Brimfield

The white GM box truck with ‘J Corduroy, Antiques – Collectibles’ on the side in scraped brown paint bounced us as the big tires rolled slowly over potholes along the state road, ours one in a long line of trucks and vans and ancient station wagons packed full.

“They’re pulling ‘em in from all over,” said my sister Angie, nineteen, remembering our late father’s stock comment for Brimfield.

She gripped the steering wheel with both hands as the bumpy pavement torqued it left and right. The engine needed revving or it threatened to stall. When had it last been serviced? She pointed out to me a tent advertising tattoos and piercings.

“Karen, see him? He’s new. I’m going to check him out later. I want a stud in my right nostril.” She grinned mischievously. “Dad swore if I did it, he wouldn’t let me in the house.”  Her grin faded with the memory. “No longer an issue.”

The kid with the official looking baton guided us into the vendor rows.

“Where are we?” Angie asked.

“3-G.  We’re on 3,” I said, dismayed, leaning forward from the bench seat to peer through the vast windshield, checking the hand-lettered signs on pine sticks. “There’s A. Crap. I guess we’re in the back.” I knew Angie was thinking, like Dad, we’re stuck in back with the dumpsters!

The call from Angie, her voice ragged with tears, caught me at work. I was en route to Human Resources—my team had missed its quota two quarters in a row so I already had my personal items in a box.

“Dad’s dead,” she had said.

 “Are you sure?” I asked my sister, a truly stupid question but had I heard correctly?  “What happened?” She got the story out as I loitered by a window and ended up ten minutes late to my firing.

That morning Dad was upending a commode-turned-planter in the garage, explaining to Angie the value of plumbing fixtures, when he groaned and fell, taken by a heart attack.

“I was doing what I remember,” said Angie, “from First Aid, until the EMT pulled me away.  She said he was gone when he hit the ground.”

I heard a voice. “I asked if you had any questions?” Judy Bishop, the HR rep, was looking at me, indicating a letter she’d set before me.

I read the first sentence, then the second. ‘Disappointing performance…’ I could hear the blood rushing in my head. I couldn’t focus. It was paragraph two before I saw that my severance was three months’ salary, and they threw in a fraction of the bonus I would have collected next month.

“We’re sorry it ended like this,” said Judy in her corporate voice.

I remembered to breathe, and tried to read the entire letter, but they were hollow words and my brain wandered. I signed the bottom. Judy smiled pleasantly and retrieved an envelope from her desk drawer. I glanced at the typed check, saw five figures, nodded to her and said goodbye.

I had a row to myself on the flight and I cried a little, then again when Angie picked me up at the Riverside station where we both cried. Since my Christmas visit, my little sister had gone Goth: black t-shirt and denim, her hair dyed to match.

“I got things started, thought I’d help,” she said, handing me a checklist from a funeral director. She had made some lavish choices. Dad had made me his executor and I confirmed my suspicions about the family finances and cancelled all but the state-mandated essentials.

I called the funeral director when we got home. “Hi, yeah, thank you. I’m the executor for Mr. Corduroy. My sister just showed me the order. I’m going to have to cancel most of that.” Out with the weatherproofed, polished bronze casket, no limo for us, no wake catered by Legal Seafoods. Pouting, Angie spoke to me as little as possible the rest of the day.

The funeral was four days away, and cleaning up the estate of Joseph Corduroy would require more paper towels and garbage cans than notarized paperwork. Other than a quick shopping trip to get Angie some mourning clothes, we spent most of our time emptying a garage too full of “collectibles” to accommodate a car.

It was closed and smelled moldy and I started sneezing; we had to move piles just to move around. Stacks of old newspapers and magazines that Dad was planning to recycle but the “profit margin was too thin.” Tools, old windows, plumbing fixtures, stacked boxes, bike parts, record albums, doorknobs and hinges, old signs, mantels, and behind a rack of moldy clothes, a collection of erotic wood sculptures neither of us knew about, and many, many lawn gnomes. Junk. 

I found a long pole filled with old clothing and discovered a scout uniform spotted with mold. “This is Mrs. Sitka’s stuff. From twelve years ago. Why is it still here?”

