Owls Well That Ends Well(11)

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.”