When I was 24, my boyfriend used our rent money to enter his first ever large-stakes poker tournament. I watched the broadcast from my apartment, suspended in fear, as he advanced to the final table; what Poker News called, “A lengthy back and forth affair.” After five days of play, he won $337,801 as the grand prize. The anchor suggested an engagement ring, but he bought the house his mom suggested first. When we moved from my apartment, he wanted to donate my furnishings and buy everything new. I only cared that one piece made it to our new house: my grandma’s coffee table.
I’ve heard the story so many times its engrained into my being: the day I came home from the hospital, my dad told my mom things were getting too serious and she should go home with her mom. For the first six months of my life, I slept tucked in a clothesbasket between my mom on her mom’s couch and that coffee table.
My earliest memory of that coffee table was when I was 4 years old. I was at my grandparents’ house painting ceramics when I accidentally dipped my paintbrush into my aunt’s coffee mug. I remember because she called me a jackass.
The coffee table was minimal: a hunky slab of Walnut with sloped legs connecting a longer matching bottom. The underside was open for storage, no apron or pouting lip, simply portions of structure crafted together. No one still alive knows where it came from – my mom or her two sisters – according to them, that coffee table was always just there.
At 22, I was living with my aunt in my grandparents’ house, but I lucked into my first apartment. My aunt told me I could take Grandma’s coffee table, but she refused to part with the matching end tables. I stomped my foot and insisted she was splitting a set, but she crossed her arms, and kept the end tables stacked in the back room unused beside the closet that stored Grandma’s ceramics.
Part varnisher, part worshipper, my grandmother sanded and refinished the three-piece furniture set every so many years in the narrow strip of yard beside Grandpap’s tomato garden. Grandma’s favorite card game was 31; she swore she never aged beyond that number, but I remember insisting she had to be older than 31 if my mom was 32. She died later that year. Grandpap passed when I was ten, but Mom repeats stories as if they still lived in that house on top of the hill.
At 33, for the first time in my life, there is grass behind my aunt’s inherited house. No garden, no rows of tomatoes. When I took my dog to gallop the openness, I became saturated with the heat of the chase. With no growth, there was no shade.
The day we moved to our new house, I turned 25. Most boxes were packed and prepared to be transferred, but I scoured the property to ensure nothing was forgotten. I never stored anything in the room above the garage, but I felt lured upstairs. Then I fell to my knees. One side of Grandma’s coffee table was splintered to smithereens. Happy birthday to me. When my soon-to-be fiancé turned out of the driveway too fast, the unstrapped coffee table toppled the tailgate, and crashed into asphalt. He wasn’t going to tell me.
Every other argument with my fiancé ended with him telling me he would get Grandma’s coffee table fixed, but he never did. Like his winning hand, we were an unsuited pair. When I was 26, I aborted his baby and painted it a miscarriage, deserted our house, and ran back to my aunt’s. The end tables were still stacked in the corner.
When I was 31, my ex died with my name still on the deed. The dwelling was mine under a Right of Survivorship clause. To sell, I had to shuffle and deal through everything everyone left since I fled. I found our unsent wedding invitations in a back basement drawer. For the first time, I considered what our seven-year-old might’ve looked like, and for the first time since my ex-fiancé died, I cried.
Hemingway’s saddest six-word short story repeated in my head when I donated bags and bags of baby clothes a tenant had left piled in the corners of what had been our bedroom. Before I sold it, I scoured the house from top to bottom. Grandma’s coffee table was nowhere to be found.
Gina Moriarty is an emerging writer from Pittsburgh, PA. She earned her MFA from Chatham University. She’s a Sagittarius and her favorite mode of transportation is on the back of a motorcycle. She writes about addiction, love, and coincidence umbrellaed by hope. Read her work here: http://ginamoriarty.com