Angie appraised the mess. “He probably forgot about it. I did. We can sell some of this on Amazon.” She said it in the confident voice she’d inherited from Dad, and like him, it held more attitude than fact.

“Doubt it,” I said tersely, pulling open a box and finding Reader’s Digests. “You have to sell volume and make money on the shipping. I have a coworker who used to do it on the side.” I saw a signed baseball card in a protective plastic sleeve, but I’d never heard of the player. “We might be able to move some of this on eBay.”

“I showed him eBay.” She grinned. “I meant to sell our stuff. Then he started bidding with my account.”

Late in the day we jammed all five garbage cans over full. 

“He’s our father!” Angie erupted the morning of the Spartan funeral, wearing a new plaid skirt, not exactly mourning clothes but good for job interviews, tears blurring her black makeup.

I had become tired of my own voice on the subject. “We can’t afford it. He would’ve wanted it to be simple.” My severance check was in my purse, but my father had raised us to be parsimonious.

She scowled until we reached the funeral parlor and saw Dad, then she crumbled in tears. I let her cry on my shoulder, my own eyes dry.

Everyone knew Joe Corduroy. After the well-attended funeral and the brunch of homemade casseroles, after enjoying tales of our father’s childhood in Worcester, as recalled by elderly second cousin Wilma from Groton, whom we’d never met, after everyone was gone, we exchanged skirts and blouses for jeans and a couple of Dad’s old shirts and returned to the garage.

“I’ve been looking for a glass vase I got him to buy years ago,” I announced. “Maybe he sold it?”

“Dad was more a buyer—“Angie started.

“Than a seller,” we said in unison, one of Mom’s expressions, and shared a grin. After her death three years ago, the house’s upkeep suffered. She had also been the one who’d somehow kept the business in the black and the garage orderly.

Though we’d reduced the rampant piles to more manageable islands, I couldn’t find the vase. After dinner, I collected Dad’s bills and found his checkbook, little used. Angie did the dishes and wrote an elegy for him on Facebook, her friends pinging back with crying emoticons. She stopped when she heard me sigh. “You look like Mom, when she was paying the bills. Angry.”

“I’m sorry I had to be a cheapskate,” I apologized. “I asked Dad a couple times if he’d put anything aside. He told me he had a nest egg.” I sat cross-legged on a kitchen chair. “As best I can tell, Dad was in the hole.”

Angie nodded glumly. “I thought so.”

“Even keeping the burial to basics, we owe the funeral ghouls a thousand and change. Normally a life insurance policy would pay for that, but he cashed his in last November to pay taxes.”

Angie frowned; she hadn’t known that.

“There’s less than a hundred dollars in this account.” I couldn’t believe my father had utterly ignored the future. He didn’t have to concern himself with me, I’d told him once on the phone, but Angie needed support, and guidance. He’d stumbled on both, in my opinion.

She grimaced, then said, “Dad didn’t like banks.”

“I know. I haven’t ruled out finding money buried somewhere, but it’s more likely to be a roll of quarters than twenties.” My pessimism was started to sound tired, even to me.

She looked at me, embarrassed. “Don’t you, like, make a lot of money?”

I’d bragged at Christmas about the pending bonus and a promotion I was slaving for, and now my embarrassment was a bottomless pit. Dad had looked amazed a child of his wore a suit to work.

I looked at Angie, “Up until Monday, I earned eighty-two thousand, which isn’t bad for twenty-six. But I lost my job the day you called, so it was a bad day all around.”

“Shit. Really?” She hesitantly offered me a hug; we’d never been close and now suddenly we were all we had. 

The house reeked of Dad’s cheap cigars, which Angie was savoring. “I can still smell him,” she said wistfully, curling fetal on the sagging couch.

“Mom would have killed him for smoking inside,” I said, mostly to myself. “So, after Mom died, did he sell anything?”

“I think so,” said Angie, looking thoughtful, but she said nothing.

I finished skimming the mail for bills. “We need to liquidate the collection, and it would help to get at least six thou for it, which seems unlikely.” Looking at her, in a parental voice, I asked, “Did you get the acceptance from Bowdoin?”

“Yessss.” After my persistent text messages, she applied to my alma mater. She had the grades, she just hadn’t wanted to go to college. And at the time she had a boyfriend she didn’t have anymore.

