A man spent nearly four hours pushing his knees into my airplane seat and ignored every request I made.
A man spent nearly four hours pushing his knees into my airplane seat and ignored every request I made.
But when he came back from the restroom and saw what I'd done, he froze in the aisle, his face turning crimson.
Chapter 1: The Space That Came With Your Ticket
"What the hell did you do?!" he shouted.
Heads turned all over the cabin.
And for the first time that flight, I wasn't the one feeling uncomfortable.
But to explain how we got there, I have to go back to seat 24A, five minutes before the plane left the ground in Tucson.
I was sixty-one years old, barely five foot two, and flying alone to meet my first granddaughter.
My husband, Elwood, had d*ed the year before, and this was my first long trip without him.
Everyone called him Woody.
He had been the one who carried the bags, read the departure boards, and squeezed my hand during takeoff, because I hated the moment the wheels left the ground.
I had spent thirty-four years as an elementary school librarian, and I was far better with picture books than boarding passes.
I was nervous.
But my daughter, Caitlin, had called three days earlier from a hospital in Albany, New York, and said, "Mom, she's here. She has Dad's chin."
After that, nothing could have kept me off that plane.
I'd paid extra for the window.
The man who took the middle seat as the cabin filled was in his early fifties, broad-shouldered, in a pricey gray quarter-zip, pressed trousers, and polished leather loafers.
A gold Rolex flashed on his wrist as he shoved his bag under the seat in front of him.
He was on the phone and he didn't look at me.
"Landing at ten after four," he was saying. "Tell Lisa to have the car at the curb. No, the baby will still be at the hospital. We'll sort this out with Brad in person."
He hung up, buckled in, and put on noise-canceling headphones.
I didn't think about it again.
Why would I?
Albany is a big place, and I had a granddaughter to meet.
Before we had even pulled away from the gate, his knee had crossed the invisible line between our seats.
It was a big knee, in a big pair of trousers, and it settled against my leg like it had signed a lease.
I shifted toward the window and assumed he'd notice.
He spread out even more.
I waited a moment.
Then I said, quietly, "Excuse me, sir. Would you mind moving your knee back a little?"
He glanced down at me.
Then he laughed.
"Seriously, lady? Look how small you are. You couldn't possibly need all that room."
For a second, I thought he was joking.
But he wasn't smiling kindly.
He honestly seemed to believe that because I was petite, part of my seat belonged to him.
I tried to stay polite.
"I still paid for the entire seat."
He shifted.
Within seconds, his knee was back against mine.
The first hour went by in a haze of engine drone and recycled air.
By the second, he had gradually taken over more and more of my space.
He claimed the shared armrest and kept it.
He tossed his jacket across the divider.
Then he stretched one foot into my legroom as though it were his.
Every time I tried to move away, I ended up pressed more tightly against the window, with the cold plastic edge of the frame digging into my shoulder.
Eventually, my hip began to ache, a hot, steady throb, like a toothache in the wrong place.
At last I turned to him again.
"Could you please keep your legs on your side? I'm getting really uncomfortable."
He pulled one headphone off his ear and sighed, long and theatrical.
"Lady, I'm six-foot-three. Where exactly do you expect me to put my legs?"
"In the space that came with your ticket."
He gave me a smug little grin.
"If you're not using that room anyway, what's the big deal?"
Then he put the headphone back on and went on eating his chips.
They smelled like cheddar and salt, and every crunch sounded like a door being closed on me.
That sentence stayed in my mind.
If you're not using that room, what's the big deal?
Apparently, he had decided that because my body took up less space, everything left over was his to claim.
When the drinks cart came, I reached forward to lower my tray table, but his elbow was in the way.
"Excuse me. Could you move your arm so I can use my tray?"
He barely acknowledged me.
I waited, and then tried again.
"Seriously, could you give me just a little room?"
He rolled his eyes without looking up.
"You women always manage to turn nothing into a problem."
I felt my cheeks grow hot.
I wanted to tell him exactly how rude he was being.
But I swallowed it.
Woody used to joke that if I accidentally bumped into a chair, I'd apologize to the furniture.
He wasn't entirely wrong.
For most of my life, I'd believed that being considerate meant staying quiet, staying patient, and doing whatever I could to prevent an argument.
But as I sat there with my shoulder against the window and my hip aching, I began to understand something.
