Angus suddenly started the loud chanting thing, like he did last time.
I wiped a hand across my forehead. “Damn it, Angus, stop it!” My voice cracked, but I managed to get the words out.
The guard at the door took a step closer.
“Don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Angus mumbled. “It’s your fault. You’re getting me upset.”
“It’s okay,” I said, both to Angus and the guard, holding up a shaking hand. “Look, we’ll talk about something else, all right? Just relax. Relax.”
My heart was still pounding, but I plastered a bright smile on my face.
“Hey, you’ll be glad to hear Betty’s going ahead with the auction this weekend. But don’t worry, we’ve got it covered. We’re all helping out.”
He was still muttering, staring at his hands, lost in his own despondent world. The dear friend I knew was gone, to a place where I couldn’t touch him.
Come back to me, Angus.
“Patsy has agreed to step in for you with the bid calling. Can you picture that?”
A faint smile appeared.
“I told her about the filler words and to practice counting numbers backwards and forwards, but do you have any other tips for her?”
At that, his eyes seemed to regain their focus. He took a deep breath. “The thing is, you have to move an awful lot of stuff in a short period of time, and the chant is how you keep people’s attention. It’s almost like singing. It’s faster than normal speech. You sort of hypnotize the bidders with the rhythm, the cadence of it.”
“Okay. And how do you keep track of what the bid is?”
“Every auctioneer has his own way. Palms up can mean odd numbers, palms down for an even hundred-dollar bid. Tell Patsy not to worry about trying to go too fast when she’s starting out. At the end of the day, the main job of an auctioneer is to communicate. If the audience can’t understand him, he’s not doing a good job.”
Talking about auctioneering was calming him down.
I was still uncomfortably warm, my shirt clinging to my back with perspiration, but I could feel my heartbeat slowly returning to normal.
What a mess we were. Angus and me.
Staring across the table at my friend, I realized how much I had always depended on Angus—on his enormous strength, on his boisterous devil-may-care attitude that made me feel as though we could bulldoze our way through anything.
Now he needed me, whether he knew it or not, and I would be there for him.
“Angus, what about the time we went picking in Lancaster? Remember that? When you sent me up into the rafters of that decrepit barn?”
He laughed. “Yeah. You were smaller so you could climb better than me. I gave you some good advice, right? Don’t fall through!”
“Thanks a lot. I was glad I was wearing jeans and sneakers that day.”
I’d clambered like a monkey up a rickety ladder into the hayloft to retrieve a box of Buddy L toy vehicles that the owner told us were up there. I still remembered the joy on Angus’s face upon seeing the old toys made of pressed steel. Like a kid on Christmas morning. He also had a passion for automotive and gasoline signs, and he’d found a couple of Esso Motor Oil signs outside the barn.
I’d done well, too. I’d picked up an antique dress form that was now proudly displayed in Eleanor’s shop and a box of Standard sewing machine accessories and buttons. Plus a rare Singer leather sewing machine that Joe had later painstakingly oiled and restored, and that I’d sold for a big profit to a collector.
People in the country are savers, even hoarders. In New York, with space at a premium, you had to be ruthless about what you kept, but here, where farmhouses were passed down through generations, if no one had the energy to clean out the recesses of the attic each time it changed hands, the stuff built up.
It seemed like Angus wanted to talk about the old days and our adventures in picking, so I let him ramble. How mentoring me and taking me out on the road had reignited his passion for collecting. About the mint Baldwin Tidioute bone-handled jackknife with excellent blades that was one of his favorite finds.
We were quiet for a moment, reliving our memories. Doing rock, paper, scissors when it was something we both wanted. How we’d slap each other five on the way home, flushed with success.
Angus grinned at me. “I remember dragging your lazy ass out of bed more than once and listening to all the moaning and groaning until I got you a cup of coffee.”
He would insist on picking me up at 5 a.m. on auction days, saying that the early bird got the worm. He wanted to be there on the dot of preview time to have a chance to look at every item. To me, it was still the middle of the night.