Over the next hour, the sixty or seventy
people who’d be staffing booths at the yard sale arrived. Michael’s
faculty colleagues fit in so perfectly with my family that I kept
mistaking them for distant cousins, which boded well for the
harmony of the yard sale, but made me want to rethink living in
Caerphilly.
At least the faculty members already
knew Michael, or thought they did, and had no interest in asking
him probing questions that relatives thought suitable for
evaluating potential in-laws. So far he’d dodged questioning from
several of my uncles about his political and religious
affiliations, but a particularly nosy aunt had surprised him into
giving her an inventory of which optional body parts he still
possessed: tonsils and wisdom teeth absent, appendix and gall
bladder still present and accounted for, and so forth. She didn’t
believe that he only wore glasses to read, though, and had taken to
following him about and peering at him from various angles, trying
to spot the contact lenses she suspected he was wearing. Although
Michael usually enjoyed my family rather more than I did, today he
was starting to look slightly frayed.
And every time I opened the door to let
in a yard sale participant, I could see that the crowd of waiting
customers had grown larger. Spike’s bark was beginning to sound
hoarse.
“Amazing,” I muttered, peering out of
the window.
“What’s amazing?” Rob
asked.
“Look at all the customers,” I said,
shaking my head.
“Is there an official term for a whole
lot of customers, like there is for owls and such?” Rob asked. “I
know I’ll get in trouble with Dad if I call them the wrong
thing.”
“I’d suggest a gaggle, like for geese,
but I don’t want to insult them,” I said. “Though I can’t imagine
why this many people would want to spend a perfectly good Saturday
at a yard sale.”
“Maybe Dad took my suggestion,” he
said.
“What suggestion?”
“To spread a rumor that Captain Ezra
Sprocket hid his pirate loot somewhere in the house,” Rob
said.
“Oh, good grief,” I said. “Even if he
had and we’d found it, do they really think we’d absent-mindedly
put it out for the yard sale along with the empty plastic
flowerpots and worn-out linens?”
Rob shrugged.
“And didn’t you and Dad make up Pirate
Ezra anyway?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I can see the
Sprockets having a pirate or two in their family tree, can’t
you?”
“They’re all pirates,” I grumbled. “I
still don’t get it.”
“Well, you wouldn’t,” Rob
said.
“No,” I said. “I’ve lost the ability to
look at Edwina’s clutter in a detached fashion, as a mere
collection of inanimate objects—annoying, perhaps a little sad, but
essentially benign. I’ve started to see it as a hostile force
occupying the house—a force against which I’ve been doing battle
for weeks.”
“Battle?” Rob echoed.
“And while I’ve evicted the Army of
Clutter from the house, and even banished some of it entirely to
the dump or the local antique stores, most of its forces are now
encamped on our lawn,” I went on, waving my hand at the yard sale
area. “In fact, they’ve gotten reinforcements from other households
and are even now plotting revenge. Planning sieges and ambushes,
and beaming hostility at us so strongly that I’m surprised you
can’t see a visible, tangible haze floating up and drifting
malignantly toward the house.”
“Wow,” Rob said. “I want some of what
you’re on.”
So much for explaining how I felt to my
family.
At eight-thirty my mother showed up,
dressed as a flapper, with a candy cigarette in a foot-long antique
holder. She looked impossibly elegant, and I fought off one of my
occasional moments of resentment that I’d inherited her height, but
not her blonde hair or slender model’s build.
She also looked calm and rested, and I
wondered if it had been a good idea, camping out here in the house
so she and Dad could stay at the Cave. Then I reminded myself that
it had been my suggestion. The cramped, cluttered Cave had been
giving me claustrophobia for weeks.
“Hello, dear,” she said, pecking me on
the cheek. “Sorry I’m so late. Is there anything I can do to
help?”
“Actually, there is,” I
said.
