All stories › Horror › Keep, Auction, Wreck › Episode 3
Highest Number Wins
Episode 3 of 3 of Keep, Auction, Wreck by Miles Redding · free to read
“Keep,” the dumpster said.
That was the word. Her voice, her flat bid sheet delivery, coming out of forty cubic yards of somebody’s life thirty feet away while she stood at my elbow in full sun with her mouth shut.
“Stace.”
She did not answer from beside me.
When I looked back the driveway was empty. Her clipboard lay on the tailgate with the truck keys squared on top of it and her cigarette still going in the gravel.
I said her name twice more. I checked the cab and the garage and walked the side yard to the fence and back.
Her phone rang in the truck. It was on the seat with her sunglasses folded on top of it, which is where she leaves it when she means to come right back inside of a minute.
Then I climbed the ladder and went over.
Everything we had thrown that day was in there. Mattresses. Twine. Magazines. All of it exactly where it had landed, hot enough through my boots to feel.
On top of the nearest carpet roll lay one index card.
4396. STACY ROAN, CREW, DRIVEWAY. WRECK.
Mine for her had been 4394. Keep. I had written the number in the corner myself and my thumb had left a mark on it from the towel.
I stood in a dumpster in the sun and did the arithmetic, which took no time at all.
The house was done.
Not done the way we leave them. Done. Parlor empty except for a blue flagged stack by the door, china boxed, albums strapped. Auction pile squared in the hall under red flags. Every room bare to the baseboard, every card gone off the walls, dust swept in one direction.
Two people cannot do nine rooms in half an hour.
I walked it twice anyway. The blue flagged stack was Rhonda’s list exactly, down to the albums, and the red flags on the auction pile were tied in Stacy’s double knot, which I would know anywhere and which proves nothing. Nine rooms of a woman’s life, sorted correct, and the only thing left loose in that house was me.
I called Rhonda from the kitchen because I could not think who else to call.
“Is the house all right?” she said.
“The house is fine.”
“Where’s your partner?”
“Loading.”
She took it. People take anything on a cleanout day. “Mom used to sit in there and say she wasn’t done with things yet.”
“Which things.”
“The keep pile,” Rhonda said. “She was never done with those.”
The box was back on the kitchen table. I had left it on the tailgate. I did not carry it in.
“Rhonda,” I said. “Did your mother ever lose one of these?”
“She didn’t lose things.”
“Did she ever let one go?”
“Not once I knew of,” Rhonda said. “That was the whole point of the box.”
I took a blank off the back and wrote 4397, STACY ROAN, CREW, DRIVEWAY, KEEP, and filed it at the front and shut the lid and counted to ten with both hands flat on the metal.
When I opened it there was 4398. Wreck.
I went out to the dumpster with that one in my fist and climbed up to put it where she could see both. The carpet roll was bare. Every card I had left out there in twenty minutes was gone off the top of that load like the sun had taken them.
I came back in and wrote 4399. I got 4400. I wrote nothing after that, because I had worked out by then that I was not the one holding the pen, and because 4395 was missing out of the run and I wanted to know where it had gone.
It was at the back of the box, filed where a person files a thing she has already settled.
4395. GIL FISK, CREW, KITCHEN. KEEP.
I put it in my shirt pocket. I stood in that kitchen with the sun going long across the floor, carded, settled, filed at the back with the things she was not done with, and I waited for the house to keep me the way it had kept the chair.
It did nothing at all. It let me pick up my tools. It let me pull the door shut at a quarter past three and load the ladder and back the truck down the drive, and the whole way out Seldon Street I watched the mirror and the house just sat there getting smaller.
I got paid Monday. In November the place sold, and nothing happened to the young couple who bought it. I stopped waiting around Thanksgiving.
Then last week I came home and set my keys on the counter.
The green box was on my kitchen table, full, the front card numbered 4417, seventeen past the last number I ever saw on Seldon Street, my name on it and the word she uses for a thing she is not finished with.
It had never needed the house.