All stories › Horror › Keep, Auction, Wreck › Episode 2

Three Words and a Number

Episode 2 of 3 of Keep, Auction, Wreck by Miles Redding · free to read

“Dent’s still warm,” Stacy said.

She had dragged the recliner off its marks and had her palm flat on the carpet. I put my good hand down next to hers. Warm, the way a dashboard is warm.

“Sun,” I said.

“Curtains are shut.”

She called Rhonda from the parlor floor at twenty of two. I stood in the doorway with my shirt stuck to my back and listened.

“Your mother’s card box,” Stacy said. “Tell me the rules of it.”

“It’s a filing system.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Rhonda took her time. “Everything in the house got a card before dark. Every day. Keep, auction, wreck. If a thing wasn’t carded, it wasn’t hers to give away.”

“What happens to a thing that isn’t carded?”

“Then it’s the house’s,” Rhonda said, in the voice people use for a phrase they learned as a kid and never questioned.

“Could she change her mind?”

“Constantly. She’d write a new card. The old one stayed in the box, she never threw one out, and the highest number was the one that counted. She’d say that at dinner. Highest number wins.”

“Was the box hers?”

“She bought it at a sale down in Gallipolis,” Rhonda said. “Box and cards both. She used to joke it came with the numbers already running.”

Stacy hung up and we stood in the parlor with the fan going.

“Highest number wins,” she said. “That’s a rule.”

“That’s the only one we have.”

“What’s keep, then.”

I looked at the recliner in its dents. “Keep is the one that came back.”

We walked the house after that and read it instead of working it. Every item we had touched that morning wore a card. Our blue flags and her cards agreed on everything but four things, and on those four her numbers were higher.

We had flagged the walnut secretary blue for Rhonda. It had a card on it now.

4392. SECRETARY, WALNUT, BACK ROOM. WRECK.

Stacy went back for the secretary pulls. She was gone maybe four minutes.

She came back without them.

“Somebody’s on the stairs,” she said.

“Somebody.”

“Third step from the bottom. Sitting. Writing.” She said it flat, the way she reads a bid sheet. “Gray cardigan. Cards on her knee.”

“Did she look at you?”

“She’s working,” Stacy said. “She’s not interested in us.”

I went and looked. Stairs, dust, and the print of one shoe in the dust that did not match our boots. A single card lay face down on the third step. I left it face down.

In the driveway Stacy finally lit the cigarette.

“We walk,” she said. “Call the attorney, eat the mobilization, take the loss.”

“Dumpster’s paid for a week.”

“Gil.”

“Twelve hundred, and it’s already gone into fuel and a day and my hand.”

“We have done three hundred and ninety houses.”

“Three hundred ninety one.”

“Then you know this is the one.”

I went back inside for the box, and I wanted to read it, and that is the whole reason. On the way through I counted. Parlor carded. Hall carded. Kitchen carded. Out the window, the truck had a card under the wiper, the cooler had a card, the hand truck had a card leaning against its wheel.

“Stace.”

“What.”

“Everything in this house has a card on it,” I said. “Except us.”

She came in and looked at the box a long minute.

“Then we card ourselves.”

“With what?”

“There’s blanks in the back.”

There were. Forty of them, maybe fifty, behind the divider, same stock, same green box. Stacy went through to the last written card and read the corner out loud. Four three nine two.

We stood on either side of the kitchen table with a pen apiece. Two in the afternoon.

“You write mine, I write yours,” she said. “Number them and put them straight in. No reading.”

“Why no reading?”

“Because then you’d argue with it.”

I gave hers 4394 and I put down keep. We dropped them in and shut the lid.

Then we carried the box out to the truck, because neither of us wanted it in the house and neither of us wanted to be the one holding it. I set it on the tailgate. The sun would not be down until half past seven.

“What word did you give me?” I said.

Stacy answered me from the dumpster.

Keep, Auction, Wreck · ← Bid Walk on Seldon Street · Highest Number Wins →