The Chair by the Window

My father's chair still faces the window where he watched the street as if expecting a delivery that never quite arrived. The leather has his shape in it— that specific lean to the left where his hip gave trouble, the arms worn pale where he rested his hands each evening at six fifteen, precise as a churchbell nobody asked to ring. I sat in it once, after. It was like wearing his coat: too large, still warm with the ghost of a size I will never fill. My mother hasn't moved it. She dusts around it the way the sea goes around a rock— not avoiding it, exactly. Just acknowledging that some things have earned the right to be where they are.