All stories › Horror › Keep, Auction, Wreck › Episode 1
Bid Walk on Seldon Street
Episode 1 of 3 of Keep, Auction, Wreck by Miles Redding · free to read
“Twelve hundred, and we eat the dumpster,” Stacy said.
Rhonda Dunlavy stood in her mother’s doorway with a coffee she was not drinking. I counted rooms behind her. Nine, plus a basement, plus a garage with a path worn through it.
“Twelve hundred is low,” I said.
“It’s low. We’re not raising it.”
That is how the two of us have worked for twelve years. Stacy Roan bids. I load. She says a number and I carry that number out to the truck in pieces.
“Mom kept everything,” Rhonda said. “I want the china. The albums. There’s a walnut secretary somewhere in there.”
“Blue flag is what you keep,” I said. “Red goes to the auction barn. Everything else rides.”
“Rides where?”
“Dumpster.”
She signed at nine. The attorney’s letter had come through already, so we were working by nine fifteen. September in Ohio. Ninety degrees by ten, no shade on that side of Seldon Street.
The front room was aisles. Not clutter. Aisles, with room to walk, which is worse, because it means somebody maintained it.
Stacy found the first card before I got the ramp down.
An index card, taped to the base of a brass lamp. Blue ballpoint, small tidy printing, a four digit number in the top right corner.
0119. LAMP, BRASS, PARLOR. KEEP.
“Cute,” Stacy said. She peeled it off and clipped it to her board.
There was one on the sideboard. One on the radio, numbered 3877. One under the mantel clock. The numbers ran in no order I could see. Somebody had been counting for a long time.
By ten fifteen there were forty cards on her clipboard and we had cleared eight feet of floor.
Then Stacy came out to the truck and handed me one more.
4381. WATER COOLER, ORANGE, PORCH. WRECK.
We had carried that cooler in from the truck at nine.
“March,” Rhonda said on the phone. “The ninth.”
Stacy had her on speaker on the porch rail while I ran the hand truck.
“Your mother label things?”
“Constantly. She had a box of cards. It was a whole system.” A pause on the line. “She was going through the house one room at a time. She never finished.”
“How far did she get?”
“The kitchen, I think.”
We found the box on the kitchen table at ten forty, a green metal recipe file with a hinged lid. It was full. I thumbed it and the cards went by like a flipbook, every one numbered.
DESK LAMP. KEEP. HAT BOXES, SEVEN. WRECK. CANNING JARS, BLUE, TWO DOZEN. AUCTION.
Auction. She had three words and we had three words and they were the same three, except she used wreck where we said trash.
“Coincidence,” Stacy said.
“Sure.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“Coincidence,” I said.
We hauled until noon. The dumpster took the mattresses, the carpet rolls, forty years of magazines in twine. Good work, ugly work, the kind that pays because nobody else will do it in that heat.
At noon I found a card taped to the dumpster rail.
4386. DUMPSTER, RENTAL, DRIVEWAY. WRECK.
“That one’s just correct,” Stacy said, and laughed, and that was the last thing either of us laughed at.
Rhonda came by at half past twelve with her china list. She stood in the cleared parlor and put her hand flat on the wall like she was checking a fever.
“It’s bigger,” she said.
“Rooms do that when they empty.”
“No. There’s more in it.”
She was gone before one.
The chair went in the dumpster at one.
Green recliner, torn arm, cat damage, nothing the auction barn would take. I broke the back off it to get it through the door and a spring came through the upholstery and opened my palm below the thumb. I bled on the porch boards, wrapped it in a shop towel, and kept working, because that is the job. Stacy stood in the driveway and watched me throw the pieces over the lip.
We did the hall closet next. Twenty minutes, maybe twenty five. Then we came back through the parlor with the closet rod and a box of shoes.
The chair was in the parlor.
Whole. Back on. Sitting in its four dents in the carpet, arms squared to the window, the tear on the left arm facing out the way it had faced out all morning.
There was a card on the seat cushion.
4390. CHAIR, GREEN, PARLOR. KEEP.
Stacy did not say anything. She walked around it twice. She put a hand on the back of it and pushed, and it moved the way a chair moves, which is to say it was a chair.
“I threw that out,” I said.
“I know.”
“You watched me.”
“I know.”
She went out to the driveway. I followed her. We both looked in the dumpster, which is what people do when they already know, and the dumpster held everything we had put in it that day except one green recliner.
Stacy got a cigarette out and did not light it.
“Twelve hundred,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I should have said two.”
The chair was back in its dent.