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The solid oak rocking chair was the first thing Tony and Pepper had bought when they bought the cabin.
Pepper was only four months pregnant, and on the way to the cabin from New York City, they passed a furniture store that promised handmade furniture. Pepper zeroed in on the chair the minute they stepped inside, the rich hue of the wood shining under the dimmed lights of the store. There was an afghan on it that was extra, and Tony bought it all.
It sat in the cabin alone until other furniture arrived and was bought. Pepper would sit in the chair and rock back and forth as the movers moved around her, humming softly to herself with her hands on her ever-expanding belly.
That chair was going to outlast them both, Tony knew it.
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Monkey Morgan loved to climb all over the chair, and only when she was standing up on the seat and pulling the chair back and forth by gripping the balls adorning the top sides of the chair did her parents realize that the chair might be the death of their daughter.
So it became a shared chair with lots of lap time cuddles, lots of sleepy Morgan on shoulders, lots of racing cars underneath it, and chasing Morguna around it. It was colored on with crayons and then cleaned back to a shiny veneer, and it was much loved by all of them.
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After her father dies, Morgan sits curled up in the chair with the now-tattered afghan it came with wrapped around her. She’s sad but she doesn’t want to cry. She’s a Big Girl, and Mommy needs her. But she misses her Daddy, who says he loves her three thousand via hologram.
The chair reminds her of him, and all the time they spent together in the cabin. Too little time, of course, but she can’t say that yet. She will later, when she asks her mother if she can take the rocking chair to her college dorm, and then to her first apartment, then all around Manhattan as she falls in and out of friendships and relationships, and finally back to the cabin, when Pepper decides it’s time another family lived there, her daughter’s family.
And Morgan will sit in the chair, her hands on her pregnant belly, humming softly to herself, knowing the chair is an important piece of her history, and it will long outlast even her.