This stranger wasn't misunderstanding my politeness.
He was taking advantage of it.
I'd paid for my seat.
I wasn't demanding anything extra.
I simply wanted to sit in it.
Nearly four hours after takeoff, he took off his headphones, unbuckled his seat belt, and stood up.
"Bathroom," he muttered.
The older man in the aisle seat stepped out to let him pass.
I watched him lumber toward the rear of the plane, and for the first time in hours, the seat beside me was empty.
I straightened my cramped leg.
Relief swept through my body like warm water.
I moved my shoulder off the window, rolled my aching hip, and sat with both knees pointing forward.
It felt wonderful.
I looked at the empty seat.
All that room.
The same room he had spent four hours taking from me, while acting as though I had no right to complain.
Then I remembered his words.
If you're not using that room, what's the big deal?
And suddenly, I smiled.
Because I'd had an idea.
I didn't have to keep arguing.
I didn't have to ask his permission to do something about it.
I looked down the aisle, spotted a flight attendant, and quietly raised my hand.
What happened next took less than a minute.
I made one simple request.
I gathered my things.
A few minutes later, he came back from the restroom, walking toward our row without a care in the world.
He glanced at his seat.
And stopped.
His face changed instantly.
He stared at the window seat, and at the person in it, as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing.
Then he searched the cabin, row by row, until he found me.
His face turned dark red.
"WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?!"
Chapter 2: One Simple Request
Nobody in the cabin said a word.
Row 24, seat A, had a new passenger.
She was a young woman, no more than twenty-eight, with tired eyes and a baby asleep against her chest in a cotton wrap.
A pastel diaper bag sat at the man's feet, where his shoe used to be.
A tiny sock, striped yellow, hung half off the baby's heel.
She looked up at him like a deer caught in headlights.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered. "She just fell asleep. If I move, she'll wake up."
He looked at the baby.
He looked at the diaper bag.
He looked, at last, at me, three rows up and across the aisle, sitting very straight in row 9 with my hands folded in my lap.
"This is MY seat," he said, in a loud, strangled voice. "That's MY room. You can't just..."
"Sir." The flight attendant had appeared at his elbow without a sound. Her badge said MONIQUE. She was in her forties, with steady eyes and a voice like a closed door. "Seat twenty-four B is yours, and you're welcome to it. Please sit down."
"She moved my..."
"She moved herself," said Monique. "I moved the other passenger. I'm the one who made the change. If you'd like to take it up with someone, take it up with me."
He opened his mouth.
Before he could say anything, the older man in the aisle seat, who had said nothing for four hours, cleared his throat.
He was about seventy-eight, thin as a fence post, in a faded Army cap and a flannel shirt buttoned to the collar.
His name was Mr. Keene.
"Son," said Mr. Keene, mildly. "I couldn't help overhearing. About four hours ago, you told that lady, 'If you're not using that room anyway, what's the big deal.'"
The cabin was so quiet I could hear the ice settle in somebody's cup.
"Well. The lady wasn't using it, either. So now the baby is. What's the big deal?"
Somewhere near row twenty-two, a woman let out a small, startled laugh.
The man in the quarter-zip stood in the aisle with his fists at his sides and his face the color of a boiled beet.
Then he sat down.
For the rest of the flight, he sat with his knees pressed tightly together and his elbows tucked in, like a man in a very small elevator.
When the baby woke and fussed, he flinched.
I will say this much for him: he didn't say a word.
Let me tell you what I actually did, because I've heard the story told since, and it has grown.
I didn't touch his things.
I didn't tell anyone he was rude.
When I raised my hand, Monique came down the aisle with a coffee pot in her hand and a question already on her face.
"Ma'am? What can I get you?"
"Is there any other seat on this plane?" I asked, in the smallest voice I own. "I'm sorry to be a bother."
She crouched beside me.
Her eyes flicked to the empty middle seat, the jacket slung over the divider, the foot-wide patch of floor he'd claimed, and, I think, to my shoulder, still pressed against the plastic.
"I saw," she said quietly. "Every bit. I'd have stepped in if you'd asked. Honey, why didn't you ask?"
"I don't like to be a problem."
"You were never the problem."
She stood, glanced toward the back, and said, "The flight's full. Every seat's taken. But I do have a young mother in thirty-eight E, middle seat, four months old in her lap, between two big men. She's been trying to nurse under a blanket for an hour, and I'd give a month's pay to put her by a window."
