THE MATTRESS
Word Count: 317
It was silly to worry about it, to feel shame. This she told herself again and again before finally deciding that they absolutely had to buy a new mattress set.
The problem was not with a new one, they’d already shopped price, and firmness, and spring count, checked out the new memory foam styles and the ones with two-sided temperature settings and even one made completely of down. Delivery dates and times were negotiated. The problem was what to do with the old.
Twenty years of a happy marriage leave their mark on a mattress. Rightfully so, she told herself. But still, Sister Marie Rose’s face glared through her nightmares, pointed fingers and clacked rosary beads at her dreams.
“We could let the delivery men take it away,” she had offered. She knew there could be snickers and winks but from two men she would never see again, or at least not for another twenty years.
“And pay twenty-five dollars for the service?” he said. “No, we’ll just put it out at the curb on large trash pickup night.”
But she imagined the reaction of not only the trash-men who she waved to if she happened to see them, but the neighbors driving by.
“We’ll put it out after dark, how’s that?” he said.
“But what about Tuesday morning?”
So she sat huddled with her coffee by the living room window, hidden from the rising sun by the curtain, peeking out at the sound of every car and truck driving by. When at long last the squealing, clanking, rumbling belch of the garbage truck hissed to a stop at the end of her drive, when the mattress and box spring had been loaded and the two men got back into the truck, she exhaled, cut short by the beep-beep of the horn and the wave of one gloved hand out the truck window.
love this!
Susan, The first few words of your posts always hook me and the last ones make me want for more!
Billie, thank you! There’s always something that age and experience can understand that youth cannot.
Thank you, Janette, for a compliment that is about the highest one can give a writer.