“What do you want to study?” I asked, finally having the sort of discussion with her I’d wanted.

Angie tended to frown when asked to think. “I was thinking of creative writing, but Dad laughed at it. ‘Learn the business, he said, make a real living.’ It’s interesting stuff, but,” she looked at me, “we’re broke now?” She looked beaten, shaking her head. “So, maybe creative writing is too flakey. I wanted to get a job at Market Basket just to have money for clothes. He kept telling me, don’t worry, he’d take me shopping, which he kept putting off.”

And just like that we were back in the red. “It would be good to get some tuition money, too.” I had gone to the cellar which Dad had always promised to remodel, but there were no surprises. Same tiny bathroom. No updates.

“We can sell the house,” I said. “That and a few grants should cover tuition. I know it won’t sell fast, and,” I looked at the tired paint, the worn floors, “it won’t sell for much, but it’s all equity.”

Water whistled through pipes in the wall. “The toilet leaks,” Angie recalled. “Dad was looking for the parts.”

“You can buy them for ten bucks,” I said, exasperated. “Probably why the damn water bill is so high.” Why this reminded me of boyfriends I didn’t know, probably the aggravation. In a calmer tone I asked, “Didn’t you have a boyfriend? Darryl something?” I recalled a stocky guy with a buzz cut and a lobe stretcher in each ear that made me flinch when I saw him on Facebook.

“Dar-ren, Darren Whitley. He joined the Army,” she said, sounding tired but not heartbroken. “We aren’t officially broken-up, I check his Facebook page, but I told him he was a dick for enlisting and he hasn’t called for a month, since he went off to basic. Dad didn’t like him,” she recalled, smiling, a hint of the rebel I’d been.

“I loved Dad, but I think losing Mom hurt me more,” I said.

She smiled sadly. “Well, you were her favorite. I liked going collecting with Dad.”

“I was not Mom’s favorite,” I said, steeped in memories of my departure. “I wasn’t anybody’s favorite. Do you remember the argument I started, telling Mom and Dad to computerize their inventory.”

Angie frowned. “A little.”

I wished I’d been nicer to him. “I told Dad he was a junk dealer. Not ‘collectibles,’” I used my fingers to mime quotes. “I’d just bought an Apple and there were all these business applications. I said we could make more money and live in a nice house.” I blushed at the memory, it stung. “Mom was defending Dad, even though she liked the idea. I wanted them to think I was bright. After that, I finished school and decided to live somewhere else.  Especially after Mom died.”

“Dad never understood why you went to Chicago. He was always seeing jobs in the paper and saying, ‘here’s one your sister could do’. One was bookkeeper for a strip club.”

“Is it still available?” We took in the view from the front door, the unmowed yard in the setting sun. “I do have to go back, at least to clean out my apartment.”

Angie looked at me skeptically. “You want to sell the house and give up your apartment.  Where are we going to live?”

That was an epiphany; I now had a housemate. “Good point. First, we need to sell the junk.”

“Collectibles,” she corrected me, and picked up a framed photo of all of us, taken just before Mom died, when she realized there was no family photo. She looked tired from the cancer, Dad at his most elegant in a disgusting bolo tie, still wearing jeans. I looked bored, Angie was smiling. The frame was aluminum, meant to glisten with hundreds of rhinestones, but only three remained, scattered among empty gray sockets. Dad found it when Mom asked for a picture frame. Not for the first time, I wondered why our only family photo didn’t merit a nicer frame in Dad’s eyes? He’d taken too much pride from using discards. There we go, woulda cost us ten bucks in the store.

The next morning, determined, I attacked the collection, moving piles of boxes I’d previously avoided, and I found the vase, shrouded in webbing and dirt. Amid the junk, even in shadow, the stained glass had light and color. “I forgot how beautiful you are,” I said in a hushed tone, as though others might discover me and rob my treasure. I’d picked it out at an estate sale in Weston and urged Dad to pay the stickered eighty bucks for it.

He’d been pleased at my interest but not the price. “Honey, I’ll offer ‘em twenty. Then I’ll go up a little. We’ll get it for forty, how much you wanna bet?” They stuck at fifty, and I pretended to pray, so he paid, which rankled him. I’d urged him to get it appraised, and then Mom died, and a few months later I was in Chicago.

