The Lift Chair That Came Home

Fitch Home Medical

We took the Ranger, and it took Jonah a full minute to get me up into the cab. I will not describe the part where my grandson put one arm under my elbow and the other on my walker, and I put one hand on the door and said a prayer, and then a more specific prayer.

Fitch Home Medical was open until noon on Saturdays. Lowell Fitch was behind the counter in his half-glasses writing in a ledger, and he looked up when the bell on the door rang. His face did something I will remember.

“Mrs. Zeman,” he said. He took the glasses off and let them hang on their cord. “I wondered whether you’d come.”

“I wondered whether I should,” I said.

“Sit,” he said. He came around the counter, which he does not do for everybody, and walked me to the nearest chair, a tall one with arms, the kind he keeps near the register. He was watching how I got down into it. I know because I watched him watch.

“I’ll tell you straight,” he said, when I was settled and Jonah had taken the folding chair by the window. “I didn’t like it. Your daughter phoned me Monday with her receipt and her card. Our policy is forty-five days on a lift chair, and you were on day forty. My men picked it up Thursday at eight, and she signed the slip on your porch.”

“I understand.”

“She said you’d decided you didn’t need it. She said you were laid up and not up to a phone call, and that you’d asked her to handle it.” He looked at me over the counter. “I’ve sold chairs for thirty-one years. I set that one up in your house in January, and I showed you the button, and I watched you stand up out of it. Mrs. Zeman, I did not believe her for a minute.”

“Then why did you give her the money?”

“Because it was her card,” he said quietly. “And that’s the policy, and I’m a small business with a lot of ways to get in trouble. And because she was a daughter, and I thought, well, maybe there’s something I don’t know.”

I did not tell him it was fine, because it wasn’t, and he would have known it.

“I’ve thought about it for two days,” he said. “I should’ve picked up the phone and called you. I’ll carry that.”

“Your chair is in the back,” he said. “It’s got a red tag on it that says returned. A returned lift chair can’t go back on the floor as new, and it can’t be shipped back for credit until the distributor truck comes through, and that’s Tuesday at seven in the morning.”

“Now,” Mr. Fitch said. “Strictly by the book, the refund went out the door, so that chair belongs to me. I can sell it to you as a demonstrator. I won’t make a penny. My cost is eleven hundred and twenty dollars.”

I opened my purse and counted. I had four hundred and six dollars, which was my grocery money until the first of the month.

“I’m short,” I said.

“I know,” said Mr. Fitch.

“I will not take up a collection,” I said, and I heard how it came out, stiff as a church pew. “I have never asked anybody for a dime in my life and I do not intend to begin at seventy-nine.”

“Nobody’s asking you to,” Mr. Fitch said. He went into the back and returned with a hand-lettered tag, the kind you hang from a string, and he wrote on it in blue pen. I read it upside down. It said Hold for Zeman, and under that, till Tuesday 7 a.m.

“I’ll keep it off the truck as long as I can,” he said. “I can’t promise more than that.”

On the way out the door, Jonah, who had said not one word, turned back.

“Mr. Fitch,” he said. “Thank you for not believing her.”

Mr. Fitch took off his half-glasses again. “Son,” he said, “that’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me all year.”