Written by RF Wilson – The cars of serious buyers and treasure hunters, speculators and the idly curious, inundate the neighborhood. The tree-lined streets are ablaze with orange and red and gold, redolent of football and bonfires, hinting of winter. By 6:30, people are knocking on the door at 136 Maplewood Road demanding to be let in for the auction advertised to begin at 8:00 a.m.

The children, all now near or past sixty, maintain a veneer of good manners. Recriminations and accusations are only hinted at, a look, a turn of the shoulder, someone leaving a room as another enters. Strangers notice nothing. Friends assume it’s grief.

Kay, the oldest, organized the event without consultation. “I’m the one who hung out here while Dad died,” she said, face the shade of a lobster removed from a pot of boiling water. “And this is the thanks I get, like the thanks I always got for being here with him and Mom.”

Doris, the baby, suggested that Kay might have talked to them about it, might have put it off for a while to give her and Hal the chance to sort through things. When Kay said, “You want something, make a bid on it,” Doris struck the appropriate, self-righteously indignant, pose.

Hal, the middle child, thinks Kay wears the martyr mantel as well as their mother had, perhaps better and is relieved at not having to go through the motions of caring about any of it. He wanders around, as he has done most of his life, looking at this and that, not sure if he has a job here, any useful purpose. He watches people examine the remnants of his youth, the ball glove and the ice skates, the pennant collection and the Hardy Boys books and wonders if he is being negligent, not wanting to reclaim any of it. The thought of a drink washes over him, taking hold unexpectedly, though not surprisingly. It will all be over in a couple of hours and Kay will divide up the take, using some arcane formula only she will understand. He knows he will wind up feeling screwed.

Doris and her husband, Fred, maintain a smug presence, sitting at a card table near the garage, paper cups that had held lattes from the coffee shop in town now serving as ash trays. Hal half expects to see wine appear, poured into glasses commandeered from some box not yet sold off. The couple share bemused expressions, as if they cannot believe civilized people would behave this way, allowing just anyone to wander through the ancestral home (although, in truth, they were the first generation to have grown up here), poking and fondling, ransacking their lives.

Hal knows Kay would love to smack the attitude off the face of the younger sister who, in Kay’s mind, had managed to marry into security on her looks alone. “She’s been a pretty good mother,” he had once said to Kay, offered as justification for Doris’ apparent success in life. “Her kids only look good compared to yours, Hal,” Kay dug, a reference to his estrangement from his own children, the great sadness of his life. Although both of Kay’s boys had cycled in and out of rehabs, he could not bring himself to say, “And what about yours?” She was still, after all, the older sister.

“So,” Hal begins, joining Doris and Fred, “your kids didn’t want to do this either?”
“They all thought it would be interesting,” Doris says, “but it would mean having to deal with their Aunt Kay, not the way any of them wants to spend what little time off they get these days. What about yours? Still not speaking to you?”
“No,” he replies, his head turned away from his sister.
“Come in, Hal. Earth to Hal,” Doris says, noting his gaze has gone off in the direction of the auctioneer’s table.
“Isn’t that Grace Meadows?” he asks.

Doris follows his line of sight. “Looks like her, from what I remember. She’s the one you had that affair with, isn’t she.” A statement, not a question. “Almost broke up your marriage.”

Hal glances back at his sister, surprised, as if she’d just shown everyone a picture of him naked.

“I used to wonder if you wouldn’t have been better off if it had,” she adds.

Without ceremony, Hal rises from the table and walks toward his erstwhile friend, stomach churning as it did in anticipation of every rendezvous they’d had. He cannot think of what he will say after he says, “Hello.” His mind is out ahead of him – what if she’s not alone? What if she is? Then he is up to her, arm’s length from her back, mouth opening.

Before he can form a word, she turns around. “Hal!” A broad smile creases her face. “I was afraid I’d miss you. You look good – ”

“Do you want to get a cup of coffee?” His words spilling out, tumbling over hers. He is half-surprised he hasn’t asked her if she wants a drink.