With the vase resting in the crook of my arm, I discovered, with my big toe, a lawn gnome in overgrown grass outside the garage door. “Ouuww. Motherfu-!” Falling forward, the vase bobbled in my arms and I lunged after it; we both landed softly in the tall grass. “Jesus, that was close.” Flip-flops kicked aside, I sat down on the concrete stoop, nursing my big toe, cursing my father.

Angie had begun mowing and stopped to comfort me. “These little fuckers,” she said, grinning. Pointing with her thumb, “There’s one around back exposing himself.” She picked up the gnome. “Dad got to be a pawnshop,” she said. “He’d given you ten bucks for these, even broken. I never had the backbone to argue with his sense of charity. I think he really liked them.”

“And that’s why you have no college fund.”

Angie set down the gnome and fired up the mower again, no doubt to shut down my latest rant. She finished, put the mower away, and came up to me, still nursing my toe.  “Y’know what we could do? Brimfield.”

“That’s a great idea,” I told her, and it was. Instead of posting pictures on eBay and waiting for someone to bid, we could attend what I’d called the biggest yard sale in New England and unload the stuff for the highest bidder in one day. I called in a one-day registration and Angie went online to price our collectibles.

An hour later, she rested her forehead in her palm. “The gnomes almost aren’t worth the cost of the gas to haul them,” she said. “There are valuable gnomes, but we don’t have any of them.” Looking up, “Dad, what were you thinking?”

Stained glass was harder to gauge. I looked more closely and found a name in script—Galle. In a few keystrokes we discovered the value of the French artist. “Holy shit.  I knew this was worth something.” Beginning prices were around six thou, it could be worth up to fifty. “Ha!  Dad, I found your investment. But I get partial credit. Maybe we just leave it out and see what people think.” Angie shrugged her shoulders neutrally. I wanted to ignite a bidding war. Brimfield attracted savvy buyers with real money. That night I grinned in my sleep, at long last the heroine.

We set out at seven a.m. I offered to drive, but Angie insisted. “She’s a handful on a bumpy road.”  

 “He brought me here a couple times,” I said. I remembered it mostly as a gathering of losers selling junk. “Got to be ten years ago. You and Mom, you had a softball tournament. Dad priced his stuff higher than anyone else. I don’t think we made back the gas money. He kept saying ‘our stuff is premium’. He spent the day talking to other sellers.”

“He liked to talk. Especially about his stuff,” said Angie. “I forgot about the softball team.  I was a good hitter.” She smiled at her refreshed memories.

It felt odd to be part of a mile-long yard sale at nine in the morning. I still expected to be at work, in my office, studying my monitor, manipulating numbers on a spreadsheet. That morning I pulled on gloves and piled tools on folding tables, hammers and old drills clunking into each other, and then the old windows. Already sweating, I collected one under each arm, my little used muscles trembling.

Angie was lost in thought, holding a gnome. “Honey, could you hurry up?” I said. “As soon as you’ve got them all out, look around and see what our competition is.” I glanced at the erotic sculptures. “See if anyone else has sculptures with woodies. Maybe they’ll buy these. I do not want to take them back. They creep me out.” 

“I was remembering something Dad told me,” Angie said, resenting my hurry up, but leaving nonetheless.

I set the vase on the knickknacks table, slightly apart, no price. The truck was finally empty. I leaned against it, my back aching from unexpected exercise, wiped my sweaty forehead, and reminded myself to breathe.

Angie returned ten minutes later with coffee. We gathered at the cashbox under the tarp. “Two sugars, two creams.”

I smiled. “Thanks, I didn’t even think to ask.” I nodded proudly at the vase. “There’s my baby.”

She glanced at it. “It’s okay.”

I touched it protectively. “It’s beautiful. It’s the only thing here I like. I’m hoping we clean up on it.”

Angie’s inherited optimism was keeping her both happy and sad. “I was thinking about how Dad always had faith that the next twenty bucks he needed was already on its way to his pocket.”

“He should have prayed for fifties, not twenties.”