Mother looked startled. No doubt she’d
been making one of those obligatory social offers that one is
supposed to decline with polite assurances that everything is under
control. After more than thirty-five years, she should know I have
no social graces.
“We’re not opening the sale until
nine,” I said. “People have been ringing the doorbell since before
six, badgering us to let them in early. Can you do something about
them?”
“Of course, dear,” Mother purred. She
drew herself up, adding a full inch to her height, and headed
toward the front door with her sternest face on. I wasn’t sure if
it was the chance to play Miss Manners and boss people around or
the fact that the would-be early birds were trying to get into the
sale ahead of her, but she threw herself into her assigned task
with enthusiasm. Ten minutes later, when I had a moment to glance
out one of the side windows, I saw that she’d chivvied the arriving
crowds into a neat line leading up to the gate of the yard sale
area, and was lecturing Gordon-you-thief on the rudeness of cutting
in line.
Hundreds of people, and at least half
of them in costume. Although many of the costumes consisted solely
of masks bought from Rob, who’d set up a table by the driveway,
right beneath one of the posters announcing the costume discount.
He didn’t have a lot of variety—in fact, apart from Groucho, he
only had Richard Nixon and Dracula. I suspected he’d bought the
masks in bulk and was selling them at a steep markup. At least he
wasn’t charging immediate family, but still, I wasn’t sure I liked
the new entrepreneur Rob who’d emerged since his computer-game
company had become successful. I’d actually begun to miss the old
feckless Rob who couldn’t be bothered with boring practical details
like money.
Someone should talk to Rob, I thought,
with a sigh. Preferably someone other than me. I’d recently
overheard two aunts praising my willingness to tackle the
unpleasant, thankless jobs that no one else would, and realized
that no matter how happy it made my aunts, this wasn’t
entirely a positive character trait. Neither was being considered
the most efficient and organized person in the family. And when you
combined the two, you got things like this giant yard sale. Maybe
when the yard sale was over, I would work on expanding my
vocabulary to include the word “no.”
I’d worry about that later. After the
yard sale. For the moment, I made a mental note to keep an
especially sharp eye on the several women in hoop skirts that
seemed like a shoplifter’s dream.
At nine sharp, Rob, Dad, and Michael
ceremonially led the dogs away and we opened the
gates.
Gordon-you-thief was among the first
half dozen to enter—even Mother couldn’t work
miracles.
I stood inside the gate, trying to make
sure no one got knocked down and trampled, and nodding greetings to
anyone I recognized—which included most of the local antique and
junk dealers. But unfamiliar faces outnumbered the familiar ones. I
wondered how many were ordinary customers, lured from all over the
adjacent dozen counties by our 30-FAMILY YARD SALE ads, and how
many were antiques dealers and pickers.
No matter. Amateurs or professionals,
they could come from Timbuktu if they liked, as long as they all
left with their arms full of stuff. And they all seemed intent on
doing so. By the end of the first hour I could see major traffic
congestion up and down the aisles, as the people in bulky costumes
encountered the even larger numbers of people dragging boxes or
baskets of stuff along with them.
At the far end of the fenced-in area
we’d placed a dozen ramshackle card tables and several of Mother’s
relatives had set up a concession stand. Cousin Bernie and Cousin
Horace—the latter in the well-worn gorilla suit that his new
girlfriend didn’t often let him wear to parties these
days—were already lighting fires in half a dozen grills and
checking their supplies of hamburger patties and hot dogs, while
Aunt Millicent and Cousin Emily set out plates of sandwiches and
cookies and bowls of fruit and salad. We didn’t want anything as
mundane as hunger to make people check out early. Cadres of
Grouchos and Draculas were already lining up for chow. We’d even
arranged to rent two portable toilets, which were tucked discreetly
behind the shrubbery in another corner of the yard sale
area.
