As I walked into the living room, my heart sank as I saw the empty space where the old couch used to sit. I couldn’t believe it. After months of begging my husband Tom to get rid of that decrepit couch, he had finally done it. But it wasn’t his doing, it was mine.
I had grown tired of waiting for him to take action, so I took matters into my own hands. Renting a truck, I wrestled the beast of a couch out of the house and hauled it straight to the dump. When I returned with a new, sleek couch, I was feeling victorious.
But Tom’s reaction was not what I expected. Instead of gratitude or approval, his face drained of color and he looked at me as if I had committed a heinous crime. Confused, I asked why he was so upset.
“You…took the couch to the dump?” he asked, his voice tight with panic.
I couldn’t understand his reaction. “Of course!” I replied. “You’ve been putting it off for months! It was disgusting, Tom. It had mold, broken springs-”
But he cut me off, his panic flashing in his eyes. “You don’t understand. That couch wasn’t just a couch.”
Confused, I demanded an explanation. He grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the door, urgently telling me we needed to go to the dump.
As we drove there, Tom was tense and unresponsive, and I pressed him for answers. He simply muttered, “I’ll explain when we get there.”
When we arrived, Tom jumped out of the car and frantically pleaded with the worker to let us retrieve something from the pile. Reluctantly, the worker agreed and Tom dove into the junk, scanning through heaps of discarded furniture. Finally, he found what he was looking for – our old couch, teetering on the edge of a pile. Without hesitation, he flipped it over and reached into a gap in the torn lining.
I watched, bewildered, as he pulled out a crumpled piece of paper, yellowed with age and covered in faded, uneven handwriting.
“This?” I asked, staring at the fragile scrap. “This is what you were so desperate to find?”