She gave me a labored look. “I understand we need money. We’re on the right track. I saw some old windows, they’re getting fifty for them, and the tub we should get a hundred for. The tools go between twenty and fifty.” She glanced at ours. “Probably nearer twenty. And there’s a guy in ‘J’ with African wood sculptures. Mostly big tits, between twenty and a hundred bucks. I,” she blushed, “didn’t talk to him.”

“Okay, we price everything a few bucks less and add ‘R.O.’ Our goal is a roll of cash and an empty truck.”

Angie sipped hot chocolate. “Before? I was thinking about college. Dad wasn’t big on it. He kept saying ‘You learn this business hands-on.’”

“I know,” I said, sipping my coffee and wishing it was a Starbucks. “If Mom was here, she would want you in college. You need to learn something besides the business. Writing, whatever.” I knew how often freshmen changed majors. The good news, I felt, was that Angie was thinking again. She had a lot to think about.

An elderly woman with horribly swollen legs came by, walking laboriously with a cane. Her jacket was old and had many pockets, her cargo shorts stained, and she walked in orthotic sneakers. Her long gray hair was pulled back with children’s barrettes. When she spoke she had the smile of a carved pumpkin. “Hello. I’m Elma Sweeney,” she said with a deep Downeast accent. “Where’s Dick?” Dad’s old friends called him Dick for reasons mysterious to us. “Are you his daughters?”Dottahs?

“We are. He died last Monday,” said Angie with a sad frown. “We’re trying to clean out his inventory.”

Elma looked stricken. “I’m so sorry. I hadn’t heard. I’ve known him for thirty years. I looked forward to seeing him here. I’m so sorry. How’d he die?” ‘Hawdee-die’

“Heart attack. He didn’t have any history. It just struck.”

Elma shook her head, as though any death was unfair. “Well, you gotta die of something. Dick and I go back a long time. I’m very sorry to hear it. You girls take care.” 

It seemed every dealer had known Dad as Dick, and I let Angie accept condolences, choosing to pretend I was working on a spreadsheet. My job gone, I tried searching job boards but my mind wandered. Right now I didn’t want another job. I didn’t want someone else to have the power to take that away from me. Well, you have to do something. That severance won’t last forever. Oddly, it was Dad’s voice, someone I thought I’d stopped listening to years ago.

I went for a walk, roaming, pretending I was in a bazaar in another hemisphere. I felt guilty leaving Angie alone, but she kept insisting she could run the show, so I let her. I returned half an hour later to find she had sold all the tools. “How?”

“Another collector,” she said smugly. “I offered him a fifteen percent cut to take them all. I know Dad got most of them for a buck or less. See? I can sell stuff.”

“Yes, you can,” I smiled, hugging her. “Now think about what you really want. And if you aren’t sure, trust me, you should at least try college. I think you’ll blossom there.” Looking around with a jaundiced look, “not much blossoming going on around here.”

Angie rolled her eyes. “Just ‘cuz they aren’t wearing suits doesn’t mean they aren’t working.”

A man in clean denim and golf shirt picked up a brass doorknocker, set it down, left and came back and asked, “How much for the faucets?”

“Make an offer,” I asked.

“Give you eight?”

Angie piped up. “Make it ten?”

“’Kay.”

A middle-aged man dressed in painters’ whites, who looked like he’d just finished turning a barn red, stopped to smile at the lawn gnomes. “My wife loves ‘em.” He knelt by one, picked it up, smiled at it, then stood, turned away, and looked over the windows. Then he asked, “How much for the tub?”

“Hundred,” I said first, smiling at Angie, a competition suddenly between us. “I’ll consider an offer.” 

“Seventy-five?”

Angie shook her head slightly. I said, “Can you go eighty?”

He looked at the tub again. “Eighty.”

“That’ll work.”

“How much for the windows?”

Without looking at her I said, “Forty-five apiece. There’re ten of them.”

“How’s three-fifty cash for all of ‘em?”

“That’ll work too.”

I knew Dad had collected the windows on garbage day two towns over. If only he had sold as well as he’d collected, maybe we wouldn’t have lived off discards, maybe he’d have seen a doctor more regularly, maybe he’d still be alive. A lot of maybes.

