Chapter 9: The Auction

"You can't sell her things," I said.

"Watch me," Kaylee said.

"Boone. Stop her."

Boone was staring at Kaylee.

"I'll call a lawyer," he said.

"Call ten," Kaylee said. "Saturday, ten o'clock. There'll be coffee."

She let the back door bang shut behind her.

On Saturday morning, my mother's life was laid out on the front lawn.

It was the same lawn where we'd had the supper.

The long tables were back, but now they were covered in her things, each one with a white sticker and a number.

Her copper pots.

Her quilts, folded in stacks.

Her good china, the set with the blue horses around the rim.

Her saddle sat on a sawhorse at the end of a row, with lot 41 stuck to the seat.

The portrait from the front hall leaned against a hay wagon.

It was my mother on Clover, painted the year I was born.

Kaylee had hired an auctioneer from Frankfort with a headset microphone and a striped vest.

Maybe two hundred people had come.

Most of them were neighbors and my mother's church friends.

Some of them, I think, had come to see me cry.

I didn't give them that.

I sat in the front row of folding chairs in my clinic jacket with my hands in my lap.

Dot sat on one side of me.

Hayes stood behind Dot's chair with one hand resting on the back of it.

He'd barely spoken to me since Sunday morning.

He'd shown up anyway, at nine-thirty, with his checkbook in his shirt pocket.

Boone stood on the front porch with his arms crossed and didn't come down.

Kaylee had a clipboard and my mother's pearls and a pink sundress.

The auctioneer started with the recipe box.

It was a tin box with a rooster on the lid, full of cards in my mother's handwriting and my grandmother's.

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