They stared at each other. Then Emily
took her phone out of her pocket and
looked at the screen. “It was right here,”
she said.
“Is it.. .in the closet?” Bev asked,
though the sliding closet door exposed
a packed wall of junk into which even
a pillowcase would be hard to wedge.
The girl scowled. “No!”
“O.K., O.K. Well. I guess.. .we just
take the box spring?”
But Emily did not want to let it go.
“Where’s the frame?” she said.
“Is it.. .are you sure you showed
them the right picture?”
“I only took the one!” She sounded
as though she might cry.
“I mean, was there a different pic-
ture, already on—”
“No, Mrs. Dreyer, no. No! That was
the picture I took!”
“All right.”
“It was here!”
They fell quiet, realizing simultane-
ously that the other women had been
listening to them argue. The baby cooed
and the aide shushed him. Wordlessly,
they lifted the box spring and stutter-
stepped it into the living room.
“It looks like there isn’t a frame after
all,” Bev said. “So we’ll just take the box
spring.”
The donor’s face was blank. The aide
frowned, eyes narrowed, as though wor-
ried she was being tricked, though it
was unclear what the trick might be. As
Bev watched, her expression softened
into quiet triumph—she was right, after
all, that there was no bed frame, only a
box spring.
Bev handed the donor a receipt and
they dragged the box spring out to the
truck. It was time to give it all away.
S
ilence, as usual, presided over the
ride to the first client’s apartment,
though a different silence from before.
Emily, head hanging and foot twitch-
ing, seemed angry; a couple of times, she
pulled out her phone and stared at the
photo of the missing bed frame before
putting it away with a sigh. As for Bev,
she was accustomed to, and adept at, hav-
ing to negotiate unexpected fissures in
her life, and she had a knack for smooth-
ing them over, making her world appear
to have healed. Stability—that was what
Bev had provided Celeste when her fa-
ther moved out, during her junior year
of high school, an ostensibly vulnera-
ble time in any teen-ager’s life. Which
is why it bewildered her when the girl
had seemed not merely to weather the
rupture but to enjoy the novelty of it, to
use it as a springboard to independence.
Last summer, in the weeks before Ce-
leste left for college, she would utter the
assistant’s name in Bev’s presence with
a casual, cruel insouciance that surely,
surely she knew hurt her. Celeste would
tell Bev that she’d gone to the pizzeria
or the movies with her father and the
assistant, that she’d taken a day trip to
the city with her father and the assis-
tant. As she talked, Celeste would jingle
the thin silver bangles the assistant had
bought her—a new, horrifying tic that
it was apparently Bev’s burden to ignore.
Why? Why!?
So Bev had it in her, here in the truck,
to pretend that what had just happened
hadn’t: that the metal bed frame had not,
in fact, mysteriously vanished from the
woman’s bedroom. Was Emily putting
one over on her, maybe as some kind of
retroactive, once-removed reprisal for
something Celeste had said or done to
her last year? But she knew it couldn’t
be so. The two hadn’t known each other,
and the girl was completely baffled.
The first client, an African-Amer-
ican woman of around thirty, was clearly
thrilled to see them; she lived in the
subsidized apartment complex over-
looking the hospital and had the air of
somebody getting a fresh start—new
job, new place. She needed the love seat
and the end table. She followed them
out to the truck and helped them carry
in the love seat. When Bev brought in
the table, the woman put her hands
on her hips and said, “Oh, oh. I’m sorry,
I meant the other one. Can I get the
other one?”
The table was a square of fake-
woodgrain Formica with pitted chrome
legs—not hideous, and sturdy enough.
It was the one they’d picked up earlier
that morning, from the woman who gave
them the love seat. Bev said, “I think
this is the only one.”
“No,” the client said. “The little white
one. The painted wood one.”
The truck contained no such table.
Bev was sure of it—she had literally
just come from inside. But when she
followed the client up the ramp, it was
perched atop the mattress pile as though
it had flown in and alighted there: a
little white wooden drop-leaf, just as
the lady had said. It seemed impossi-
ble that it had remained upright as
they drove; and, anyway, it had not been
there moments ago, when they’d ex-
humed the love seat from underneath
