NEW PALTZ, N.Y. (AP) — For all the screaming and carrying on, their neighbors thought they'd won the lottery. But it was a lumpy old sofa stuffed with $40,000 in cash that had three young roommates raising a ruckus. 
 
 From left, Lara Russo, Cally Guasti and Reese Werkhoven sit on a couch in their apartment in New Paltz, N.Y. on Thursday, May 15, 2014. The roommates had purchased it at a Salvation Army store and found... (Associated Press) 
 
 Lara Russo, left, Cally Guasti, center, and Reese Werkhoven sit on a couch in their apartment in New Paltz, N.Y. on Thursday, May 15, 2014. The roommates had purchased it at a Salvation Army store and... (Associated Press) 
 
 And here's the other side of the ticket: They returned the money to the 91-year-old widow whose couch had been given away. 
 
 "We just pulled out envelopes and envelopes," said Cally Guasti, a social worker with Family of Woodstock who shares an apartment with two friends in New Paltz, 75 miles north of New York City. "My mouth was literally hanging open — everybody's was — it was an unfathomable amount." 
 
 Guasti told The Associated Press on Thursday that she and her friends had bought the beat-up couch and a chair for $55 at a Salvation Army thrift shop in March. They noticed the arm cushions were weirdly lumpy. Then, one night in April, one of them, State University of New York at New Paltz student Reese Werkhoven, opened a zipper on one arm and found an envelope. 
 
 It contained $4,000 in bubble-wrapped bills. 
 
 Guasti, Werkhoven and roommate Lara Russo opened the other arm zipper and started mining the treasure stashed inside. They counted it up: $40,800. 
 
 "Honestly, I was a little overwhelmed," Russo said. "I wanted to put it back in the couch and like re-find it in the morning when I can process it better." 
 
 Gausti said they spread the money on the bed and started counting. 
 
 "And we were screaming," she said "In the morning, our neighbors were like, 'We thought you won the lottery.'" 
 
 Mixed in with the cash was a deposit slip with a woman's name on it. Werkhoven called her the next morning. 
 
 "She said, 'I have a lot of money in that couch and I really need it,'" Guasti said. 
 
 They drove to the home of the woman, who turned out to be the elderly woman. She cried in gratitude when they gave her the cash she had hidden away. 
 
 The woman's family had donated the couch to the Salvation Army while she was having health problems. 
 
 "It's not our money, said Werkhoven, of New York City. "We didn't have any right to it." 
 
 Guasti said the cash simply wasn't theirs. "I think if any of us had used it, it would have felt really wrong." ||||| It was an ethical dilemma straight from the textbooks: Imagine you and two of your friends find a small fortune of cash inside a crummy old couch you bought for cheap at a second-hand shop. Would you trace the money back to its owner, or would you keep it to spend on your heart’s deepest desires? A SUNY New Paltz student and two friends dealt with this dilemma firsthand early March 2014. 
 
 Third-year geology student Reese Werkhoven, Mount Holyoke College graduate Cally Guasti, and SUNY New Paltz graduate Lara Russo were getting cozy on their new couch for the first time when Werkhoven found a plastic envelope under the couch’s patchy arm. 
 
 “I almost peed,” Werkhoven said. Inside the envelope was a wad of twenties that added up to $700. 
 
 “The most money I’d ever found in a couch was like fifty cents. Honestly, I’d be ecstatic to find just $5 in a couch.” 
 
 The group began a thorough excavation, maneuvering the couch in all directions so that every linty crevice could be probed to find more money. 
 
 “Just when we thought we pulled out the last envelope we’d find another $1,000 a few minutes later,” said Guasti. 
 
 Twenty minutes after sitting on an old, musky couch, three college students were now miraculously standing on $40,000 in cash. 
 
 For a while, there were no notes, no names, or anything else that could have told them who the money belonged to. For all they knew the money was fair game. 
 
 ~ 
 
 Then there was a game changer. Russo found a woman’s name on one of the envelopes. 
 
