window made the brown corduroy look even browner. You could see every patch on the armrest. The sagging middle looked like a hammock.
I posted it on Facebook Marketplace. Old couch. Comfortable. Some wear. $40. Must pick up.
I almost deleted the listing three times.
The first time was ten minutes after I posted it. I stood in the kitchen with my thumb over the delete button for a full minute.
The second time was that afternoon, when Kate asked me what I was looking at on my phone. I told her nothing. She looked at me for a long moment and didn’t push.
The third time was that night, when I lay down on the couch for what I knew might be the last time. I put my hand on Arthur’s cushion. I almost deleted it right then.
I didn’t.
On Sunday morning, a message came.
Hi! Is the couch still available? I can pick it up today if that works. I’m furnishing an apartment and it looks perfect.
His name was Eli Navarro.
I wrote back: Yes, still available. Come by after 2.
At two-fifteen, a pickup truck pulled into my driveway. It was old and blue, with a dented tailgate and a child’s car seat in the back.
A young man climbed out. Mid-thirties, dark hair, a gray hoodie, and the tired eyes of someone who hadn’t slept well in a while. A friend got out of the passenger side, a bigger guy in a Bengals cap.
And from the back seat, a little girl.
She was maybe five or six, with curly dark hair in two puffs on top of her head and a purple T-shirt with a cartoon unicorn on it. She had a stuffed bunny tucked under one arm.
She marched right past her father, up my porch steps, and into the living room the second I opened the door.
She saw the couch. She climbed onto it. She bounced on the sagging middle.
“Daddy!” she shouted. “We both fit!”
Eli winced.
“Mila,” he said. “We don’t climb on people’s furniture without asking.”
“It’s all right,” I said. And it was. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had laughed in my living room.
He apologized anyway. He explained that he was furnishing an apartment over in Beavercreek after his divorce. He’d moved in two weeks ago. He had a mattress, a kitchen table, two chairs, and not much else.
“So far, we’ve been watching cartoons on the floor,” he said. He laughed a little, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Mila says it’s like camping. But I wanted her to have somewhere to sit when she’s with me.”
He looked at the couch.
“It’s every other weekend,” he said quietly. “I want it to feel like home.”
Mila was lying on Arthur’s cushion now, with her bunny on her chest, looking up at the ceiling.
“This couch is squishy,” she announced. “It hugs you.”
I had to turn around and look out the window for a moment.
Eli handed me two twenty-dollar bills.
I took one of them. I handed the other one back.
“Buy her a treat,” I said.
He looked surprised. “Ma’am, you don’t have to—”
“I know,” I said. “I want to.”
He and his friend lifted the couch. It took them three tries to get it through the front door. The sagging middle scraped against the doorframe. The patched armrest caught on the screen door.
As they carried it down the porch steps, I almost asked them to put it back.
I stood in the doorway with my hand on the frame. The words were right there in my mouth. Wait. I’ve changed my mind.
I didn’t say them.
Mila waved at me from the back seat of the pickup as they pulled away. She was holding her bunny up to the window so it could wave too.
I waved back until the truck turned the corner.
Then I went inside and looked at the empty space on the living room carpet. There was a rectangle of darker carpet where the couch had been for twenty years, untouched by sunlight.
Kate came home from the store an hour later. She looked at the empty space. She looked at me.
She didn’t say anything. She just hugged me.
That night, for the first time in six months, I slept in my bed.
I lay on my side, facing Arthur’s pillow. I didn’t sleep well. But I slept.
Part Five: The Porch
The next morning, Kate drove to the airport early for her flight back to Denver. I made a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper, trying to get used to the quiet again.
At nine-thirty, the doorbell rang.
It was Eli.
He was standing on my porch in the same gray hoodie. Without his daughter. Without his friend. His blue pickup was parked at the curb.
He looked pale. Like he hadn’t slept at all.
“Mr. Navarro,” I said. “Did something break?”
He held out his hand. In it were two twenty-dollar bills. The forty dollars.
“I brought your money back,” he said.
I didn’t understand.
“After what I found,” he said, “I thought you might want the couch back too.”
My heart started beating faster.
“What did you find?” I asked.
He didn’t smile.
“Could I come in?” he said.
I made him a cup of coffee. He sat across from me at the kitchen table, the same table where Arthur used to do his crossword puzzles every morning.
Eli wrapped both hands around the mug. He didn’t drink it.
“Last night,” he said, “Mila dropped a pencil between the cushions. She was coloring. It slipped down the back, all the way to the bottom.”
He looked at the mug.
“I couldn’t reach it,” he said. “So I turned the couch over to get it out from underneath.”
“When I flipped it,” he said, “I noticed the fabric on the bottom. That black cloth they put under couches. It had been sewn shut. By hand. In a bunch of different places.”
He looked up at me.
“Some of the stitches were old,” he said. “Really old. Some of them looked new. Like somebody had opened it and sewn it shut over and over again. For years.”
I remembered.
Arthur, sitting on the living room floor with the couch tipped on its side. A needle and heavy black thread from his tackle box. His reading glasses on the end of his nose.
“What are you doing?” I’d asked. More than once. Over the years.
“Another seam split,” he’d say. “This thing’s falling apart, Franny.”
“Then let’s buy a new one.”
“I’ll fix it,” he’d say.
How many times had I seen him do that? Five? Ten? Always in the spring, I realized now. Always the same week in April.
I never once asked why.
Eli reached into the pocket of his hoodie.
He placed something on the kitchen table between us.
It was a thick package, about the size of a hardcover book. Wrapped in brown paper that had gone soft and yellow with age. Sealed all around with masking tape, layers and layers of it, some old and brittle, some newer.
Across the front, in faded blue ink, was my name.
Fran.
In Arthur’s handwriting.
“I cut the fabric open,” Eli said quietly. “Where it was sewn. This was tucked inside. Wedged up against the frame, right under the middle cushion. Where it sags.”
He looked at me.
“Did you know what he was hiding inside?” he asked.
I shook my head.
I couldn’t speak.
Eli carefully slid the package toward me.
“I only read the beginning,” he said. “The top page. It wasn’t sealed all the way. I thought maybe it was a receipt or a manual or something.”
He swallowed.
“It gave me chills,” he said. “I stopped reading. I didn’t think it was mine to read.”
I looked at the package.
At my name in Arthur’s handwriting. At the yellowed paper. At the layers of tape, some of it so old it had turned the color of tea.
With trembling fingers, I opened it.