I thought for exactly one second.
"Give her mine."
"And where would you sit?"
"Anywhere," I said. "I'm small."
"That's the funny thing," said Monique, and she smiled for the first time. "There's an open aisle seat in row nine, extra legroom. A passenger missed the connection in Phoenix. It's yours, if you want it."
I looked at the empty seat beside me.
I looked at the man's jacket.
I remembered his voice.
If you're not using that room anyway.
"I want it," I said.
So I gathered my purse, my cardigan, and my little paperback, and I stood up, and my hip complained, and I walked three rows up and sat down in a seat where, for the first time in four hours, my knees pointed straight ahead.
Behind me, Monique helped the young mother, whose name was Alyssa, carry the baby and her bag forward.
She slid into the window seat, and let out a breath that sounded like it had been held since Phoenix.
"Thank you," she mouthed at me, from three rows back.
I nodded.
Then I closed my eyes.
That was the entire plan.
I hadn't meant to humiliate him.
I'd only meant to stop making room for someone who thought I owed it.
The rest of the flight passed in a long, golden quiet.
Mr. Keene sent a note forward with the cart: a paper napkin, folded in four, with six words in blocky capitals.
YOU DID EVERYTHING RIGHT, MA'AM.
I tucked it into my paperback, and I read the same page for an hour.
At ten past four, the wheels touched down in Albany with a jolt that went all the way up my spine.
For once, I wasn't nervous at all.
I took a cab straight to the hospital with my carry-on on my lap, past brown February snowbanks and gray brick buildings, watching the numbers of the streets count down.
She was waiting in Room 418 on the fourth floor of Albany Medical Center.
And I had no idea who else was about to walk through the door.
Chapter 3: Room 418
Caitlin was sitting up in the hospital bed in a faded green cardigan, with her hair in a messy knot and the baby asleep in the crook of her arm.
When she saw me in the doorway, she burst into tears.
"Mom."
I don't remember crossing the room.
I only remember the smell, antiseptic and lavender lotion and the sweet, warm, impossible smell of a newborn, and the feel of my daughter's cheek wet against mine.
She was thirty-one years old and had always been, to me, six.
"Come here," she whispered. "Come meet her."
Brad stood on the other side of the bed.
Tall, shy, shirtsleeves rolled, a wooden pencil still stuck behind his ear from the high school music room, where he'd taught band and choir for four years.
He kissed my cheek.
"We're so glad you're here, Peggy."
Then Caitlin put the baby in my arms.
She weighed almost nothing.
She weighed everything.
A tiny face, pink and creased, a tuft of dark hair, one fist curled under her chin.
Her father's chin.
My husband's chin.
It was Woody's chin, the stubborn little cleft he'd had since the day I met him in the school library in 1988, returning an overdue copy of Charlotte's Web.
I started to cry, and I couldn't stop.
I stood there, in the middle of that hospital room, holding my granddaughter, and for the first time in a year, I let myself miss him all the way down.
"She's perfect," I said.
"Her name's Marigold," said Caitlin, wiping her face. "Mari, for short."
I looked up.
Brad nodded at the little plastic card taped to the bassinet.
Pink and blue stripes, in a nurse's rounded handwriting.
MARIGOLD ELWOOD DUVAL-HOBBS.
I read it three times.
"Elwood," I whispered.
"For Dad," said Caitlin. "We wanted her to carry him with her."
I sat down in the vinyl armchair by the window, because my knees had stopped working, and I held that baby against my heart and I did not say anything for a long time.
It was Brad who finally cleared his throat.
"Peggy, I need to warn you about something. My parents are on their way."
Caitlin shifted against the pillows.
"They land at four ten. They'll be here by five."
"Oh," I said. "Are they nice?"
Brad and Caitlin glanced at each other.
"They're," Brad said. "Particular."
It came out in pieces, the way hard stories do.
His father, Kurt Hobbs, ran a regional investment firm in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Brad had been groomed to join it.
At twenty-six, he had walked away to teach music in a public high school, and his father hadn't said a word to him in three years.
They hadn't come to the wedding in Tucson.
They had sent a card, one line long, with a printed signature.
"What's he like?" I asked.
Brad smiled, without humor.