 “We had a lot of moral discussions about the money,” Russo said. “We all agreed that we had to bring the money back to whoever it belonged to… it’s their money– we didn’t earn it. However, there were a lot of gray areas we had to consider.” 
 
 Each of them called their parents for advice;. Their parents basically told them all the same thing: 
 
 Don’t spend the money. Don’t tell anyone about the money. Find the woman from the envelope. Find out if it’s her money. 
 
 Questions came into focus. 
 
 What if the money had belonged to a homicidal drug dealer? What if it was all counterfeit? What if the person who owned the money was dead? Who should they trust to give it to in their name? What if the person is just a really bad person? 
 
 Russo pondered the last question on the phone with her mother. “My mom said that I have a good moral compass, and if I don’t think that someone is a good person, or deserving of the money, then I’m not obligated to give it to them. This really threw me off. Where do you draw the line? It’s all very subjective.” 
 
 The possibilities were endless and the group seemingly discussed them all that night. Though they weren’t banking on it, there was still a chance they’d be able to keep some or all of the money. 
 
 “I would have bought my mom a new car,” Werkhoven said. “What she drives is a piece of junk, and I really wanted to surprise her with a brand-new car.” 
 
 Other items high on the wish lists: paying back student loans and traveling the world. 
 
 Keeping the big secret 
 
 The next morning, Russo and Guasti were at work, Werkhoven was at class, and all of them had a huge secret they couldn’t share with anyone. 
 
 Then around 11 a.m., Werkhoven’s mom called and told him that she found the woman’s name in the phone book. After work Werkhoven gave the woman a call. 
 
 He asked the woman her name and told her he had just bought a couch from Salvation Army. 
 
 She immediately replied, “Oh, I left a lot of money in that couch.” 
 
 Werkhoven promised her that he and his housemates would be able to return the money at any time, but he was a little taken aback by her shortness with him on the phone. 
 
 Returning the money 
 
 In the late afternoon, Werkhoven, Guasti and Russo were in the car headed to the woman’s house in the Hudson Valley. 
 
 “About halfway to her house we stopped the car and had a serious discussion…what if she’s a really bad person? What can we do at this point if we meet her and decide we don’t want to give her the money?” 
 
 Not having a plan of exit, they rolled up the long driveway past three “beware of dog” signs and several mounted cameras. 
 
 It was a rustic home in a rough neighborhood. The porch was grey and chipping paint. The front door creaked open slowly, Werkhoven remembered. 
 
 “I think the part of this whole experience that cleared away my prior thoughts and worries was when I saw the woman’s daughter and granddaughter greet us at the door,” Werkhoven said. “I could just tell right away that these were nice people.” 
 
 “When we handed the money back to the woman, she told us that she felt like her husband was present in the room with us,” Guasti said. 
 
 In an interview, the woman, who asked not to be identified, explained how her money was lost. 
 
 Her husband had had a heart condition and knew his time was limited. Before he died, he gave her money each week to put away for when he passed. For 30 years she stored her savings inside an old couch in the television room where she slept. When her husband passed away, she remained working as a florist and continued to store her money in the couch until she had an operation on her back and went to a rehabilitation center for several months. 
 
 Upon the doctor’s advice, the woman’s daughter and son-in-law replaced the couch she slept on with a full-size bed. 
 
 The couch ended up at the Salvation Army store in New Paltz and was bought for $20 by three genuinely good young people who had the strength and wherewithal to make a commendable moral decision. 
 
 “We almost didn’t pick that couch,” Russo said. “It’s pretty ugly and smells, but it was the only couch that fit the right dimensions for our living room.” 
 
 The woman gave $1,000 to Guasti, Russo and Werkhoven as a reward for returning the $40,000. ||||| Why Does This One Couch From West Elm Suck So Much? Comparing notes with other unsatisfied owners of the Peggy sofa 
 
 When I was a kid my grandma had a couch on her front porch that was, as a result of some sort of thrifty post-wartime craft project, stuffed with crumpled-up newspapers. Every couch I have sat on since then has felt unreasonably, needlessly luxurious. Poly-Fil? Foam? Goose feathers? Forget about it. The only couch anybody needs is a metal frame pulled from the curb, a few pillow cases, and a stack of old newspapers. 
 
