Owls Well That Ends Well(18)

I reminded myself that I didn’t actually have to call her anything at the moment. And even if someone she didn’t know joined us, a free spirit like Not-Rosemary wouldn’t expect a formal introduction.

“Wonderful?” I repeated. “I’m not sure how wonderful it will be, but I hope it’s productive.”

“Oh, it will be,” she said. “Look at the blessing you’re giving all these people.”

“Blessing?” I echoed, distracted by a passing shopper. I wasn’t quite sure how much of a blessing it was to tempt anyone into buying a surplus milking machine and a dozen vintage 1960s troll dolls.

“Are you familiar with feng shui?” she said. “It’s the ancient Chinese art of placement. The literal translation is ‘the way of wind and water,’ and—”

“Yes, you gave Mother a book about it for Christmas, remember,” I said. Although considering the effect the book had had on Mother, I would have guessed the literal translation of feng shui was “Come, let us drop everything and rearrange the furniture another seventeen or eighteen times before dinner.”

“Clutter is very significant in feng shui,” she said. “At least in dealing with Western homes. If you want to feng shui your house, the first thing you should do is get rid of clutter.”

“Really?” I said, with genuine interest. Had Not-Rosemary finally taken up a fad that I could relate to?

“Yes,” she said. “Clutter is bad. Blocks the house’s chi—the energy flow—and can also hold negative energy from past residents, or past owners of the clutter. If you ask me, clutter is probably the root cause of half the problems in our culture.”

“I see,” I said. I was glad to see that she’d finally stopped blaming television and refined sugar, since I rather liked both of those.

“So look at what your yard sale will accomplish,” she said. “What a wonderful energy clearing! Imagine all the bad karma and negative energy everyone’s getting rid of!”

She drifted off, beaming cheerfully at everyone she passed. I wonder if it would eventually occur to her that the sellers couldn’t get rid of their cosmically blighted stuff unless some other poor soul bought it. Did the buyers get the seller’s negative energy along with the stuff, or did being sold reset an item’s karma count to zero?

But she had helped me realize why the sellers were so happy: they were removing unwanted burdens from their lives. Okay, some of them thought it was more about making money than dry cleaning their chi, but surely even they were starting to feel not just richer but lighter and freer.

I had a harder time understanding why the buyers were so happy, but as Mother frequently remarked, I hadn’t inherited her shopping gene. I decided to assume that everything the customers were carrying around would meet some long-felt want. Better yet, some dire need that their perilous finances would never have allowed them to meet if not for our yard sale. That would solve the karma count problem, too.

Of course, I kept spotting the occasional person who threatened to overturn my newly created illusion—what long-felt want or dire need could my elderly aunt Catriona have for a fully functional crossbow and a video on firming her buns? I pushed the thought out of my mind.

And I also saw a few people who seemed genuinely upset by something. I tried to suppress the urge to go and ask them what was wrong. No matter how much I wanted everyone to have a lovely time at the yard sale it wasn’t my responsibility to make it happen. I couldn’t fix everyone’s problems. I shouldn’t even try.

“What’s wrong?” I asked Cousin Morris a few minutes later.

“I think it’s over,” he said, his words slightly muffled because his head was buried in his hands. “The passion has gone out of our marriage.”

Too much information, I thought, and scrambled for the right thing to say. Cousin Morris was a pleasant, mild-mannered man with gently receding hair and a gently growing tummy. Cousin Ginnie, his wife, was responsible for the tummy. She was a plump, cheerful woman whose life revolved around cooking, thanks to her career as the dessert chef for an upscale Williamsburg restaurant. They were older than I was—in their fifties—but I was fond of Morris and Ginnie, and never passed up their dinner invitations. Still, I didn’t think of them as close friends. Why was Morris confiding in me? Or was he going around saying the same thing to everyone he met? That didn’t sound like Morris.

And I had to admit that if I had to pick a word to describe their marriage, “passion” wouldn’t be the first thing that came to mind. It wouldn’t come to mind at all. “Comfortable, though slightly boring” would have been my diagnosis—the sort of relationship so many married people fall into after a while. Did this have anything to do with my inexplicable reluctance to take the plunge with Michael? The fear that we’d eventually settle into comfortable-but-boring?