Herman Cogan is on the phone talking with his mother when she mentions the wing chair she gave him years ago, before she moved to Florida. His mother often reminisces these days. Talking about the past. When they were a family.
“I don’t remember it,” Cogan says.
“It’s the one with the rose-colored seat. You loved to sit in it when you were young. You didn’t throw it away, did you?”
Cogan rarely ventures into the basement of his three-flat apartment building. It is dark and dank and smells of decay. The light switch malfunctioned years ago. Now he’s using a flashlight to avoid bumping into luggage, boxes of books, non-working washers and dryers, old furniture. The landlord has promised to fix the light switch, but never gets around to it. After stumbling over an old garden hose, Cogan finds the chair sheathed in opaque plastic.
Yes. Gray knobbly, with a tufted, rose-colored seat. He remembers. His mother had two workmen with a pickup drop off the furniture she would have no use for in Florida, and he had asked them to put it in the cellar. He intended to sort through it all, but never got to it.
Cogan notices something beneath the chair, barely visible under the plastic. A wooden box. As he pulls it clear of the chair, he realizes it is a small casket. He never noticed it before. Whose is it? How did it get there? Is anything in it?
“It’s here, Mom, the chair. But I also found a little casket. What’s that about?”
“Oh, dear.”
“Mom?”
“They weren’t supposed to deliver...
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