The chair was the color of a bad decision.
Mara stood in front of it with her coat over one arm while Bev lowered herself into its embrace. Purple velvet rose around her shoulders. Along the sides, brass-colored studs had been hammered into two long, curving rows. It was the kind of chair a person could confess in, if the person listening had been dead for a century.
Bev put her hands on the arms.
“Well?”
“You couldn't dust it.”
“I'd pay someone.”
“They'd leave.”
“I'd pay them more.”
Mara walked around it. The back was worse. It had a ring on it, a large metal ring of no apparent use. She took hold of it and gave it a little tug.
“That's for when the bearers carry you out.”
Bev laughed without opening her eyes. “I can hear you enjoying yourself.”
The store occupied two floors of a building that had once sold office supplies. Mara could remember coming here for a printer cartridge and being told the printer itself was cheaper. Now there were candles as big as saucepans and a dining table laid for eight people who would have to eat whatever matched the plates.
Bev had asked her to come because she had an hour before meeting Anne. Mara had said she would, thinking they could look at something sensible first: a good mattress, perhaps, or the kind of sofa that didn't sink in the middle. Bev had walked past both without slowing down.
A saleswoman approached carrying a tablet. Her shoes made almost no sound on the rug.
“Is it comfortable?” she asked.
“Disgracefully,” Bev said.
“It's one of our most popular pieces.”
Mara looked around. There were no others.
“Do you have it in anything else?”
Bev opened her eyes. “I don't want anything else.”
The woman smiled at the person in the chair. “We do several fabrics, but the plum has a lot of character.”
“So does a wet dog,” Mara said, too quietly for the woman to hear.
Bev heard. She began laughing again and couldn't get up. Mara had to take her hand and pull, the two of them briefly caught between Bev's weight and the chair's determination to keep it. The saleswoman waited with professional patience.
“Would you like to see the footstool?” she asked.
Bev held Mara's hand harder.
“There's a footstool?”
It was round and low, with the same studs. Bev put a foot on it. Mara thought of a circus she had been taken to as a child, the lion made to stand on a box while everyone clapped because it hadn't eaten the man.
“I'd like to sit down now,” she said.
“Get your own.”
The woman left them to look at fabrics they didn't want. Bev sat again and slipped off her shoes. Her left foot was swollen across the top. Mara hadn't noticed it at work, under the black shoes they all complained about and bought again because they knew where to find them.
“That's bad,” she said.
“It's my foot.”
“You should get it looked at.”
“It has been looked at. It was less impressed than you.”
She put both feet on the stool. The hem of her pants lifted, showing socks in two different shades of black.
“That earring thing's spreading,” Mara said.
“It's how you'll know I'm rich. Nothing will have to agree.”
Mara sat on a straight-backed chair opposite her. From here she could see what Bev saw: the purple arms around her, her feet no longer having to find the floor, the ridiculous little table at exactly the height of her hand. It would be an easy place to put a glass. Or a plate. Or a book that had belonged to the library long enough to make Bev worry about it.
“Anne will hate it,” Mara said.
“She'll never sit in it. She'll sit in my old one and tell me I've lost my mind.”
“Will you keep the old one?”
“It's a good chair.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“Buying a bad one.”
They smiled at each other. Mara had known Bev since before she dyed her hair, then through the years when she dyed it so firmly that everyone pretended not to notice the line at her forehead, then into the present arrangement, in which nobody could say which parts were natural and Bev denied it mattered. She had helped carry the good chair up three flights of stairs. Bev had stood at the top telling them not to scrape the wallpaper while she and Daniel sweated beneath its weight.
Bev rubbed the velvet backward with the flat of her hand, making a dark patch, then smoothed it in the other direction. Mara reached over and spoiled it again. Bev slapped her wrist.
The saleswoman returned with a price written on a small card. Bev looked at it, looked at the footstool, then took the card and put it in her bag.
“Not today,” she said.
“We can arrange a deposit.”
“I haven't got it today.”
Mara felt the urge to explain that Bev wasn't wasting the woman's time. She could have explained it in one sentence. They were the people who had won, they would be back, the purple chair could go somewhere no matter what it cost. Beside her, Bev was putting her shoes on.
“Could I have the measurements?” she asked instead.
The saleswoman gave them to her. Mara wrote them on the back of a receipt. Bev asked about delivery, then about whether the stool came through the door separately, with such orderly attention that the woman lost the faint impatience Mara had thought she saw.
Outside, Bev took the receipt.
“I'll put a little outline on the floor,” she said.
“You'll trip over it.”
“Then I'll know it's too big.”
They went to a coffee shop on the next street. Bev bought two coffees and a pastry they could break in half without having to agree on which half was larger. She pushed the saucer toward Mara.
“You're quiet.”
“I've been talking for an hour.”
“About my chair. That doesn't count.”
Mara broke off a piece of pastry. It left a track of sugar on the table. She brushed it into a little heap with her finger, thinking of Iris's drawing. She had not brought it out again. It was in her bag with the receipt from a gas station and the lid of a pen she couldn't find.
“I went to see Iris.”
“How is she?”
“Fine.”
Bev waited. She had a way of waiting that made Mara feel there was a question on the table even when Bev hadn't asked one.
“She doesn't want anything.”
“She'll think of something.”
“I didn't mean money. I meant—”
Mara stopped. Bev leaned down to rub her ankle, moving the shoe's strap so it didn't press on the swollen place.
“I know,” she said.
“I drew her a place to live. A whole house. I'd given her a garden and everything.”
Bev stopped rubbing her ankle. “Where?”
“I hadn't found one.”
“Oh.” She pulled the strap loose another notch. “Thought you meant there was a house.”
Mara almost got the drawing out. She could see it would look different spread across a table this size. Bev had broken the pastry again, trying to get the sugar to fall onto the saucer.
“At least you want something,” Mara said.
“You'll hate my coat.”
“Have you bought it?”
“Not yet.”
“Then there's still hope.”
Bev held out her hands for the other half of the pastry. Mara gave it to her and watched her take a large bite. She was going to become rich and eat just as Bev ate now, pulling the plate closer rather than catching every crumb. There was something soothing about it.
Bev took a photograph of the measurements, holding the receipt flat beneath her cup. She sent it to Anne. The reply came before she put the phone down.
“She's outside,” Bev said, looking past Mara. Anne was at the door, wearing a raincoat with a hood so large that only her nose showed. She saw Bev and lifted two fingers, then took the hood down, revealing hair flattened on one side.
“Anne,” Bev said, lifting a hand.
Anne sat without taking off the coat. She had only ten minutes, she told them, before the shoe place closed, and she wasn't spending another winter walking around with her feet wet. Bev showed her the photograph she had taken of the purple chair.
Anne stared at it.
“Good God.”
Bev began to laugh. Mara joined her, and for a while it was everything she'd hoped money would let them do: sit somewhere warm, be silly about an object they could actually buy, listen to Anne insist that the chair looked upholstered in somebody's insides.
When Bev rose to go, she put the photograph away and took the little card with the price out again. She looked at it once, not smiling now, then returned it carefully to the pocket inside her bag.
“I'll need you for the door,” Bev said. “If you're free. You've got the receipt.”
Mara felt in her bag, then saw it under Bev's cup. Bev picked it up, laughing, and gave it to her.