“Now?” she answers. “I’d love to, but is it OK for you to leave?” A laugh follows immediately. “Here we are in our sixties, and I’m still worried about your big sister’s disapproval.”

“Yeah. If I don’t behave the way she thinks I should, she’s likely to decide I don’t deserve my share of the take. Let me tell Doris, so she doesn’t think I’ve abandoned her.”

The two walk back to the garage, the knot in Hal’s gut slackening. Doris sees them coming and smiles at the woman.

“You remember Grace,” Hal says in Doris’ direction; then, “Grace, this is Doris’ husband Fred. Fred, Grace . . . is it still Meadows?”
“Meadows again,” she says and Ken says, “Nice to meet you Grace Meadows Again.”

They all smile at Ken’s wit. Grace gives the appropriate condolences. They exchange pleasantries about the weather.

Then Hal says, “We’re outa’ here. If Kay comes looking for me, tell her I’ll be back in a little while.”
Doris smiles and with raised eyebrow, says, “Of course, we all know about your ‘little whiles,’ and winks at Grace.
“We’re going to get coffee,” Hal says, feeling he has to defend his former lover.
“Whatever. I’m not your mother, Hal. I’m not even your older sister. I’m the one you used to sneak around with half the time.”

Hal cannot halt the slide into memory, to the times he and his kid sister sneaked out of the house when they were in high school. Later, when he and Grace were in the midst of their affair, they occasionally ran into Doris during their afternoon bar crawls. He feels an archaic mix of shame, guilt and arousal.

“I’ll be back to help clean,” he says as he turns with Grace toward the driveway.

In the car on the way into town, they share an awkward silence. As they pass the Gaslight Grill on Third Street, Hal muses, “You suppose people still do what we did there?”
“Is the Pope still Catholic?” she answers.
“You remember that Dylan line, ‘If I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then’? That lost innocence thing.
“You think we were innocent?” she asks, a smile in her voice.
“Maybe naïve is a better word.
“Do you regret it?”
“No. Not really. I occasionally lapse into the ‘what if?’ place, like, ‘what if I’d been able to accept sooner that my marriage wasn’t going to work?’”

In the coffee shop, they reminisce, bring each other up to date on family, current life status. The excitement he felt on seeing her has mellowed, the undefined expectation drained away. He declines the waitress’ offer of a refill, saying to Grace, “I’d better get back.”

At the house, he kisses her on the lips.
She smiles, says, “You’ve got my number. I really would like to hear from you again.”
He believes her.

What the auctioneer couldn’t interest people in buying, is being boxed and loaded on the truck of a dealer who removes the leftovers from these events, a vulture picking at carrion. Hal sees a triangle of orange felt with black lettering sticking out of a carton still on the ground. He yanks on it, pulling out a New York Giants pennant, reminder of an earlier time from which he, like the ballplayers who moved to San Francisco, has left behind.

Beneath the Giants flag is a roll of similar memorabilia of other teams, extant and extinct. More memories drift by. Duke Snider, Mickey Mantle, Robin Roberts, Stan Musial. Dodgers, Yankees, Phillies, Cardinals. A hand thumps his shoulder.

“Hey, bud. You gotta pay for those.”
Hal turns to see a burly man, scowling.
“This was my house. These are mine.”
“Not anymore. I bought ’em, along with all this stuff.” A hand waves in the direction of his truck.
Hal considers arguing. Then says, “OK. Five dollars for the lot.”
“Fifty. Some of those could be collector things.”
“Ten,” Hal counters.
“Thirty.”
“Twenty.”
“Deal,” the man says.

Hal hands the man two ten dollar bills and carries the souvenirs to his car. After throwing the bundle on the back seat, he waves at a neighbor raking leaves into a curb-side fire, looks back at the house, gets in behind the wheel. Smiling to himself, he wonders what the others will say about his disappearance.

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RF Wilson writes in Asheville, NC, where he lives with his wife, Beth Gage. He is the author of the novel, “Killer Weed,” recently published by Pisgah Press and the short story, “Accident Prone,” in the anthology “Carolina Crimes” published by Wildside Press.