I sent Angie back to the tarp of James Hickory, Collector of Curiosities, as engraved on a wooden shingle hung from a tent pole. Behind the Jeep she saw the tent Mr. Hickory had slept in, a sleeping bag rolled up snugly. It was a little chilly for sleeping under the stars.

Beside the Jeep, on the grass, were the mahogany figures of absurdly well-endowed women. Angie glanced for a long moment at his wares, then approached Mr. Hickory. “Help you?” he asked in an accent she couldn’t place.

“Hi, I’m Angie Corduroy.”

“Jim Hickory.  Pleased to meet you, Angie.” He smiled. “What can I do for you?”

“Your wooden figures? How much are you asking for them?”

“Twenty apiece. I have sixteen and I can do a deal for all of them.”

She nodded politely. “Are you interested in acquiring some different ones?”

His smile changed direction, from genial greeter, to lopsided. “What d’you have?”

She tried to describe them without blushing or using her hands.

"Appears your late father—very sorry to hear it, I knew Dick—was collecting the males.” Hickory nodded knowledgeably. “If they’re genuine they’re usually African.”

“What do they go for?” she asked shyly.

"If you want to fetch one of yours, I’ll take a look at it.”

She returned with a smaller one in a paper bag. He rose from his seat and put his glasses on. His brown pants were deeply creased, as though he’d slept in them, and he smelled of his breakfast, a bag of Cheetos. Setting his hat on the table, exposing a shiny bald pate, he turned the male figurine around in his thick hands, one fingernail blackened, looking closer here and there, and then set it down, sighing. He smiled a kindly smile, a little foolish looking, as though confessing to a mistake. “I’m sorry, dear, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure this is a fake.” He began explaining and pointing out details.

She smiled politely, her spirits crashing. As soon as he finished, she said quickly, “Thank you, thanks for your help.”

She returned and I saw that she’d cried again. “Junk, junk, junk!” she said for my benefit.

The man buying windows was peeling bills off a roll when he saw the stained-glass vase. He knelt to see the light shine through it. “Look at you,” he said reverently. “Galle?”

“Yes, it is.” I felt the adrenaline rush.

He retrieved a soft rag from his back pocket and dabbed at a spot. “Very nice,” he smiled. “How much?”

I loved the vase, it was a good memory of a day with my Dad, a rarity. “Make me an offer?”

He reached for it, then looked at me. “Do you mind? I’d like to see it with more light.” He took a step back, raised it over his head to capture the sun. “I’ll go a hundred,” he said, and dug out his wallet.

“No, that one’s worth more,” I said, hoping I was right.

He looked at it again. “One-twenty-five?”

Not even close to a thousand. I concentrated on keeping a poker-face. “Let me think about it. You going to be around? I won’t sell it to anyone else for a half hour.”

He nodded. “Okay. I need to pack up what I’ve already got. I’ll be back.”

A slim woman, dressed in elegant, spotless linen, had been idling across the way. She paused before the stained glass and studied it. “How much for this?” she asked in a strong Long Island voice.

“I’m considering offers. The bidding starts at,” I felt a bit breathless, “a thousand.”

She frowned, bent and looked closely at it, rubbed at imaginary dirt, got up and walked away.

“A thousand?” Angie asked, also breathless. “Dad had anything worth a thousand?”

My heart was pounding. “Maybe. We paid fifty bucks for it six years ago. It would be nice to make a huge profit.”

Angie dropped the fertility doll on the tarp, by the others, like it was old paper. “By the way—these things? Friggin’ firewood.”

I mouthed ‘oh’ and hugged her with one arm. “It’s okay, we’ll be okay.” Then I smiled brightly, “and tonight we have a bonfire!”

The Long Island woman returned with an equally well-dressed man with styled gray hair. He leaned over the glass carefully, dug out reading glasses and got close enough for a nose print, then picked it up, upending it, turned to her and shook his head. She frowned and looked at me as though I’d misled them. “My friend says this is not a Galle. It’s a knock-off.”

My heart sank. “Are you sure?”

