The Moving Day

By ten in the morning, Laura had learned two things about Ellen’s sofa. It was heavier than it looked, and it had entered the upstairs apartment by means no one could remember.

“It came through the door,” Ellen said.

“It couldn’t have,” said Mark, who was holding the lower end in the stairwell.

“I watched them bring it in.”

“Then they took the door off.”

“They did not take the door off.”

Laura, wedged between the sofa and the wall, could see neither of them. She had been assigned to guide the back leg around the turn in the stairs, a job that had seemed possible when she was standing in the living room. Now she could feel the wooden frame pressing through the upholstery against her shoulder.

“Could somebody decide whether we’re going up or down?” she asked.

They had been going down. Then Mark had discovered that the sofa would not clear the landing, and everyone had pushed it halfway back up. A strip of wallpaper had come away with them. Ellen stood above, holding one end with both hands and looking down as if the right angle might reveal itself from there.

“Down,” she said.

Mark shifted his grip. The sofa moved six inches, caught on the banister, and stopped.

Ellen was leaving that afternoon for a job in Portland. Her father had lent her a pickup, though he had warned her that the passenger door stuck and the fuel gauge could not be trusted. She had spent the previous evening packing books into boxes intended for produce. One split open when Mark lifted it, leaving a dozen novels scattered beneath the kitchen table. By morning, all three of them were tired enough to find this funny.

Laura had planned to help for an hour. She had arrived in clothes she could get dirty and had brought coffee for everyone, which Ellen pronounced the most useful thing anyone had done so far. The apartment already looked unfamiliar. Bare rectangles marked the walls where pictures had hung, and the rooms gave back their voices. In the kitchen, someone had left a single spoon beside the sink.

They tried the sofa on its side. They tried it on its back. Mark proposed removing one leg until Laura pointed out that all four were fixed to the frame. Ellen went downstairs and opened the front door, though the sofa was still nowhere near it. When she returned, she was followed by the building’s caretaker, who looked at the obstruction without offering to help.

“That sofa was here when you moved in,” he said.

Ellen turned to Mark. “I told you.”

“No,” the caretaker said. “I mean it was already in the apartment.”

For a moment none of them spoke. Then Mark began to laugh, quietly at first, with his forehead resting against the sofa. Laura laughed too, though the weight of it was still on her shoulder. Ellen looked from one of them to the other.

“You could have mentioned that downstairs.”

“You never asked,” the caretaker said.

He went back to his work. They carried the sofa upstairs, where it settled into its old place beneath a pale rectangle on the wall. Ellen stood over it, considering what her father might say when she arrived in Portland without it. Then she tore a sheet of notebook paper from a pad and wrote SOFA — FREE, BUT YOU MOVE IT in letters large enough to read from the sidewalk.

By noon they had loaded everything that would fit in the pickup. The last boxes went in beneath a tarp, followed by a lamp whose shade had survived college by some improbable kindness. Mark tied the ropes while Ellen watched the sky. Laura brought down the spoon from the kitchen and placed it in Ellen’s hand.

“I thought you might miss this.”

“I might,” Ellen said, and put it in the glove compartment.

The passenger door took three attempts to close. Ellen backed the truck out of its space while Mark called directions she could not hear through the open window. She stopped once to check the tarp, waved, and drove away with the lamp shade trembling above the tailgate.

Mark went home to sleep. Laura stayed long enough to carry Ellen’s sign downstairs and tape it beside the mailboxes. On her way out, she glanced back through the open apartment door. The sofa sat in the middle of the emptied room, looking larger than it ever had when everything else was there.

Outside, she found a crescent of white paint on her sleeve and a small scrape across one knuckle. She had nearly reached the corner when she heard someone call from the building.

“Is the sofa still available?”

Laura turned. A young man stood at the entrance with a friend behind him, both looking hopeful.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s upstairs.”

“Will it fit down the stairs?”

She looked at the two of them. “You’ll want to ask the caretaker.”