The Lift Chair That Came Home

The Thursday I came home from my hip appointment to four dents in the carpet where my lift chair had stood, I learned my daughter Brenda had returned it for the $1,849 refund, and I set the kettle on and put out two cups.

The dents were in a row of two and two, each one about the size of a saucer. They had been there since January, when two men set that chair in the corner of my front room, and they were the first thing I saw when Mr. Mabry held the door and I came in behind my walker.

The corner was empty. The lamp stood where it always stood, and the little table with my pills and my reading glasses, and the afghan Gene’s mother crocheted in 1971 was folded over the arm of nothing at all.

I stood on the mat with my coat still buttoned and looked at the place where my chair had been.

“Millie?” Mr. Mabry said behind me. He had driven the church van forty minutes to Knoxville and forty minutes back, and sat two hours in a waiting room reading a magazine about boats. “You all right?”

“I believe somebody has moved my furniture,” I said.

He looked past me into the room. Alvin Mabry carried the mail in Lucas County for thirty-four years and has seen the inside of more front rooms than the Lord, and I watched him decide not to say a word.

He asked if I wanted him to come in. I told him no, thank you, the van was a great kindness, and he went down my porch steps slower than he needed to.

There was a note on the kitchen table, under the sugar bowl. I knew the handwriting. It slants to the right the way mine did before my hands got stiff.

Mom, I took the chair back to Fitch’s. You have your walker and you’re doing so well, and honestly you didn’t really need it. That money will do more good somewhere else right now. I’ll explain Sunday. Love you. B.

I read it twice. Then I read the middle part a third time, because I wanted to be sure I hadn’t added it myself.

I am seventy-nine years old. I cooked hot lunches for Derby Consolidated for thirty-one years, and in that time I have been lied to by a great many children and a few of their parents, and I can tell you the difference between a lie and a person trying to hold up a roof with her bare hands.

I did not yet know which this was. I knew only that my daughter had a key to my house, and that she had used it while I was getting my X-rays taken forty miles away.