The man, rail-thin, spoke in a British accent. He had oddly long fingers. “He signed Galle, as you have here. The plant is his preferred motif. But underneath?” and he upended it and touched two dimpled spots on the bottom. “See here? This is where the injection mold broke off. This was mass produced.” He enunciated the words with contempt. “The seam, it’s almost invisible.” Well, I’d missed it. “It’s a very nice piece, for decorating purposes. A beautiful fake,” he said, apparently his version of condolences, as I must have looked awful. They walked off and I felt foolish.

“I didn’t want to say anything,” said Angie, frowning sympathetically. “Dad did get it appraised. They said it wasn’t original. I just wasn’t sure they could tell.”

What rattled me more? That I was wrong? That I hadn’t learned the business? Or that I’d called my father a junk dealer, and I’d also bought junk, or how did the man put it? A beautiful fake. Dad probably knew it wasn’t original himself. My burgeoning self-confidence faded. “I feel so stupid.”

“Hey, we’ve got nine hundred and sixteen dollars. That’s more than we ever cleared.” She smiled at me, hopeful. “We’re most of the way to paying for Dad.” Her voice dropped at the end. “I wonder if he thought those wooden idols were legit. I hate to think he paid full price for them.” We both grinned and shook our heads in unison—Dad never paid full price for anything. “Hey, is this your guy coming back?”

I picked up the vase, which I still loved, but it was worth a hundred and twenty-five dollars to this man. Unenthusiastically, I said, “If you still want it, you can have it.”

He nodded and counted twenties onto the table. I remembered holding the vase up that day, begging Dad to buy it. “Fifty is top buck. If I pay top buck for it, how do I make a profit?” he asked, teaching me the business. To my embarrassment, my eyes welled up and I felt tears on my cheeks. He couldn’t help noticing. “Are you okay?” He paused, a bill pinched in mid-air.

I’d laughed telling Mom how irritated Dad was when he paid fifty dollars for it. I was blinking away tears, and then my nose started running. I picked the vase up again. “I’d like to keep this, after all. It’s a family heirloom.”

He was a good sport. Scooping up his cash, “Okay, I can respect that. If you change your mind, I’m at A-17.” He set his business card on the table and headed off.

“I’m glad you kept it,” Angie said, hugging me. “You need something nice to remember Dad.”

Though I didn’t shed a tear seeing Dad in a coffin, I cried as I held the vase. “Maybe we could repaint the truck. ‘Corduroy Sisters, Antiques’.”

My phone buzzed, a text from a work friend ‘were you canned?’ “I’ll be right back,” I told my sister, walking around the truck.

Angie began collecting the gnomes. She reached for one of the ceramics—we hadn’t sold any—and her fingertips slipped, the gnome rolled free and broke on a knob of granite into five pieces. “Shit.  Five bucks shot to hell!” She saw a piece of brown paper in the ceramic torso. She pulled on it and a small bag came loose. Inside was a roll of twenties.  It had been stuffed through a hole in the base. She picked up another and goosed it and smiled as she felt brown paper. Dropping it on the same rock, she found another bag of bills. She looked for me. “Dad, you paranoid son of a…”

Five minutes later, I returned to witness a mass killing of lawn gnomes, and Angie counting bills. “I found his savings,” she reported, beaming. “Ten thousand, mostly in twenties, a few fifties.  Even some Benjamins,” she held them aloft.

“Y’know, there is nothing—I mean nothing—in his will about those damn gnomes. We could have sold these for, like, a dollar apiece and,” I raised my eyes heavenward. “Dad!  Next time leave a note!”

Angie angled her face in the rearview mirror, smiling as she admired the green stud in her right nostril. I had held her hand for the piercing and told a terrible knock-knock joke as she discovered she was afraid of needles.

“What do you do for fun?” she asked as we hit the Mass Pike.

“Nothing much.” I was holding the vase like it was my child. “You should come with me back to Chicago, we can make it a mini vacation. Sometime real soon, let’s talk about college.” We headed home with the sun setting in the rearview, Angie found a metal head station on the radio and I endured it.

“Think there are any more gnomes?”

Robert Moore is a semi-retired librarian by day, a writer and community service performer by night.  He published The Stone House Diaries (2006), historical fiction set in his hometown of Niagara Falls, as well as short stories in print and online journals.  He lives currently in Clarence, NY, with his wife, Stephanie.

Image generated by Krin Van Tatenhove