“Fascinating Dad—but right now, we have an owl crisis. Gordon-you-thief keeps sneaking into the barn. I’m sure he doesn’t mean to upset your fledgling owls, but—”
“I’ll go and talk to him immediately,” Dad said.
He put a sign on his chair that read OWL BE RIGHT BACK and hurried over to the barn.
“Excuse me,” someone said, tugging at my elbow. “I think a quarter apiece is too expensive for these.”
I turned to find a middle-aged version of Goldilocks standing at my side, pointing her porridge spoon at a collection of tiny china owls on one corner of the SPOOR table.
I stifled the impulse to say that I agreed and would give her a quarter to take the whole lot of them off our hands. Then an evil thought hit me.
“I could let them go at three for a dollar,” I said, feigning reluctance.
“Okay,” Goldilocks said. She snatched up the whole collection, all twelve of them, handed me four dollar bills, and hurried off, as if afraid I’d retract the offer. A second too late, I realized that I’d just broken my own rule about giving everyone receipts.
“Aunt Meg?”
I looked down to see my nephew Eric dressed as Superman. He was staring at Goldilocks’s retreating back with a puzzled look.
“Aunt Meg, three for a dollar—”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “I’ll explain it to you later. Or your grandfather will when he gets back—do you want to watch his table for him?”
“Okay,” Eric said, with a grin. Then he stood behind the counter, puffed out his chest so the “S” showed to better advantage, and assumed a serious, responsible expression.
On my way back to the checkout counter, I ran into my cousin Basil. Or possibly Basil’s identical twin, Cyril. No one in the family could tell them apart and I’d given up trying after I figured out that no matter what you called one of them, he’d claim to be the other twin anyway. At any rate, he was trying to shove an enormous box of stuff along in front of him by kicking it, while carrying a moose head in each arm.
“Let me help you with that,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, as I divested him of the moose heads. “That’s my pile over there.”
He indicated a huge pile of stuff over by the fence. Enough stuff to fill a two-bedroom apartment, which was what Basil and Cyril had. But their lair was already crammed to the ceiling with books, computer equipment, war-gaming paraphernalia, and assorted junk. Where could they possibly put all this stuff? Not to mention that every item he’d collected was either broken, perfectly hideous, or both.
“What in the world are you doing with all this stuff?” I asked.
I tried to keep my dismay from showing, but apparently I failed.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “We’re getting rid of it all really soon.”
“Getting rid of it?” I echoed. “Then why buy it in the first place?”
“You know that TV show that comes to your house and organizes it?”
“Yes,” I said. Actually, I knew of several such shows, and watched them all religiously, a guilty secret I hid from everyone but Michael. I hoped it was a phase I’d grow out of once we unloaded Mrs. Sprocket’s clutter.
“We want to get on that show,” he said. “But the first thing they do is make you get rid of half of your stuff. And we don’t want to get rid of anything; we just want them to organize us.”
“I see,” I said. “So you’re trying to put enough extra stuff in your house that they won’t touch yours.”
“Exactly,” he said, beaming.
While I wanted to ask, what if they didn’t get on the show, I hated to spoil his fun.
“Good luck with it,” I said instead, and left him with his loot.
Back at the checkout area I found to my relief that Mrs. Fenniman and Michael had taken over as cashiers. Michael would remain calm and genial no matter what the customers said or did, Mrs. Fenniman took no guff from anyone, and both of them could do a halfway decent Groucho voice to go with their masks. Things were looking up.
In fact, I suddenly realized that I was feeling cheerful again. Dad would take care of Gordon-you-thief, and in the meantime, I was surrounded by people made very, very happy by the yard sale.
“Meg, this is wonderful!”
I turned and saw my twenty-something cousin Rosemary, from the Keenan branch of the family. I had a quick moment of panic, because I couldn’t immediately remember what I was supposed to call her these days. Morgana? Ecstasy? Cassandra? She’d been through all of those, but I didn’t think any of them were current. Rob had taken to calling her simply “Not-Rosemary.” She had changed her name five or six times in the last decade, usually to symbolize some new breakthrough she felt she’d achieved in her path to wisdom or enlightenment or however she currently defined her goal. Not-Rosemary had never met an Eastern religion or a new age fad she didn’t like, and she always dressed to enhance her already uncanny resemblance to the Woodstock-era Joni Mitchell.