The Lift Chair That Came Home

At my follow-up in the first week of January the doctor, a young woman named Dr. Patel who talks fast and means every word, watched me try to stand from the exam chair and said, “Mrs. Zeman, you need a lift chair.”

“They cost a fortune,” I said.

“You’ll spend more on a fall,” she said. “Get one.”

So the second Saturday of January, Brenda drove me to Fitch Home Medical in Chariton. It is a low brick building next to a feed store, and the man who runs it is Lowell Fitch, sixty-some, with half-glasses on a cord and a way of watching how you move before he says a word about what you need.

He sat me in four chairs. In the third one, a tan microfiber with two motors and a remote the size of a bar of soap, I pushed the button and rose up out of that seat like a woman being invited to dance.

“That’s the one,” Mr. Fitch said, not asking.

It was $1,849 with the tax and the delivery. I had it in my savings at the Derby bank, where I have kept my money since 1968, and I intended to spend it on exactly the thing I needed.

Here is where I should have known, and did not.

Brenda said at the counter, “Mama, put it on my card. I get points, and you can just write me a check.” It made sense. It was the sort of thing a daughter does to be useful.

I wrote the check for $1,849 that same afternoon, on my kitchen table, and she folded it in her purse and kissed me on the head.

So the chair was bought and paid for, and it was mine. But the receipt had her name on it, and her card number, and the money had gone through her hands like water through a pipe.

Two cups

I want to say why I did not call the sheriff, because I know some of you are asking.

I thought about it for about as long as it takes to pour coffee. A deputy would have stood in my front room with his hat in his hands and told me, very kindly, that it was a family matter. He would have been right.

A lawyer in Chariton would have charged me more than the chair for the pleasure of writing a letter. And a courtroom is a place where somebody has to lose, and I have one daughter.

So I did what I did when she was seven and had broken the glass door on the cabinet and was hiding in her closet. I put the kettle on, and I took down two cups and set them on the table, and I waited.

I sat in the straight chair by the kitchen table, the only one in the house with arms, and looked at the second cup until my eyes got tired.

She did not call. She did not come Friday. Over the next days I would set out those two cups every evening, and every evening I would put one back in the cupboard, and I never once thought about stopping.