The Lift Chair That Came Home

Tuesday

At ten minutes to seven on Tuesday morning there was a white van in my drive, and I stood at the storm door in my robe and could not make my legs go.

Mr. Fitch got out of the driver’s side with his half-glasses on their cord. He had driven fifteen miles in the dark. In the back of the van, under a quilted moving blanket, was my chair.

I had the money in a bread bag on the table, eleven hundred and twenty-six dollars in all. There was the Circle’s five hundred and eight, my four hundred and six, and Jonah’s two hundred and twelve, a good part of it in singles and fives.

“Mr. Fitch,” I said, and held out the bread bag.

“Eleven hundred and twenty,” said Mr. Fitch. He counted it out slowly on the hood of the van, in the cold, in his gloves. He pushed six dollars back across the hood and said, “The boy’s over by six. Put it toward the muffler.” Then he folded the rest once, put it in his coat pocket, and said, “Paid in full.”

Then he did something I did not expect. He went around to the back of the van, and before the men lifted anything, he cut the red tag off the chair arm and handed me the other one, the one in blue pen.

“You keep that,” he said. “I wrote it Saturday, and I meant it more than I let on.”

I did not know what to say, so I took it.

By then Arlen Cutler was in the road, in his barn coat, and behind him came Pastor Greer in his stocking cap, and behind him Jonah in a hooded sweatshirt with his hair standing straight up. Three men and a boy carried a chair up my porch steps in the gray light.

They set it down in the corner of my front room, and Arlen, who has the eye of a man who has laid out a thousand fence lines, adjusted it a quarter of an inch to the left until the four feet dropped into the four dents.

It fit like a key in a lock.

“Go on, Grandma,” Jonah said.

I sat down in my chair. It took the weight of me the way it always had. I felt the cushion rise up around my back, and I put my hand on the cold remote, and I looked around at those men and that boy standing in my front room.

I pressed the button.

The seat tipped, and I came up, and I stood on my own two legs in my own house, with my hands free.

“I’d say that’s a good return,” said Mr. Fitch.

That was Tuesday. I set out two cups that night, same as every night, and I put one back in the cupboard.