For twenty years, I begged my husband to get rid of that couch.

It was brown corduroy, the color of wet tree bark, with a sagging middle that swallowed you whole. The left armrest was worn through to the stuffing, and I’d patched it three times with fabric from the craft store that never quite matched. Sitting down was easy. Getting up required a running start, a rocking motion, and sometimes a prayer.

We bought it in 2005 from a furniture store in Dayton that went out of business the next year. I should have taken that as a sign.“Let’s buy a new one, Arthur,” I’d say. Every spring, when the furniture ads came in the Sunday paper. Every Christmas, when our daughter came home and sank into it with a groan. Every time the springs poked through and tore another pair of my stockings.

Arthur would look up from his crossword. He’d pat the cushion beside him.

“This one makes you sit closer to me,” he’d say.

And I’d roll my eyes and sit down next to him, and the sagging middle would tip me right into his shoulder, and he’d smile like he’d won something.

My name is Frances Delaney. Everyone calls me Fran.

I’m seventy-one years old. I taught second grade at Fairborn Elementary for thirty-three years. I live in a small brick ranch house on Maplewood Drive in Fairborn, Ohio, a few miles from the air force base. It has a big backyard, a vegetable garden, and a maple tree that turns the color of fire every October.

I lived there with Arthur for forty-two years.

For twenty years, I begged him to get rid of that couch.

Now I understand why he never would.

It wasn’t the couch he couldn’t let go of.

It was the reason to sit close.