"When I was twelve, I went to band camp for a month. When I came home, my bedroom was a home gym. A treadmill and a rack of weights. He said, 'You weren't using it. What's the big deal?'"
My whole body went still.
"That's what he always says," Brad went on. "If you aren't using something, he takes it. He's never once thought it was wrong."
In my arms, Marigold gave a tiny sigh.
I felt something crawl up the back of my neck.
"Brad," I said, slowly. "What does your father look like?"
"Tall. Gray at the temples. He wears a gold Rolex, and he never takes it off." Brad shrugged. "You'll see him. He doesn't exactly blend in."
I was going to say something.
I really was.
But in that instant, a sharp double knock rattled the half-open door, and a bright, brittle voice said, "Knock-knock! Is this the right room?"
A woman swept in on a cloud of expensive perfume.
She was in her late fifties, in a cream cashmere coat, with blond highlights and a tan that didn't come from a Northeast winter.
A tan Hermès Birkin hung from her elbow, and a gold Cartier bracelet slid up and down her wrist as she waved.
Lisa Hobbs.
"Brad, darling!" She kissed the air beside his cheek. "And this must be our little Hobbs. Oh, let me see her."
She stopped.
Her eyes landed on me, in the vinyl chair, holding the baby against my chest.
It was the look you give a stranger who has taken the good seat.
"Oh," she said. "You must be Caitlin's mother."
"Peggy," I said. "Peggy Duval."
"How lovely that you could make the trip." She said it the way you say it to a waiter who has brought the wrong dish. "Flights are so dreadfully expensive these days, aren't they? On a teacher's pension."
"Librarian's."
"Of course."
Behind her, two nurses had paused in the hallway with a medication cart.
A man in the next room's doorway was holding a paper cup and pretending not to listen.
"Now," said Lisa, brightly, setting the Birkin on the foot of the bed. "I'd like to settle the christening, while we're all together. We've reserved St. Barnabas in Greenwich for the fourteenth. Reception for a hundred and eighty at the club. We've put down the deposit. Of course, the church is rather small, so we've kept the list to immediate family."
"I'm her grandmother," I said.
"Of course you are, dear." She patted the air toward me. "The Arizona grandmother."
Caitlin said, "Lisa, that's..."
"And I do think we should fix this." Lisa lifted the name card from the bassinet between two fingers, as if it were something the cat had dragged in. "Duval-Hobbs? Brad, we discussed this. The child is a Hobbs. We'll correct the paperwork before the baptism."
The room had gone very quiet.
Brad took a step forward.
His jaw was tight.
I don't think I'd ever seen him angry before.
But before he could speak, a shadow filled the doorway, and a tall man in a gray quarter-zip stepped in behind his wife.
His loafers were polished.
A gold Rolex flashed on his wrist.
He had an enormous, expensive bouquet of flowers in one hand, and he was looking straight at me.
All the color left his face at once.
It didn't turn red, this time.
It went white.
"Kurt, darling, finally," Lisa said. "I was just explaining to Mrs. Duval how things will work."
Kurt Hobbs did not answer.
He stood in the doorway, with the bouquet shaking very slightly in his fist, and stared at the small woman holding his granddaughter.
"Lisa," he said, hoarsely. "Stop."
"What?"
"Stop talking."
She laughed.
"Why on earth are you whispering?"
Brad looked from one face to the other.
Slowly, he said, "Dad? Do the two of you know each other?"
Chapter 4: Ask Her Name
I stood up.
I did it slowly, because my hip still remembered four hours of seat 24A.
Then I leaned down and put Marigold back in her mother's arms, and I smoothed the blanket over her shoulder, and I turned to face the man in the doorway.
"Hello, Mr. Hobbs," I said. "I think we've met."
"Peggy," he began. "Mrs. Duval. I..."
"Row twenty-four," I said. "Seat B."
Lisa's smile faltered.
"Row what? Kurt, what is she talking about?"
No one answered.
So I told her.
I kept my voice level, and I kept it short, because I'd learned something that day about how little I needed to say.
"For nearly four hours, your husband and I shared a row. I asked him to move his knee. Then I asked him to keep his legs on his side. Then I asked him to move his elbow so I could lower my tray. I asked seven times." I let that sit. "He told me I was small. He told me that if I wasn't using the room anyway, what was the big deal."
The nurses in the hallway had stopped pretending to push their cart.
The man with the paper cup had taken one step into the room.