 But in spite of myself, as a 28-year-old, I find myself drawn into the same capitalistic pitfall that many young professionals are drawn into — a need to prove my adulthood with mid-century furniture. And more specifically, a need to prove that I’ve graduated from Walmart bedframes and second-hand plywood shelves scooped up from the sidewalk. 
 
 This is why, a few weeks after moving in with my partner, Kevin, we decided to buy a couch from West Elm. The couch would be the most prominent piece of furniture in our small apartment and our first big purchase together — a gigantic spongy representation of our shared style sensibility. We chose a West Elm design called the “Peggy” in a deep rusty orange color. We would each put a fat $600 towards the couch, and that money would be an investment into our new life together. It was more than we were used to paying for a piece of furniture, but the price seemed to be proof of enduring quality. I looked at the image on the West Elm website and saw an entire montage of us laughing on the couch with friends, reading the Sunday paper on the couch, drinking obscure liqueurs on the couch (would this be the couch on which we would discover that we loved Cynar or Chartreuse?), moving the couch into a larger apartment, covering the couch with tarps while we painted the walls around it a daring color, giving birth on the couch, dying on the couch. 
 
 This is the moment when I need to warn you of something vitally important. No matter what Apple commercials and jewelry ads tell you, you should never, ever view an object as a metaphor for your relationship. Engagement rings are the biggest racket in history, and even if you love each other, one of you will lose your ring. If you buy a couch together, either the couch or the relationship will break, and the two things will have no correlation. 
 
 The couch came, and our old one, a vintage leather Craigslist number, left. We loved our new couch. It was a little uncomfortable, but probably just needed some throw pillows to soften it. We sat on the couch at the end of each day and congratulated ourselves on our good and prudent choice and searched for throw pillows that didn’t have any words or foxes on them. 
 
 Around when the throw pillows finally arrived, the couch began to disintegrate in small ways. We would scooch across a cushion at the wrong angle, and a button would pop off, leaving a fraying hole behind. We would lean back slightly too far, and all of the cushions would shift forward and over the edge of the couch in unison. As soon as one button had fallen off of our couch, it was like a spigot had been turned, allowing all of the other buttons to fall off, too. I emailed customer service and asked if this was normal. They sent me a button-repair kit, indicating that this probably happens a lot. The kit was backordered, so it arrived two full months later and contained a wooden dowel, two buttons, and some directions that didn’t make sense. One direction was to “Hold the cushion properly and make sure the pointed end of the stick is all the way through, until you can see both ends of the stick on each side of the cushion.” I tried in earnest to follow the directions, but the wooden dowel would not fit into the buttonholes, and the entire exercise left me with fewer buttons than I started with. 
 
 I became obsessed with the extremely banal mistake I had made as a consumer. You know how you’re not supposed to talk about the weather or your commute because they’re boring? The same is true of couches. The craziest fucking couch in the world is still not more exciting than the Q train running on the R line because of scheduled track maintenance. But I was obsessed, and all I could talk about was the couch. The more I talked about the couch, the more I heard from people having the same problem. It turned out that an unusually large number of our friends owned the same exact couch and were extremely miffed at West Elm about it. 
 
 For many young professionals in their 20s and 30s, the next stop after Craigslist and Ikea is West Elm. One friend, Scaachi, had bought the couch when she and her boyfriend first moved in together, just like me and Kevin. Another couple we know got the Peggy after moving into the apartment they had bought together. Everything at West Elm has the allure of being just out of the price range of recent college grads but reasonably affordable for someone who’s been saving. And with the price comes an irrational sense of faith in the furniture’s quality. Shawna Delgaty, a friend of a friend, said she was drawn to the Peggy sofa’s “affordable-but-adult” price range. “It was certainly the most money I’d ever spent on a piece of furniture,” she told me. 
 
