A Lock and a Leash

I got to the Oakhaven market at seven in the morning, which was early enough that the dew was still on the canvas tents and half the vendors were still unloading their cars. My booth was at the far end, past the apple bins and the cider stand, and honestly it was the worst spot in the place for foot traffic. I didn't mind. I'd signed up to run a free appraisal table for old photographs, not to get rich.

I'm Becca, by the way. I'm twenty-eight, I work as a curator at the county historical museum, and on the second Saturday of October I spend my mornings telling strangers that the tintype of their great-grandmother is worth about twelve dollars. It's a good gig. People bring in the strangest things.

Setting up takes me twenty minutes. Folding table, a sign I laminated myself, a magnifying loupe, cotton gloves, and a small display of items the museum had deaccessioned, mostly to give people something to look at. Among those items was an old iron cattle lock from the 1890s, a heavy thing with a loop on one end and a long chain. I'd set it out because it looked interesting. That was a mistake, as it turned out.

Around eight, the market filled in. The smell of cinnamon hit from the cider stand, and the guy two booths down, a woodworker named Corey, started arranging cutting boards like he was staging a magazine shoot. Corey is twenty-nine, sells charcuterie boards to everyone's mother, and talks more than anyone I've ever met.

The booth directly across the aisle from me was pottery. I noticed the vendor before I noticed the pottery, and then I noticed the pottery and felt bad about it, because the pottery was genuinely good. Wide bowls with a blue-gray glaze, mugs with little thumb dents in the handles. The vendor was a woman with dark hair pulled back through a bandana, wearing clay-dusted jeans and a flannel with the sleeves pushed up. She was thirty-two, strong forearms, laugh that carried.

She caught me looking and waved. I waved back, then busied myself with the sign. (Smooth, Becca. Real smooth.)

Corey leaned over from his booth around nine. "That's Gretchen," he said. "Pottery. She's been doing this market four years, maybe five. You've got the whole stare-down happening over there."

"I do not have a stare-down happening."

"You absolutely do. She's single, before you ask. Well, I think she's single. Ask her yourself, you're ten feet away."

"I'm working."

"You're sitting at a table looking at photos of dead people. You can spare a minute." Corey is helpful like that.

Gretchen came over around ten, when there was a lull. She wiped her hands on her jeans first, which I appreciated. Clay dust does nothing good for a tintype.

"So you're the photo lady," she said. "I'm Gretchen. I do the pottery across the way."

"Becca. Curator at the county museum, but today I'm just doing free appraisals."

Her eyes went over my table, and that's when she saw the cattle lock.

"Oh my god," she said, and picked it up with both hands. It was heavy enough that she shifted her grip. "Is this a leash?"

"It's a cattle lock. Eighteen-nineties. It went on a stanchion in a barn."

"Uh huh." She held up the chain, let the loop dangle, and looked at me over the top of it with the most innocent expression I have ever seen on a person. "Becca. At the market. With a leash on her table."

"It's for cows."

"That's what someone with a secret would say." She turned to Corey. "Corey. The museum lady has a leash."

Corey came over at a jog, basically. "No way. Is that for one of those lifestyle things?"

"It is for a cow," I said. "From the eighteen-nineties."

"The eighteen-nineties," Gretchen repeated. "So it's a very traditional arrangement."

I will admit the tips of my ears went hot. I'm a quiet person by nature and being teased by a pretty woman in front of two dozen farmers was not on my schedule. "You're both terrible."

"She's blushing," Corey announced to the market at large.

"I am not."

A woman buying apples glanced over, and Gretchen held up the lock. "It's hers!" she called, cheerful as anything. Then, quieter, just to me: "Sorry. Is this actually bothering you? I can put it down."

"No, it's fine," I said, and it was. Mostly. "It's kind of funny. The chain does look like something else, if you don't know what a stanchion is."

"See, now you're learning to talk like a person with a secret." She set the lock back down, carefully, and grinned at me. "For the record, I like the bowls and the mugs and everything else on my table, but the pottery booth next to the leash booth is the best comedy in this market."

I laughed at that, and I meant it. "You should put a sign up. Come see the leash."

"Careful, I might." She lingered a minute more, asked what the loupe was for, let me show her a daguerreotype from the display case. Her thumb had a smear of blue glaze on the knuckle and I noticed it way longer than was necessary for a professional conversation.

* * *

The trouble started around eleven, and it was entirely Cooper's fault.

He and Gretchen went to art school together when they were both twenty-one, and by the way they bicker you'd never guess there was any affection under it, but there is. Cooper is thirty, wears a canvas apron with wax stains on it, and has never once in his life declined to be involved in a joke.

He wandered over mid-morning for one of his usual arguments with Gretchen about whether his honey should be displayed next to her honey pots, and found the tail end of the leash business, because Corey was still not letting it go.

"She's got it coiled up like a choker," Corey said. "Very discreet. Very tasteful."

"It's an antique cow lock," I said.

"That's exactly what you told Gretchen," Cooper said. He picked up the chain, examined it, and looked at me with real disappointment. "And here I thought you were the interesting one at the end of the row."

