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.
Part Six: The First Page
The tape came away in brittle pieces. The paper underneath was soft as cloth.
Inside was a stack of envelopes. Dozens of them. Different sizes, different colors. Some white, some cream, some blue. Held together with a rubber band that snapped the moment I touched it.
On top of the stack was a single sheet of lined notebook paper. Folded in half. Arthur’s handwriting on the outside.
Fran. Read this first.
I unfolded it.
The first thing I saw was a date.
April 14, 1986.
I knew that date.
Every mother knows the dates.
It was the birthday of the daughter we’d lost.
Not Kate. Not the daughter who’d called me last week from Denver, who’d hugged me in this kitchen yesterday, who had Arthur’s laugh.
The other one.
The one we’d buried.
Her name was Rose Marie Delaney.
She was born on April 14, 1986, at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton. She weighed five pounds, eleven ounces. She had dark hair like Arthur’s and tiny fingers that curled around his thumb.
She had a heart defect. Hypoplastic left heart syndrome, the doctors called it. The left side of her heart had never developed properly. In 1986, there was almost nothing they could do.
She lived for three days.
I’d had an emergency C-section. Something had gone wrong during labor. They put me under. When I woke up, Rose had already been taken to the neonatal unit.
I held her once. On the second day, for about twenty minutes, with tubes and wires everywhere. She opened her eyes and looked at me.
On the morning of the third day, I had a high fever. An infection from the surgery. They wouldn’t let me out of bed. They gave me something for the pain that made the room spin.
Arthur was with Rose when she died.
I wasn’t.
