“Meg, we’re out of Spike’s dog food!” Rob exclaimed, appearing at my elbow while I was trying to calm an elderly lady whose sense of decency had been violated by her discovery that one of the booths was selling back issues of Playboy.
“Get him a hamburger from Horace,” I said.
“Okay,” Rob said. “How does he like them?”
“Ask him,” I said.
“Roger,” Rob said, turning to go.
“While you’re going that way,” I called after him, “Could you tell that man with the grandfather clock that he doesn’t have to carry it around the whole time he’s shopping; we’d be happy to keep it behind the checkout counter for him.”
“I’ve already told him that, twice,” Rob said. “He says he doesn’t mind carrying it.”
“Let me rephrase that. Tell him if he whacks one more person in the head with the clock, I’ll take it away from him and kick him out of the yard sale.”
“Roger.”
I returned to my irate customer.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said. “I’m not sure we have the right to keep someone from selling his Playboy magazines, but if you can point out the booth, I’ll ask him to keep them out of sight.”
“Hmph,” the woman snorted, as she turned and marched away. After a few feet, she stopped and turned back, hands on her hips.
“And don’t let me catch you selling any of that trash to that worthless husband of mine!” she shouted.
I turned to the checkout counter. The white rabbit and the ballerina looked stricken. Michael, standing nearby, wore the intensely solemn look that always meant he was trying not to crack up.
“And does anyone have any idea who she is, and what her worthless husband looks like?”
“No,” Michael said. “But I know who’s selling the Playboys. Your cousin Everett.”
“Can you talk to him?”
“Sure,” Michael said. “I’ll tell him to keep his Playboys under the counter with the Penthouses and Hustlers.”
“Good grief,” I said. “I thought all he had was forty years of National Geographic.”
Just then I heard a loud altercation nearby. Not the first of the day, by any means, but the voices sounded familiar, so I waded through the crowd to see what was going on.
“It’s mine!”
“No, it’s not!”
“Yes, it is!”
“I saw it first!”
“But I touched it first!”
“Liar!”
“Thief!”
“Let go!”
“Take that!”
Typical. I’d heard so many quarrels already today that I’d given up intervening unless the participants came to blows, which these two seemed about to do.
And to my dismay, I realized that the latest combatants were two of my aunts—elderly, respectable women who didn’t hesitate to rap my knuckles at Thanksgiving dinner to correct minor flaws in my table manners.
They were playing tug-of-war over an antique purple cut-velvet piano shawl with foot-long fringe. Not tugging very hard, of course, since the material was fragile; but both of them were obviously determined not to let go. Aunt Gladys, her stout form encased in a vintage beaded opera gown, had both ring-encrusted fists clamped firmly around her end of the shawl and looked as if even the boom lift would have trouble dislodging her. In a fair fight, I’d have bet on her. But Aunt Josephine didn’t fight fair. Looking uncannily authentic in her wicked witch costume, complete with a pointed hat and a toy cat wired to her shoulder, she was only holding the shawl with one hand while with the other she whacked Aunt Gladys in the derriere with her broomstick, throwing in an occasional kick to the shins for good measure.
I took a deep breath and was about to wade in on my one-woman peacekeeping mission when a streak of black-and-white fur appeared and launched itself at the shawl. Spike. He couldn’t quite leap high enough to reach the shawl, but he managed a good mouthful of the swaying fringe. My aunts watched in horror as he hung suspended from the shawl for a few seconds and then dropped when his weight ripped the fragile fabric in half.
“Sorry,” Rob said, running up and clipping the leash back onto Spike’s collar—an easier task than usual, with Spike’s fangs muffled in fringe. “I was taking him over for his hamburger, but he got loose.”
“A Solomon among dogs,” I said. “Does either of you want this?”
I held out the remaining half of the shawl. Both aunts shook their heads. They gathered up their dignity along with the objects they’d apparently dropped in the fray and strode off without looking back.