Chapter 24: The Second Lot

On the last Saturday of October, the warehouse in the Pearl District held six hundred people.

The bar ran out of wine by six.

Backstage, Freja held my jacket open by the lapels.

It was the same charcoal jacket, and this time she had let the sleeves out herself.

"It fits," I said.

"It fits because I measured you. Properly." She smoothed the shoulders. "I didn't use any pins."

"Do I get a lot number?"

"You're lot one."

"Why one?"

"Because I wanted you sold before the wine ran out." She stepped back and looked me over. "And because I'm the director, and I can."

"What happens to the paddle with the number one?"

Her mouth went flat.

"We don't have a number one this year," she said. "The registration desk skipped it. Nobody mentioned it."

I kissed her, and her pencil fell out of her hair.

Teddy's head appeared through the curtain.

"Open it," he whispered.

"It is open."

"More."

Freja reached up and unbuttoned the top button of my shirt.

"Done," she told him. "Go sit down."

The auctioneer called lot one, and I walked out.

The hall made the sound it had made a year ago, everyone turning at once.

Now some of them were cheering.

Women leaned over the runway.

The woman in red from last year was in the front row with her paddle already up.

She winked at me, and I grinned.

"Dinner for two," the auctioneer said. "He restores chairs, and he is attached to no one but our director."

"Who'll open at ten thousand?"

The paddles went up in a wave.

Ten became thirty in about a breath.

At fifty it was the woman in red against a woman in a green coat I didn't know.

At seventy it was Teddy's friend from the sound company, who didn't need a date and was bidding for the joy of it.

At ninety, the woman in red raised her paddle and looked at me with exaggerated tragedy.

"Ninety thousand dollars," the auctioneer said. "Going once."

Freja came out of the wing with her tablet against her chest and a pencil in her fist.

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