…carrying it. The rocking chair. Because I hadn’t left it on that curb — I’d loaded it into my car the same afternoon my nephew set it out, and I’d spent two weeks cleaning it up. And in the cleaning, I’d found what none of them knew was there.
I set it down in the middle of the living room, and the talking stopped. Then I turned it over so everyone could see the underside of the seat.
It was covered in names. Carved and inked, in a dozen different hands, going back more than a hundred years. My mother hadn’t bought that chair. Her grandmother had rocked her babies in it. So had her mother. So had she. It was the chair five generations of this family had been rocked to sleep in, and every mother had added the names of the children she’d rocked.
I read them out loud. My great-great-grandmother’s babies, in faded pencil. My mother’s hand, listing me and my sister. And near the bottom, in Mom’s careful writing from just a few years back: my nephew’s name. The one who called it ugly junk. She had rocked him in that chair as a colicky baby, night after night, and written him into a hundred years of family.
He put his face in his hands and cried like the little boy she’d rocked.
The chair sits in my front room now. My first grandbaby is due in the spring. There’s room under the seat for one more name.
He threw to the curb what he called ugly old junk — never once turning it over to see that his own name was carved on the underside, among a hundred years of children his mother’s family had rocked to sleep.