"Why would I bring a leash to a public market?"

"That's what I keep asking," I said. Nobody was listening.

By noon the story had been through maybe thirty people, and each pass added a detail. By one o'clock, per the cider guy, I was apparently a museum curator with a "very private private life" who displayed her collar in plain sight, and Gretchen was the bold potter who'd called me on it. Two college guys came by on a dare and asked if they could see the leash. I told them it was for cattle and one of them said "sure it is" and they both giggled their way off down the aisle.

Gretchen watched the whole thing from across the way and gave me a thumbs up at one point, which I did not return.

"You could just put it away," Corey pointed out, reasonably.

"It's a museum artifact. It has as much right to be on the table as anything else."

"Sure."

"It does."

"Sure it does." He went back to his boards.

Around two, business slowed and Gretchen came over with two paper cups of cider and put one in front of me. "Peace offering," she said. "I got you fully labeled as the market weirdo."

"I was already the market weirdo. I appraise dead people's portraits for free."

"Fair." She sat on the folding chair beside my table, which was not a thing people usually did, and stretched her legs out. "For what it's worth, the lock really is nice. The ironwork on that loop is good."

"Thank you. It's actually my favorite piece on the table."

"Of course it is," she said, and sipped her cider, and looked at me like she was filing that away somewhere.

Cooper came back around two thirty, ostensibly to buy nothing from me, and leaned on the end of my table like he paid rent there. Corey drifted down from his booth with two chairs' worth of casual. I knew what this was. You learn to read a room when half your job is watching people decide whether to haggle.

"So," Cooper said, "we've been discussing."

"I don't like where this is going."

"We've been discussing," he repeated, "the sign you should put up."

"It's a cow lock."

"Right, right." He nodded along, patient, like a man humoring someone about the tooth fairy. "But from a marketing standpoint, the mystery is worth more than the truth. People walk past your table all morning. Nobody walks past a mystery."

"Sales are not my metric," I said. "It's free."

"Free attracts a certain type. The leash attracts everyone."

Corey sat down on my spare folding chair, which was quickly becoming Gretchen's chair and now apparently a communal seating area. "I did a little test," he said. "I moved one of my boards so it's facing your table. Foot traffic's up on this whole row. You two are the attraction."

"That's not, people came for the apples."

"Some came for the apples. Some came for the scandal." He counted on his fingers. "The cider guy. The candle lady. Both of those boys. A lady with a whippet, who was disappointed, by the way, she thought it was real."

"The whippet lady thought my 1890s cattle lock was a real leash."

"She asked if it was humane."

I put my face in my hands for a second. Cooper, never one to leave a thing alone, picked up the chain and ran it through his fingers like he was pricing it.

"See, the thing is," he said, "if you wanted people to stop, you'd write the truth on the sign. But you left it as 'antique iron lock, misc.' That's a choice."

"It's a laminated sign. I made it in March. I wasn't anticipating any of this."

"Uh huh."

"Cooper."

"I'm just saying you could have relabeled it in June. In July. Any Saturday since."

Gretchen, across the aisle, was pretending to arrange mugs but I could see her shoulders shaking. She'd been eavesdropping the entire time, without even the decency to hide it.

"You're all conspiracy theorists," I said. "There are four of you and one of me and you've invented a whole person."

"Whole person with a good eye," Cooper said, "who buys ironwork she likes and sets up at the far end of the market where there's shade and quiet, and then gets flustered exactly once, in public, when a pretty woman touches her chain." He shrugged. "I don't invent anything, Becca. I just report."

"That is the worst thing anyone has said to me all year, and I work in a museum where a board member cried about a watermark."

Cooper raised his honey dipper in salute and went back to his booth, satisfied. Corey stayed a minute, gathering his chair, and said, quieter, "Hey, for actual real, if it's bothering you I'll tell them to knock it off. Me and Gretchen built these tables together, I've got pull."

"No, it's fine. It's dumb, but it's fine." And then, because it was true and Corey was the only one of them I could say it to, "She's funny. That is the entire problem. Everyone else is annoying and she's actually funny."

"Yep," Corey said, like that confirmed something, and hauled his chair back down the aisle.

I should note here that none of this felt bad, which surprised me. I've spent most of my twenties being the person nobody teases, in the polite way, because they assume I'd take it wrong. Being the person a whole market has decided to razz, warmly, over an 1890s stanchion lock, was a promotion I hadn't expected to want.

Then Gretchen did what Gretchen does.

* * *

It was close to three, the light going amber and the crowd thinning to the diehards, when she crossed the aisle with her hands behind her back and a look on her face that I had learned, over one Saturday, to be afraid of.

"Becca. Question."

"Answering questions is literally my booth."

"Can I borrow that?"

She pointed at the lock. The lock, my favorite piece on the table, the one piece of ironwork in the whole deaccession lot that I would have kept if the museum didn't have rules.

"Borrow it."

"Just for a minute. I want to show Cooper something about the clasp, he doesn't believe the