So far, not a lot of people were
checking out at all. That’s where things would get sticky. Most of
the sellers had organized an elaborate, color-coded system of price
stickers so customers could go through a single checkout at the
exit. We’d be weeks coming up with an accurate tally of everyone’s
sales, and even then half the sellers would still think they’d been
shorted. The sellers who collected money themselves were supposed
to issue receipts that their customers could show at checkout, but
I already knew they’d forget, and I’d spend way too much time
straightening out the resulting problems. And the ballerina and the
white rabbit who were currently serving as cashiers were proving
unfortunate choices. Harvey seemed terrified of the cash register,
and Pavlova of the customers. It was going to be a long
day.
“What’s wrong?” Michael asked, when he
returned from his dog delivery mission.
“Oh, dear,” I said. “Do I look as if
something is wrong? I thought I had on my welcoming hostess
face.”
“I’m harder to fool than most of these
people,” he said. “I know you too well.”
“I’m just wondering who in the world
will buy all this stuff?”
“Are you worrying about the quality of
the stuff, or just the sheer quantity?”
“Both,” I said. “Take that, for
example.”
I pointed at a lamp shade on a nearby
table.
“Ick,” he said.
“Ick” summed it up pretty well. The
lamp shade was huge—three feet tall, and equally wide at the base,
though the sides curved in as they went upward and then flared out
again, making it look like an inverted Art Nouveau birdbath. Its
dominant colors were orange and purple, though at least a dozen
other hues appeared here and there in the trimmings. And as for the
trimmings, I had nothing against lace, fringe, braid, bows, beads,
tassels, appliqués, rosettes, silk flowers, rhinestones, prisms, or
embroidery, but I thought inflicting all of them on one defenseless
shade was unforgivable.
“I can see why someone would want to
get rid of it,” I said.
“I’d have dumped it ages ago,” Michael
said, after glancing behind him to make sure the seller was truly
out of earshot.
“Who in the world was so devoid of
taste that they’d make such a thing?” I exclaimed. “And more to the
point, who will ever buy it?”
Michael shrugged.
“Beats me,” he said. “But odds are
someone will buy it, and if not, we’ve got the truck from the
charity coming Monday morning, and then the Dumpster from the trash
company in the afternoon. One way or another, it’ll all be gone by
Monday night.”
“And good riddance,” I said.
“Meanwhile, why is Mrs. Fenniman shaking her fist at Cousin
Dolores?”
“Damn,” he said. “I thought I’d calmed
them down. Apparently Dolores is selling a spectacularly ugly vase
Mrs. Fenniman gave her as a wedding present. Mrs. Fenniman is
peeved.”
“Dolores dumped the groom a good five
years ago,” I said. “If you ask me, she’s allowed to unload the
baggage
that came with him. Should I go and explain that to Mrs.
Fenniman?”
“Strangely enough, that’s almost
exactly what your mother said just now when I asked her to
mediate,” Michael said. “Ah, there she is.”
As usual in our family, Mother’s
arrival shut down hostilities instantly, as both combatants
scrambled to avoid her wrath.
“Thank God for Mother sometimes,” I
said. “Though whenever I find myself saying that, I always wonder
if I should take my own temperature. And what is Everett doing with
his boom lift, anyway?”
I pointed up, where one of the portable
toilets had been lifted forty feet in the air on the platform of
the boom lift. Everett, one of Mother’s more enterprising cousins,
had brought the boom lift over two weeks ago to help with our roof
repairs. It was a multiperson model, with a six-foot wide metal
platform on the end of a forty-foot extension arm. The arm so
dwarfed the tractor base below that I kept expecting the whole
contraption to topple over. So far even Mother’s family hadn’t
achieved that in any of the boom lift’s previous outings, though
several had broken limbs by slipping through the railings and
falling off the platform. At least whoever had put the portable
toilet on the platform seemed to have loaded it
securely.
“I heard him threatening to play a joke
on your Uncle Floyd,” Michael said.
Just then, the portable toilet’s door
slammed open and a portly man, still fumbling with his fly, stepped
out, looked down, and abandoned his pants to clutch the rail of the
boom lift.