Beside the bed, Brad had gone absolutely still.
"He also said that women always turn nothing into a problem," I added. "I remember that, because I counted every word."
Lisa turned slowly to her husband.
The Birkin was still on the foot of the bed, and the bracelet at her wrist caught the fluorescent light.
"Kurt," she said. "Is that true?"
He looked at the bouquet in his fist.
He looked at his shoes.
"I didn't know who she was," he said. "Lisa, I swear. I had no idea she was..."
"I know you didn't," I said.
He looked up.
"That's the part I'd like you to hear, Mr. Hobbs." I held his eyes. "You didn't need to know who I was. I wasn't anyone's mother-in-law at twenty-four A. I was just a woman in the seat she'd paid for. That should have been enough."
Nobody breathed.
The monitor beside Caitlin's bed beeped softly, once, twice.
I had never in my life spoken to a stranger that way, and my knees were shaking inside my slacks.
But my voice was steady.
"Dad."
Brad's voice came out low and flat.
It was the voice of a man who had been rehearsing a speech for ten years and finally found out he didn't need it.
"I need you to understand something. Peggy wasn't at our wedding because she's some distant in-law. She was at our wedding because she was the only parent who came. She called me every Sunday night for three years, when you wouldn't pick up the phone. She learned the cello part to my winter concert so she could play along over video. She mailed me a care package every October, with a pair of wool socks, because she heard I get cold in the band room."
He swallowed.
"You sat beside the woman who did that for me, for four hours, and you made her feel small."
Kurt's mouth worked.
"I didn't..."
"You said it to her," said Brad, "the same thing you said to me when I was twelve. 'If you're not using that room, what's the big deal.' You've been saying it my whole life." His voice shook. "And on a plane, you said it to my mother-in-law."
A faint sound came from somewhere in the doorway, a nurse trying not to laugh, or trying not to cry.
Lisa turned a very peculiar shade of pink.
"Well," she said, with a short, brittle laugh. "I'm sure this is all a misunderstanding. Mrs. Duval could simply have said..."
"She did, Lisa," said Kurt, very quietly. "She said it seven times."
Silence fell over Room 418.
It was the loudest silence I have ever stood in.
At last, Lisa lifted her chin, picked up the Birkin by its handles, and sat down heavily on the very edge of the visitor's chair, as though someone had cut her strings.
She didn't say another word.
She just stared at the little name card, MARIGOLD ELWOOD DUVAL-HOBBS, as if she were seeing it for the first time.
"There won't be a christening in Greenwich," Brad said. "Not on the fourteenth, and not at St. Barnabas. It'll be in Albany, at Caitlin's church, with the people who showed up."
"Brad," said Lisa, faintly. "The deposit..."
"Keep it."
Kurt closed his eyes.
When he opened them, they were wet.
"Mrs. Duval," he said. His voice had no polish left in it at all. "I'm sorry."
"To whom?"
"To you."
"Would you be sorry," I asked gently, "if I weren't Marigold's grandmother?"
He was quiet for a very long time.
I will give him this: he didn't rush it.
"No," he said at last. "I think... on that plane, I wouldn't have been sorry at all. I'd have forgotten you by the time I reached the gate."
"Thank you for telling the truth."
"I mean it, though. I'm sorry now."
"I believe you," I said. "That's not the same as forgiving you."
He nodded, like a man who had expected exactly that.
He set the bouquet down on the windowsill, very carefully, beside his own gold watch, which he had unclasped without seeming to notice, and left lying next to the flowers.
I noticed.
"Mrs. Duval," he said. "May I ask you something?"
"You may."
"What's your name?"
For a moment, I didn't understand.
"It's Peggy. Peggy Duval. You know that."
"I do," said Kurt Hobbs. "But I never asked. Not once. Not on the plane, and not in four years of my son's marriage. I never asked you a single thing." He took a breath. "Who are you, Peggy?"
I looked at the man for a long time.
Then I answered.
"I'm Peggy Duval. I'm sixty-one. I was an elementary school librarian for thirty-four years. I lost my husband last winter, and I am still learning how to take up room in a world that's quieter without him. I like window seats. I hate flying. And I'm Marigold's grandmother, which, as of this afternoon, is the best thing I've ever been."
Beside me, Caitlin was crying openly.
Brad had a hand over his eyes.
