The Last Studebaker. Robin Hemley
full of atmosphere, brimming with South Bend's glorious history. But Lois wouldn't have eaten there even if the ninety-nine-cent special had been pheasant under glass. After all, the Studebakers had broken their promise. They'd promised to give more than they took. They'd promised to treat people decently, like family. As far as she was concerned, the house should have been razed and a plaque erected: Where the Rinky-Dink Studebakers Once Reigned.
“Since when have you started eating at Tippecanoe Place?” Lois said.
Willy started walking slowly down the stairs, dignified as Caesar, his sheet still wrapped around him. Lois followed.
“Brunch is it? When did you learn the world brunch, Willy? I thought you only knew the words breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Are we going to eat croissants at brunch? Are we going to drink mimosas?”
“What do you care?” he said.
“I don't. I'm just curious, that's all. I'm just interested in my ex-husband's education. Any time he learns a new word I'm fascinated. Did Alice teach you brunch?”
She stopped at the front door and watched him step onto the front porch. He turned around and faced her. He looked like her husband. He looked like someone she knew better than anyone, even her daughters. He looked like a man whose familiarity made him handsome.
“None of your business,” he said.
That was too much for her. “Give me back my sheet,” she yelled as loud as she could. She heard the doors to the girls' bedrooms open upstairs.
“I didn't think you'd be upset,” he said. “I thought we agreed it was time you and the girls found a new place to live.”
“Give me back my sheet,” she said as firmly as she could. She wanted this to get through to him, that he couldn't just walk away with her sheet. She'd follow him around all day to get it back if she had to.
“I thought this is what you wanted,” he said.
What a ridiculous thing for him to say. A minute ago she'd been counting his chest hairs.
Willy looked away to the road. He seemed to have forgotten Lois stood there. “Damn it, I hope Alice understands.”
“Understands what?” Lois said. “I don't understand. Tell me.”
The previous night was a muddle to her. She remembered too many things. Hardly any of it really happened, she tried to tell herself. “Can I fix breakfast, Willy?” she said, forgetting his brunch date. “Can I do that at least?” She meant a lot more than that, but she couldn't say it. She meant, could she pretend he wasn't telling her these things? Could she get some coffee in him and give him time to wake up? Could they overthrow the old habits and despair just a while longer, at least until she had time to figure out what had really happened last night?
Willy picked at his chest. She just stood there, wondering what he really wanted to do.
He whipped his sheet away and handed it to her. Then he turned around and loped across the yard to the barn, naked as Lois had made him.
TWO
Lois had lived in only two different houses her whole life: her father's and Willy's. She didn't know what it felt like to be without I some small utensil or piece of furniture. She was leaving a lot behind with Willy, and had made a list of things to look for at garage sales: dishes, glasses, chairs, window blinds, a coffee table. Also, a glass butter churn. Though she'd never churned butter in her life, she had owned a butter churn before. For fifteen years it sat on the mantle. Then, in the middle of packing up, the churn had slipped and shattered on the floor. Practically speaking, she didn't need a butter churn. Still, it topped her list. She'd discovered that owning something for fifteen years made it pretty close to necessary.
The same could be said of Willy, though she couldn't replace him that easily, and she didn't want to. Still, she added him to the list, down near the bottom. Next to his name, in parentheses, she wrote: “Hah! Good luck.” She meant good luck finding him again. She also meant good luck if she did find him again. Either way, she wasn't getting a bargain.
Lois searched for garage sales much like a diviner going after water. Instead of scanning the classifieds, she simply aimed her car through neighborhoods, trusted intuition, and watched for signs. In this way, she almost always spotted a garage sale every half hour. Often, there'd be two garage sales on the same block. Giving garage sales tended to be contagious in a neighborhood.
She had discovered the best kinds of sales over the past year, also the ones to avoid. Estate sales consisted of an entire accumulated life dissected on a lawn for people to browse through. Multifamily sales promised bargains, too. Church sales, by comparison, bored Lois. All church sales looked alike, and offered up the same items: heaps of wrinkled clothing, baked goods, Up With People and New Christie Minstrels records, and inspirational books.
Some people held garage sales almost every weekend. Lois didn't appreciate these professional garage-sale givers at all. She considered them charlatans who lured people like herself to sales that had been depleted months before.
Some people didn't know the meaning of garage sales. They seemed to think anything and everything had value, and couldn't differentiate between collectibles and junk. Most of the time, Lois didn't even need to stop at these sales. She could tell the kind of sale just by driving past. The worst ones usually had two racks of faded clothes on the porch or in the yard and a couple of card tables topped by can openers and ancient shavers and waffle irons and jelly-jar glasses. Didn't these people know that only a fool would pay a dollar for a set of five washed-out tin pie plates? Or buy a toaster with a frayed cord? Warped beer coasters with stains? Broken golf clubs? Coverless People magazines? Why did these people think they could get away with it? Was this the best show they could put on?
Old garage-sale signs upset Lois the most. A lot of people didn't bother dating their signs, and a lot didn't take them down from telephone poles or the backs of stop signs when the sales were through. Nothing felt emptier than driving past a garage-sale site that had been panned out months ago.
If you wanted to go garage sale-ing with Lois, you had to wake up early. By eleven in the morning, sometimes ten, the best ones had been picked clean. By then, the garage-sale ladies had swarmed over every good garage sale in town. The garage-sale ladies were a bunch of scavengers like Lois, only more organized and deadly. They buzzed from sale to sale like a grasshopper plague, showing up early and devastating the crop, reselling it later to the antique stores around town.
The most thrilling moment at a garage sale for Lois was when she pulled up to the curb in front of a promising one. Her feet magically guided her to the best bargains at the sale, as her eyes scanned each item. Maybe this time she'd come across the find of a lifetime. She didn't know the name of this find, but she thought it waited for her: the one item that would coalesce all her dreams of happiness into one hard relic, one profound bargain.
She parked in front of a brick ranch house. The yard consisted of dirt with patches of weeds and grass surrounding a flagpole without a flag. A lone bush sat beside the cracked concrete walkway. All sorts of debris covered the porch. At first, Lois didn't see anyone there, but then she noticed a man who seemed entombed like a pharaoh in the midst of his possessions. The man wore a porkpie hat decorated with fishing lures, and his face had settled with age into a featureless pudding.
“Real fine day for a sale,” the man said when she'd come halfway up the walk.
The fact that the man could speak amazed her. He hardly seemed human. She imagined him shrunken and porcelain-glazed, collecting dust on a junk shop shelf, with his porkpie hat and fishing lures, and a small plaque underneath him: World's Greatest Fisherman.
Lois started ferreting through the piles of knickknacks for bargains. She forgot about her list. It wasn't the real reason she had gone garage sale-ing anyway. Over the last year she'd become a garage-sale junkie. She bought plenty of things she didn't need, plenty of stuff that had nothing to do with her life. Something about garage sales soothed her. Something that made her forget her problems.