Auctioneer's Last Bid

Tilly Cartwright stood at the counter of the Lough Island post office and checked her watch for the third time. Forty-three years old, Black, Irish-born to a Jamaican mother, single by choice, and currently stuck waiting on a package that the whole island seemed to know about.

She had built her life the way she wanted it. A flat in Galway, a career in estate auctions, no one to answer to. Five years ago she had flirted with a colleague named Trent for a whole summer, back when she was thirty-eight, and even that had gone nowhere because she let it go nowhere. It suited her. That was the story she told people and herself.

"Your box is on the boat, love," Sherri said from behind the counter. Sherri was sixty-two and had run the post office and the general store for as long as anyone could remember. She was widowed at fifty and had poured every ounce of leftover energy into other people's love lives. "It'll be here by four."

"It was supposed to be here by noon," Tilly said.

"Well, the ferry comes when it comes." Sherri leaned on the counter and looked at her with open interest. "You're the auctioneer, aren't you. Doing the Mullen estate."

"Tomorrow morning. I'm just here for the appraisal paperwork."

"Ah, that's grand work. You'll be at the gallery show tonight, so."

"I hadn't planned on it."

"Oh, you should go. There's wine. There's cheese." Sherri said the word cheese like it settled the matter. "Everyone will be there."

Tilly had met ten women like Sherri in ten small towns. They were harmless, mostly. She smiled and said she would think about it, and Sherri beamed like she had already won.

The trouble with Sherri, Tilly decided ten minutes later, was that helpfulness was her whole personality. The woman had already told her the ferry schedule, the price of eggs, which doctor to avoid, and that the Wi-Fi at the guesthouse was "temperamental at best, like most men on this island." Tilly had laughed at that one despite herself.

When the package finally arrived, Sherri held it up, looked at the label, looked at Tilly, and went very still in a way Tilly would only understand later.

"Cartwright," Sherri read. "Is that you, love?"

"That's me."

"And you'd be... tall. Dark hair. Forty-something?"

"Forty-three."

Sherri set the box down slowly and slid something across the counter with it. A folded note, handwritten. "Then this is for you, love. I'd say it's been a long time coming."

Tilly unfolded it. It said: *Looking forward to finally meeting you at the gallery show tonight. I'll find you by the paintings. Collin.*

"I think there's a mistake," Tilly said. "I don't know a Collin."

"Not a mistake at all. You've been writing to each other for near two months, sure you have."

"I have absolutely not."

"Well." Sherri folded her arms, entirely unbothered. "Someone has. And he's a lovely man. Twenty-eight, works the ferry. You could do worse, and I'd know, because I've watched every woman on this island do worse."

Tilly stared at the note. The handwriting was neat and a little old-fashioned. "You know what, I think you've mixed me up with someone else. Someone who actually writes letters."

"Maybe I have and maybe I haven't." Sherri rang up the postage on nothing at all, just to have something to do with her hands. "Either way, you're free tonight and so is he. Go to the show. If it's a mistake, you'll get wine and cheese out of it."

"That is genuinely your pitch."

"It's a good pitch." Sherri grinned. "Sixty-two years on this earth, love. I know what works."

Tilly took the note because there was nothing else to do with it. She walked back to the guesthouse telling herself she would throw it in the bin. She did not throw it in the bin. She looked at it while she dried her hair, and by the time she had picked a blouse she had already lost the argument with herself. One glass of wine, she thought. Then home.

* * *

The gallery was really the old community hall with a new name painted over the door. The Mullen estate had lent a dozen paintings for the show, and Tilly drifted along them with a professional eye, half working and half not. She stopped in front of a small oil painting of an oil lamp burning on a kitchen table. The light in it was warm and the room around it was dark, and she stood there longer than she meant to.

"That's one of the good ones," a man said behind her.

She turned. He was tall, mid to late twenties, dark-haired, wearing a shirt that had been ironed with effort. He had a paper cup in each hand and he looked at her with the particular expression of a man who has just realized something is wrong but has not worked out what.

"You're Collin," she said.

"And you're not Máire." He said it before he could stop himself, and then winced. "Sorry. That came out wrong. I was told I'd be meeting someone by the paintings."

"Ah." Tilly laughed before she could help it. "Sherri."

"Sherri." He handed her one of the cups, since it seemed rude not to at that point. "You got a note too, then."

"I got a note. I thought I'd get wine out of it at minimum."

He laughed, and the sound of it made her reassess him slightly. "Two months," he said. "I've been writing to a woman named Máire for two months. She's from the mainland, said she was thinking of moving out this way. Sherri runs the post office, so all our letters went through her. I thought, well, tonight's the night we finally meet."

"And instead you get me."

"Instead I get you," he agreed. He looked back at the painting. "Which, in fairness, is not a bad trade on paper, but I'd like it noted I'm a decent man who was stood up by accident."

"Noted. And I'm a decent woman who was handed someone else's romance by a postmistress with too much time on her hands."

They found the wine table. The cheese was already half gone, picked over by the island's entire population of a hundred and forty, most of whom were in the room. Tilly got them a corner of a table and they stood there with their glasses, and the honest thing happened, which was that the conversation did not die once.

"So what's the Máire situation," she asked. "Do you tell her tonight went sideways?"

"I'll write to her. Tell her the truth, that a postmistress with an agenda gave my letter to the wrong woman." He turned his glass. "Honestly she might be relieved. I think she had a fella in Galway she never quite mentioned."

"And I'll bill Sherri for emotional labor." Tilly sipped the wine, which was cheap and sweet. "Can I ask what you do? She said ferry."

"Deckhand on the Lough Island ferry. Four years now." He said it simply, but his mouth tightened. "Though that might change. They're downsizing the route. If they cut runs, some of us get transferred to the mainland terminal."

"That would be bad?"

"It'd be a job. It'd also be leaving." He shrugged. "My whole life is here. My da ran this boat before me. But they don't care about that in an office in Donegal Town."

Tilly nodded slowly. "I know the feeling from the other end. I'm up for a promotion. Regional lead auctioneer. It means the Galway office