“I’m not selling it to him,” Dermot’s mother said. “He’d only stick it back in my garage again.”
“I don’t have room for it in my apartment.”
“And I don’t have room for it in my garage.”
I left them to sort it out. Up and down the aisles, similar battles were being waged over rusting tricycles, battered reclining chairs, and moth-eaten scraps of clothing. If I’d known how traumatic yard sales were for the sellers, I’d have arranged to have a family therapist on hand.
Mother was being unusually helpful, but she couldn’t be everywhere at once, and she had her hands full dealing with the shoplifters. She knew who all the family kleptomaniacs were and exactly what mix of threat and cajolery to use with each of them. And long experience with the light-fingered members of our clan had given her a second sense for spotting strangers intent on pilfering, whether for professional or psychiatric reasons.
For once in my life I wished I had more family members like Mother. I could use a dozen more of her, at least.
I’d assign one just to keep people out of the barn. I didn’t quite share Dad’s passionate concern for the welfare of the nesting owls, but I had other, more practical reasons for declaring the barn off-limits. Including the fact that we weren’t entirely sure parts of it were structurally sound. The last thing we needed to inaugurate our life in the house was a lawsuit from some disgruntled customer who’d wandered in where he had no business being and gotten injured by falling beams or rubble. So I’d posted a variety of threatening signs on the barn doors, everything from “Keep out!” and “No Trespassing!” to “Warning! Falling debris!” and Dad had added his “Keep out! Owls nesting!” signs, which were probably less effective but a lot more picturesque.
And yet less than an hour into the sale, I saw Gordon ducking into the barn, dragging a large cardboard box. And then he came out empty-handed. Several times. Okay, he probably wasn’t attempting larceny. For one thing, both of the ground floor doors to the barn were inside the fence, and if he tried to lower stuff out of the hayloft door, which did overlook the outside world, someone would surely notice. So he was probably only doing what people had warned me the greedy and inconsiderate customers would do—dragging large quantities of stuff off to one side to sort through at their leisure before returning the unwanted items to the sale area. Not a big problem if they did their sorting and returning relatively soon, but if they waited till near the end of the sale, when you started reducing prices across the board …
Well, Gordon might be in for a nasty shock. For one thing, we weren’t reducing prices today—this was a two- day event. And for another thing, as soon as I had a moment I planned to slip into the barn, drag out everything Gordon had hidden away there, and put it back out for anyone who wanted it.
Unfortunately, every time I set out toward the barn, some new crisis intervened. A lost child. A lost purse. More scuffles between overeager Grouchos and Nixons.
I caught Eric and one of his little cousins charging admission to the portable toilets and ordered the young entrepreneurs to exercise their capitalistic instincts by helping Cousin Horace at the hamburger stand.
“You’d be amazed what you can find at yard sales,” I overheard one woman telling another. “On Antiques Road Show, people are always bringing bits of junk they bought at yard sales and finding out they’re worth thousands of dollars.”
“That’s true,” the second woman said. Just then they spotted my shadow. They hunched protectively over the table in front of them and glared at me until I moved on. I fought back a smile. Would it reassure them to know that I was not a competitor? That I had no intention of buying anything at the yard sale, and particularly not from that table, which was filled with some of the worst junk I’d cleared out of Mrs. Sprocket’s attic? Probably not. And I certainly didn’t want to discourage them by mentioning that seventeen keen-eyed antique appraisers had already turned up their noses at the contents of that particular table. For all I know, if I’d called an eighteenth dealer he might have spotted a hidden treasure among the clutter. Perhaps the cracked chamber pot had once stood in the servants’ quarters in Monticello, or perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt had crocheted the toilet paper roll covers as part of the war effort. I wished them luck.
Cousin Deirdre, the animal rights activist, had begun splashing paint on every moth-eaten fur coat and taxidermied mongoose in sight. I confiscated her paint and explained to the unhappy fur owners that she only used nontoxic washable paint, but most of them didn’t calm down until Mother promised to see that Deirdre reimbursed their cleaning costs.