 One friend emailed customer service after four buttons went missing, and customer service told her to hire an upholsterer. Another friend was simply told to buy a crochet needle and fix them herself. She bought the crochet needle and tried to re-thread the buttons but eventually gave up. Kevin Fanning, a friend who has a Peggy sofa with a missing button at his office, says, “The missing button (which there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to fix, short of buying a new couch) constitutes about 90% of my daily work-related frustration. Every time I look at it I lose my mind.” 
 
 Since West Elm doesn’t have product reviews on their website, there is no real reason to know how widely disliked the Peggy sofa is until you buy one and then join the strange ad hoc community of Peggy truthers on the internet. As far as I can gather, the Peggy sofa has been on the market since 2014, which means that three years of consumers have been buying it and then immediately trying to warn others against making the same mistake. 
 
 There’s the woman in Denver who left a 700-word review on her local West Elm’s Yelp page, describing why she’ll never shop there again after buying the Peggy: “To have created a detailed training guide with colored pictures on how to repair your sofa means you’ve probably received hundreds, if not thousands, of calls, emails and visits about this awfully made Peggy sofa. You have to do better, West Elm.” Another woman with similar complaints took to West Elm’s Facebook page: “I have furniture from IKEA that is 6+ years old, that has moved across the country (twice!) that has held up better than this couch.” 
 
 And then there are the Instagram Peggy trolls. Every once in awhile the couch will appear in a carefully styled photo on the company’s Instagram page, and warnings pour in under the photo. “This is literally the worst couch I’ve ever bought,” writes one commenter. Others echo: “Got this couch in gray, and it’s falling apart!!!” and “This was my first big furniture purchase and I am so disappointed.” and “This is the absolute WORST piece of #furniture I’ve ever purchased!!!” 
 
 Possessed with a fervent and slightly unhinged desire for truth and justice on behalf of the entire Peggy community, I went into two different West Elm stores and asked patient employees what they thought of the Peggy and if they would recommend it to somebody. They unanimously agreed that it was a great couch. I asked whether the buttons ever posed a problem, and one said that as long as I didn’t have pets or kids, it was fine (but here’s what a dog or a cat would look like on the Peggy in case you’re curious). In both cases, I asked what the expected lifespan is for a West Elm couch like the Peggy. Both store employees told me that between one and three years was normal for a couch with light use. 
 
 My partner tried to quell my obsession, suggesting that we buy a new one and forget the whole fiasco. But it was past the window where we could return the couch for a refund, and buying a new couch once a year sounded like the most frivolously boring way to spend money that I could think of. I would rather take an annual vacation to Iceland or join Equinox or buy $1200 of Haribo gummies every year. 
 
 On New Year’s Eve, we had a party. Twelve minutes before midnight, as a roomful of twenty or so people pounded cheap champagne and listened to the Weeknd, there was a loud crash, and the whole apartment shook. I ran out of the kitchen and into the living room. The couch had collapsed on the floor, surrounded by startled guests who were miraculously unharmed. A leg had snapped off, and the whole thing had toppled over. Tipsy friends set about propping the 300-pound piece of garbage up with stacks of books. I went to find Kevin and tell him the good news. “Happy New Year!” I said. “We’re getting a new couch.”
– A 91-year-old widow in New York state has been reunited with her life savings thanks to the honesty of three young roommates who found the cash in a beat-up sofa they bought from the Salvation Army. Months after buying the couch, the trio were astonished to discover $40,000 stashed in the arm cushions, the AP reports. After finding a name written on an envelope, they contacted the sofa's former owner and discovered she had stored her savings in it for more than 30 years. While the elderly woman was in hospital after an operation on her back, her daughter unknowingly got rid of the couch her mother slept on and replaced it with a full-sized bed. After the find, "we had a lot of moral discussions about the money," one of the roommates tells Little Rebellion. "We all agreed that we had to bring the money back to whoever it belonged to. It's their money—we didn’t earn it." They say that after they handed the money back, she cried in gratitude, and rewarded them with $1,000. (A homeless man recently did something similar—for a second time.)