I found a pair of scissors.
“Don’t.”
I cut through the tape.
“Annie, please.”
I opened the cardboard flaps and pulled away layers of packing paper.
Blue paint.
Wood.
For a second, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.
Then I removed the remaining packing material.
It was a chair.
An old wooden kitchen chair painted blue.
The paint had worn away around the edges. One leg had been repaired with a darker piece of wood, and a black mark scarred the bottom rung as if something hot had once touched it.
I looked at Mom.
She lowered herself into one of our kitchen chairs.
Not the blue one.
“What is this?”
She said nothing.
I lifted the chair from the box and set it on the floor.
It wobbled.
Then I noticed scratches beneath the seat.
I tipped it sideways.
One word had been carved deeply into the wood in uneven letters.
GILBERT.
I covered my mouth.
Dad’s name.
It wasn’t recent. The grooves had darkened with age.
“Dad,” I whispered, staring at the chair, “what are we supposed to do with this?”
Mom began to cry.
She pressed her fingertips to her eyes while I waited.
Finally, she said, “That was his chair.”
“Where?”
“In Hawaii.”
“I figured that part out.”
She looked at me.
“Your father didn’t grow up the way you think he did.”
Dad’s childhood home had become unstable when he was a teenager.
Mom didn’t know every detail.
Dad hadn’t told her everything either.
But for several years, he lived with a foster family.
It was a crowded house, with kids constantly coming and going, too many shoes by the door, and too many plates drying beside the sink.
“And that chair?” I asked.
“Kitchen table.” Mom looked at it. “There weren’t enough matching chairs. Gilbert got that blue one.”
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