"Thank you," Kurt said. His voice cracked in the middle. "Could I... would you allow me to hold my granddaughter?"
I glanced at my daughter, and she gave me a small, wet nod.
I took Marigold from her arms.
I walked across the room, and I stopped in front of the tall man in the gray quarter-zip, who stood very still, with his elbows pressed to his sides.
"Mind her head," I said, and set his granddaughter in his arms. "And keep your elbows in."
Marigold opened her eyes, and looked up at him with Woody's gray, serious stare.
Kurt Hobbs's face collapsed.
"This isn't forgiveness," I told him quietly. "It's room. There is room for you, if you earn it."
"I'll earn it," he whispered.
I wasn't sure I believed him yet.
But I let him hold her.
Chapter 5: The Window Seat
I sold the house in Tucson in May.
It was a small stucco ranch with a lemon tree in the yard, where Woody and I had raised our daughter, and I'd always told myself I couldn't leave it.
But a house is only a place to keep a life.
The life was in Albany now, ten minutes from a baby with a stubborn little chin.
I rented a second-floor apartment on Madison Avenue with a bay window.
Every Tuesday, I took Marigold for the morning.
Every Saturday, I read picture books to a circle of toddlers at the library on Delaware Avenue, in a chair too small for anyone.
It turned out I hadn't stopped being a librarian.
I had only stopped having someone to read to.
Kurt Hobbs earned it slowly.
That is the only honest way to say it.
The first snowfall in March, I woke at six to the scrape of a metal shovel under my window.
He didn't knock.
He cleared my steps, my walk, and the long stretch of sidewalk to the corner, then drove off in the dark.
He came back the next storm.
And the next.
He never once mentioned it, and neither did I, though I started leaving a thermos of coffee on the porch rail.
In April, Brad mailed me a small, flat box.
Inside was a receipt.
His father had sold the gold Rolex on a Tuesday, and had given every dollar to the music program at Brad's high school, enough for forty new band uniforms and a set of timpani.
"He didn't tell me," Brad wrote on the back. "The department head called me crying."
Kurt wore a plain steel watch after that.
The christening was in June, in Caitlin's little brick church on Lark Street, with open windows and a smell of cut grass.
I stood at the font beside my daughter, holding Marigold in a gown that Woody's mother had worn in 1929.
Brad's father stood in the back pew, alone, with his hands folded.
Lisa sat three rows behind him.
She had worn a plain navy dress.
The Birkin was nowhere in sight.
At the reception, in the church hall, over paper plates of ham sandwiches and sheet cake, she came up to me with a cup of lemonade that she held in both hands, like a student about to recite.
"Mrs. Duval," she said. "Peggy. May I?"
"Of course."
"I called you 'the Arizona grandmother.'" Her voice was thin. "In front of nurses. I've thought about it every night since. I'd like to say I was only nervous. But I wasn't. I was being unkind, and I knew it."
"I know," I said. "Thank you for saying so."
She nodded.
"Would you... would it be all right if I came on Saturdays? To the library? I don't know any picture books."
I looked at the woman in the plain navy dress.
"I'll lend you a few," I said.
In August, I flew back to Tucson for the last of my boxes.
Kurt asked if he could come.
I said yes before I thought about it, and then I thought about it, and I still said yes.
We boarded at dawn.
I had the window, seat 24A, the same number I hadn't chosen on purpose.
He sat in 24B, a broad-shouldered man in a gray quarter-zip, with a boarding pass folded in his shirt pocket.
A young man took the aisle seat, with headphones and a backpack.
When the plane began to roll, I felt the old fear in my chest, the moment before the wheels leave the ground.
Before I could reach for it, a large, warm hand covered mine.
It was Kurt's.
He didn't say anything.
His elbows were tucked in.
His knees were pointed straight ahead.
His legs stayed inside the space that came with his ticket, every inch of the way, for the whole six hours.
Somewhere over Kansas, he glanced at the armrest between us.
"It's yours," he murmured. "I just wanted you to know I know."
I looked out the window, at the clouds going gold beneath the wing, and I thought of Woody.
He would have laughed until he cried.
Then he'd have said what he always said when I made myself small and somebody noticed.
Peg, you can apologize to the furniture. But never to yourself.
I settled back into my seat, and into every inch of it.
I took up exactly as much room as I had paid for.
May you like
It turned out to be all of it.
THE END
