That couch came with the house. We bought this place here in Owensboro off an old widower about ten years back, and he left half his furniture behind, said he had not the heart or the strength to haul it off. My wife hated that couch from day one. Brown, big as a boat, ugly as sin. Ten years she nagged me to get rid of it, and ten years I told her it still had good springs in it, because the honest truth is I was too lazy to deal with it. That still got good springs in it is a thing I think about every night now.
Finally this spring I hauled it to the dump. At the scale, the young fella told me they have to open up the big upholstered pieces before the crusher, because folks hide all kinds of things in them. He slit the black cloth on the underside, worked his hand up into the frame, and he froze. Then he drew his hand back out slow, stood up, white as paper, and said, mister, you had better come look at this yourself.
Up inside that couch, sewn into the frame in a cloth pouch, was a womans wedding ring, worn thin. A bundle of letters tied in ribbon. And a stack of recipe cards in a careful hand, splattered and soft from years of kitchen use.
The letters were from that old widower to his wife. One for every anniversary, fifty of them, love letters a man wrote to the woman he was married to, and kept. When she passed, he could not look at her things and could not throw them away, so he sewed the best of her into the couch and left it behind when he sold the house, because he could not bear to keep her and could not bear to lose her either. Fifty years of a man adoring his wife, hidden in the ugly couch my wife begged me to get rid of.
I stood at that dump and thought about ten years of my own. Ten years of my wife asking me for one small thing, and me too lazy to give it, telling her no over good springs in a couch.
Marry me again in the next life, Ruth. I will do it all the same, only I will tell you every single day instead of writing it down.
That was the last letter. That is what a man wished he had done differently, at the end. Told her out loud. Every day.
I did not crush that couch. I tracked down the widower, gone now, but he had a niece, and I put his Ruth ring and his letters into her hands, and she wept over an uncle she never knew had loved that deep.
Then I drove home, and I did not stop at the Hardees for my coffee. I stopped at the florist. My wife has been asking me for a new couch for ten years, and this weekend we are going to go pick one out together, and I am going to carry every bag, and I am going to tell her, out loud, the thing that old man taught me at a dump. That she was never nagging. She was just asking to matter. And she always did.