“I think Everett picked up the wrong
toilet,” I said. “That’s not Uncle Floyd.”
“No, it’s Dr. Gruber,” Michael said.
“Chairman of the Music Department. I’d better go rescue
him.”
Michael took off running. Uncle Floyd
emerged from the other toilet and joined the crowd gawking up at
the airborne professor.
“Good heavens,” exclaimed a voice
behind me, in an English accent.
“Morning, Giles,” I said, turning to
greet him. Giles Rathbone was one of Michael’s closest friends on
the Caerphilly College faculty, not to mention a member of his
tenure committee.
And he wasn’t wearing a costume. I
liked Giles.
“I had no idea yard sales were so …
lively,” he said, staring up at the boom lift with visible
alarm.
“This isn’t your typical yard sale,” I
said.
“Or that so many people would be out
this early,” he added, looking around as if the crowd unnerved him
as much as Dr. Gruber’s plight.
I had to smile. Giles’s tall form,
loosely draped, as always, in tweed and corduroy, was hunched
protectively and his eyes behind the thick glasses blinked and
watered as if unused to this much brightness. Seeing Giles
out-of-doors always reminded me of the scene at the beginning of
The Wind in the Willows where Mole emerges
into the sunlight.
“A bit overwhelming,” I said, and Giles
nodded in agreement. He looked half ready to bolt back to his car.
I suppressed a sigh of exasperation. How had Michael ever
befriended such a recluse? I’d spent the first six months I’d known
Giles convincing him that it was okay to call me Meg rather than
Miss Langslow. Though come to think of it, perhaps I’d only gotten
him to drop the Miss. I couldn’t remember if he’d ever actually
called me Meg.
Friends had warned me that it could be
hard work, getting your significant other’s male friends to accept
you, but I hadn’t expected the process to be quite so much like
coaxing a small nocturnal animal out of its hole.
Though that reminded me: I had bait
today. I fished around in my pocket until I found a small slip of
paper I’d stuck there.
“Here,” I said, handing it to Giles. “I
jotted down a map of which tables are selling books.”
“Ah, thanks,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll
find that helpful.” I hoped so. Sooner or later, I was sure, I
could break through Giles’s reserve and turn polite acceptance into
real friendship.
“It’s only fair,” I said. “You were an
enormous help dealing with Edwina’s library. Without you, we’d have
put a lot of valuable books out for the yard sale.”
Giles nodded absently and turned his
attention to the map. Well, so much for bonding with Giles
today.
I heard a small commotion to my right,
and turned to see Gordon-you-thief, attempting to drag two
oversized boxes through the crowd.
“Hey, Guiles,” Gordon called. It took
me a second to realize that he was talking to Giles, and
mispronouncing his name, with a hard “G” rather than a soft
one.
“I think he’s calling you,” I said to
Giles, in an undertone.
“Maybe if I ignore him he’ll go away,”
Giles said, through clenched teeth.
“No such luck,” I said. “He’s headed
this way.”
“Hey, Guiles,” Gordon repeated, coming
up to stand in front of Giles with his back toward me. “Glad I ran
into you.”
“Hello, Gordon,” Giles said, edging
back slightly.
“You’re still collecting R. Austin
Freeman, right?” Gordon said, taking a half step to close up the
distance between them.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“R. Austin Freeman’s an
early-twentieth-century mystery author,” Giles said turning to me
and, not accidentally,
edging farther away from Gordon. “His protagonist was both a lawyer
and a doctor—sort of a late-Victorian Quincy. I’ve been collecting
his books for years. My collection’s nearly complete, though,” he
said, turning back to Gordon and stepping away slightly when he
realized that Gordon had again closed the gap to what was, for
Giles, uncomfortably close quarters.
