My name is Frances Delaney and I lived in my Fairborn home with my husband Arthur for forty two years before his sudden passing in March. For twenty years I begged him to get rid of our brown corduroy couch that we purchased from a closing furniture store in Dayton back in 2005. It had a sagging middle and a patched left armrest that always tipped whoever was sitting on it right into Arthur. He refused to part with it because he claimed it made me sit closer to him. After his unexpected heart attack I found myself completely unable to sleep in our bed. Instead I spent six months sleeping on his side of that battered couch wrapped in his old flannel blanket because the sagging cushions still pulled me toward the space where he used to sit. My daughter Kate visited in September and gently reminded me that I did not need to keep everything exactly as it was when Arthur was alive. Her quiet support finally gave me the courage to post a picture of the worn out piece of furniture online for forty dollars.
A young divorced father named Eli Navarro came to pick up the couch that Sunday afternoon to furnish an empty apartment for his little girl Mila. I watched Mila bounce on the sagging cushions with pure joy and decided to let them take the couch for free because they needed a reason to smile. I thought I had finally moved forward until Eli returned to my porch the very next morning looking pale and exhausted. He brought the money back and explained that Mila had dropped a pencil between the cushions causing him to flip the couch over to retrieve it. When he turned the furniture upside down he noticed the black fabric underneath had been sliced open and hand sewn shut repeatedly over many years. Hidden deep inside the frame right beneath Arthur usual sitting spot was a thick package wrapped in yellowed brown paper and secured with decades of masking tape. Eli realized it was not his to read and placed the sealed package on my kitchen table showing my name written across the front in my late husband familiar handwriting.
With trembling hands I opened the brittle tape to find a stack of thirty nine envelopes and a single piece of notebook paper dated April 14 1986. That date will forever be etched in my mind because it was the day our infant daughter Rose Marie died from a severe heart defect after just three days of life. I was suffering from a terrible postoperative fever at the time and made Arthur promise me that nobody would touch our little girl after she passed away. His letter confessed that on the morning Rose died a pediatric heart specialist told him about a baby boy in another room who desperately needed a healthy valve to survive. While I was unconscious and burning with fever Arthur made the solitary agonizing decision to donate our daughter healthy right valve to save the dying infant boy. He admitted in his letter that he signed the donation papers before I woke up and then lied to my face when I demanded my promise because he could not bear to shatter me completely.