Owls Well That Ends Well(9)

While Michael works two jobs so we can afford it, the kinder, gentler part of my brain replied. Instead of whining, I should be proud of how well he juggled the conflicting roles of drama professor vying for tenure and regular cast member on a syndicated TV show.

The cynic tried to suggest that money wouldn’t be such a problem if Michael hadn’t committed us to buying such a money pit of a house. Kinder-gentler would then protest that if Michael hadn’t taken the house, we’d still be trying to make do with his tiny basement apartment.

I was tired of the whole argument. I smacked both voices back into their cages and told them to shut up, at least for today and tomorrow. I had a yard sale to run.

And the doorbell was ringing again.





Chapter 5

Over the next hour, the sixty or seventy people who’d be staffing booths at the yard sale arrived. Michael’s faculty colleagues fit in so perfectly with my family that I kept mistaking them for distant cousins, which boded well for the harmony of the yard sale, but made me want to rethink living in Caerphilly.

At least the faculty members already knew Michael, or thought they did, and had no interest in asking him probing questions that relatives thought suitable for evaluating potential in-laws. So far he’d dodged questioning from several of my uncles about his political and religious affiliations, but a particularly nosy aunt had surprised him into giving her an inventory of which optional body parts he still possessed: tonsils and wisdom teeth absent, appendix and gall bladder still present and accounted for, and so forth. She didn’t believe that he only wore glasses to read, though, and had taken to following him about and peering at him from various angles, trying to spot the contact lenses she suspected he was wearing. Although Michael usually enjoyed my family rather more than I did, today he was starting to look slightly frayed.

And every time I opened the door to let in a yard sale participant, I could see that the crowd of waiting customers had grown larger. Spike’s bark was beginning to sound hoarse.

“Amazing,” I muttered, peering out of the window.

“What’s amazing?” Rob asked.

“Look at all the customers,” I said, shaking my head.

“Is there an official term for a whole lot of customers, like there is for owls and such?” Rob asked. “I know I’ll get in trouble with Dad if I call them the wrong thing.”

“I’d suggest a gaggle, like for geese, but I don’t want to insult them,” I said. “Though I can’t imagine why this many people would want to spend a perfectly good Saturday at a yard sale.”

“Maybe Dad took my suggestion,” he said.

“What suggestion?”

“To spread a rumor that Captain Ezra Sprocket hid his pirate loot somewhere in the house,” Rob said.

“Oh, good grief,” I said. “Even if he had and we’d found it, do they really think we’d absent-mindedly put it out for the yard sale along with the empty plastic flowerpots and worn-out linens?”

Rob shrugged.

“And didn’t you and Dad make up Pirate Ezra anyway?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I can see the Sprockets having a pirate or two in their family tree, can’t you?”

“They’re all pirates,” I grumbled. “I still don’t get it.”

“Well, you wouldn’t,” Rob said.

“No,” I said. “I’ve lost the ability to look at Edwina’s clutter in a detached fashion, as a mere collection of inanimate objects—annoying, perhaps a little sad, but essentially benign. I’ve started to see it as a hostile force occupying the house—a force against which I’ve been doing battle for weeks.”

“Battle?” Rob echoed.

“And while I’ve evicted the Army of Clutter from the house, and even banished some of it entirely to the dump or the local antique stores, most of its forces are now encamped on our lawn,” I went on, waving my hand at the yard sale area. “In fact, they’ve gotten reinforcements from other households and are even now plotting revenge. Planning sieges and ambushes, and beaming hostility at us so strongly that I’m surprised you can’t see a visible, tangible haze floating up and drifting malignantly toward the house.”

“Wow,” Rob said. “I want some of what you’re on.”

So much for explaining how I felt to my family.

At eight-thirty my mother showed up, dressed as a flapper, with a candy cigarette in a foot-long antique holder. She looked impossibly elegant, and I fought off one of my occasional moments of resentment that I’d inherited her height, but not her blonde hair or slender model’s build.