By Margery Hannah
By the time I began visualizing what kind of sofa to manifest for my Moving On Up home during my divorced-in-my-mid-twenties years, mom announced she’d found it. “I saw your sectional at King’s,” she said during a standard unannounced drop-in, beckoning me into her Ford pick-up truck, bought with a secret appeal on her behalf by me to the family trust. My daughters were at school, but if needed the double cab would have accommodated us all. She was a true Ford girl, my mom, always commenting on how her dad owned a Model T.
It wasn’t what I’d imagined. I dithered on the color, camel, and the texture, mohair. The clean lines made a perfect capital L, though it could be reconfigured into a lower case l, with an apostrophe on the side. Deceivingly simple. It was upstairs in the closeout area for a reason.
But mom had style, so I trusted her word. “We have layaway,” Pat, one of the store owners, declared. I gave my last fifty to hold it; although I failed to fully appreciate the vision, the quality pitied the price, it’s value only fractionally recognized. Scuffling, I paid it off over the next several months.
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Chelle A. Carter-Wilson