The Bear on the Nightstand

The small brown teddy bear sat on Margaret's nightstand for forty-three years. Its left ear was torn, its glass eye slightly loose, but Arthur left it exactly where she'd placed it the morning of the surgery she never came home from.

At seventy-eight, he was learning to navigate his granddaughter Chloe's old iPhone. She'd upgraded again—something about better cameras for her photography classes—and insisted he needed to "get with the times, Grandpa."

"Your grandmother," Arthur told the bear, adjusting his reading glasses, "would have laughed herself silly seeing me poke at this glass screen with my index finger like I'm testing a ripe peach at the market."

Chloe had set up video calls, though Arthur preferred their Sunday visits. Still, when the phone chimed with her face on the screen, his heart lifted. She was twenty-three now, working in the city, living the life Margaret had dreamed of for all their grandchildren.

"Grandpa," Chloe said during one call, "I'm investing in my first stocks. Remember how you told me about bull markets?"

Arthur smiled, thinking back to 1987, to the frantic phone calls and lost shirts, to Margaret's steady hand on his shoulder. "A bull market," he'd told Chloe when she was small, "is like charging ahead with your head down, confident and strong. A bear market is when things get sluggish, you hibernate and wait."

But he hadn't told her the whole truth—how Margaret had been his bull during the dark years, how her stubborn optimism had carried them through miscarriages and layoffs and his own foolish pride. She'd been the one who'd bought this house when he'd said they couldn't afford it, who'd insisted he start that business everyone said would fail.

The bear on the nightstand had been a gift from their first child, the one they lost, purchased with money earned from his eventual success.

Arthur touched the bear's worn fur. "We had some bear markets, you and I," he whispered to the empty room. "But you always believed the bulls would return."

He picked up the iPhone, scrolled through photos Chloe had sent—her graduation, her new apartment, her smiling face illuminated by city lights. Margaret would have adored seeing her granddaughter thrive.

"Alright," Arthur said to both the bear and the phone. "Let's see if this old man can learn one more thing before he goes."

He pressed the button to call Chloe. When she answered, beaming, "Grandpa! You figured it out!", he knew Margaret was laughing somewhere, delighted that after all these years, her bull-headed husband was still learning something new.