La-Z-Girl

The first place my wife and I lived in after college was an old Victorian house that had been converted into five apartments. The building housed an assortment of low-lifes as well as a few middling-lifes like ourselves. The day we moved in, my wife had to work so I started moving a few of our paltry collection of worldly goods by myself. One of our most prized possessions was an old easy chair that I had rescued from somebody's garbage at one point. I got one of my roommates to help me load it into the hatchback of my car, along with a number of other items, and then drove over to the apartment by myself to unload. I was able to carry everything into the apartment except for the chair. Our apartment was on the first floor, but there were two doorways and a narrow hallway which would have been virtually impossible for me to navigate with that chair. So I left it by the front door and went to pick up my wife from work.

By the time we got back a scant twenty minutes later, the chair was nowhere to be found. This was a big, heavy chair, so whoever took it couldn't have gotten very far. We looked in all directions and didn't see anyone making a quick getaway with a massive easy chair slung over his shoulder, so we decided to ask the residents of the other apartments if they had seen any suspicious activity. The only ones around were our upstairs neighbors, a woman who must have weighed 300 pounds and her nearly-as-chunky boyfriend. I knocked and she opened the door about four inches. "Hi," I said. "We're just moving in, and it looks like somebody took a chair that we left outside. Have you seen a big easy chair?"

"A chair? No, uhhhhh, we haven't seen a chair, have we honey? No, haven't seen any chairs."

"Ooookaaaayyyy," I said, genuinely confused at the ambiguity of her response. How hard is it to remember whether you have seen an easy chair sitting outside on a sidewalk?

I went back down to our apartment and my wife and I discussed the possibilities. My razor-sharp mind began putting all the pieces together, like a montage in one of those dumbed-down thrillers where they flash all the clues in front of you one more time in case you hadn't figured out that the gardener buried the bodies behind the tool shed:

FLASH: Empty space where the chair had been.

FLASH: Deserted neighborhood surrounding building.

FLASH: Neighbor's door open a crack, with fat woman blocking view of apartment.

FLASH: Fat woman stammering about how she was pretty sure she hadn't seen the chair.

"I've got it!" I announced. "The bodies are behind the tool shed!"

Just then there was a knock at the door. It was our hefty neighbor. "I think I found your chair," she said.

"Gee, really?" I said.

"After you stopped by, we went looking for it, and we saw somebody carrying it down the street. They dropped it when they saw us, so we grabbed the chair so no one else would take it."

"Wow, thanks! So where is it now?"

"We carried it upstairs to our apartment."

Keep in mind that to get to their apartment one had to go up a steep, narrow flight of stairs that was maybe ten feet from our door, which had been standing open for the full five minutes that had elapsed since my last conversation with Hefty McJuggs.

"Wow, that's unbelievable!" I said, with genuine enthusiasm.

She offered to help us carry it back down. What a sweatheart.

When we got upstairs we saw that the chair had been nicely arranged among their other furniture, with a prime spot facing the TV. Just where you would put it if you wanted to store it for two minutes before alerting the rightful owner.

It took us about ten minutes just to get the damn thing down the stairs, with my wife taking full opportunity to make comments like, "Wow, how'd you get it up here so fast? That must have been really hard," and "We really appreciate you keeping our chair safe. We wouldn't want some low-life jerks to steal it."

The important thing is that we got our chair back. And I guess I need to give Hefty some credit for at least finding a way to get the chair back to us while maintaining some miniscule amount of face. She must have figured that we were bound to see the chair in their apartment at some point, so she might as well give it up before the situation got even more awkward. The funny thing is, I think that's the last time I ever saw the inside of their apartment. You tend not to hang out with folks after they steal your furniture.