I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or
feel sorry for Giles. I’d done this dance with Gordon myself,
backing away half a step at a time as he kept inching closer than I
found comfortable. At first, I’d assumed that we just had very
different senses of personal space, but eventually I’d realized
that Gordon did it deliberately, to keep people off balance in a
negotiation.
Or perhaps just to annoy them. At any
rate, once I knew what he was doing, I’d figured out how to stop
him. Whenever he tried to crowd me, I’d step even closer and peer
down my nose at him. At 5’ 10”, I was a good five or six inches
taller than Gordon, and he didn’t like having to crane his neck to
see me.
I was tempted to try it on him now, and
rescue Giles, but Gordon was already turning away.
“Still, you might want to take a look
at what I found on the dollar table over there,” he said, jerking
his thumb over his shoulder. “I bet you’ll want it when you see it
in the shop.”
He sauntered off, still
smirking.
Giles sighed.
“The maddening thing is, I probably
will want whatever he’s found,” he said. “The bastard has a damned
good idea what’s in my collection.”
“He sold you most of it?” I
guessed.
“No, only a few, and those some years
ago. As soon as he finds out you’re collecting something, the
prices start creeping up. More than creeping, really. Skyrocketing.
I
usually do better elsewhere. But he stops by my office from time to
time. That’s where I keep my detective fiction collection, you see.
And the science fiction and fantasy stuff. To annoy the old
fuddy-duddies who look down their noses at genre
fiction.”
I fought to hide my smile. To look at
him, you’d take Giles for a fuddy-duddy himself. I had a hard time
imagining that beneath his stodgy tweed beat the heart of a rebel.
A pedantic rebel, perhaps, and one who preferred to keep his
rebellion subtle enough to avoid offending the
administration.
“So while Gordon’s in your office, he
sneaks a peek at your shelves.”
Giles snorted.
“Sneaks a peek! I came back from a
class one day and found him taking a detailed inventory. Not only
which books, but in what condition. So he could be on the lookout
for better copies that might tempt me to trade up.”
“At sky-high prices,” I said. This was
a longer and more natural conversation than I could ever remember
having with Giles. Perhaps I should bone up on this Freeman person.
Or was our shared dislike for Gordon the stronger
bond?
Giles nodded.
“The only Freemans I’m missing are a
few relatively rare ones. I suspect he’s found one of those or
perhaps what he thinks is a better copy of one I already
have.”
“So he’ll probably be extracting more
money from you soon,” I said.
“Not necessarily,” Giles said. “Last
fall, I made a resolution not to deal with Gordon anymore. I
decided it spoils my enjoyment of the books, just knowing they’ve
passed through his hands. Haven’t been in his shop for over a year
now.”
“Maybe he hasn’t found anything after
all, then,” I
said. “Maybe he’s just trying to lure you back into his den of
literary temptation.”
“Let’s hope I have the strength of will
to resist, then,” Giles said.
“Get thee behind me, Gordon!” I
said.
Giles chuckled at my joke, though as
usual I couldn’t tell if he found it funny or just wanted to be
polite. I wondered, suddenly, if I wasn’t the only one making an
effort to become friends. Perhaps, in spite of thinking me entirely
too boisterous and independent, Giles was, in his own stuffy way,
making heroic efforts to get to know me. Or perhaps I was just
overreacting to his normal British reticence. No way to
tell.
“Well, I suppose there’s a chance
Gordon has overlooked a few books worth owning,” he said. “Be
seeing you.”
I was surprised to see him stop briefly
at the table where Dad, still in his great horned owl disguise, was
selling off Edwina Sprocket’s collection of owl tchotchkes to
benefit SPOOR. I hadn’t pegged Giles for a birdwatcher or a
collector of ceramic owls. But I had to smile when I saw him pick
up a pair of owl-shaped bronze bookends and tuck them in the crook
of one arm before heading off toward the books.
Just then, a squabble broke out between
Scarlett O’Hara and a middle-aged Gypsy, who’d each grabbed one of
a pair of brass andirons, and my day really began going
downhill.