Bidding on Galen

The salt flat out here does something to your head. I'd driven two hours from the funeral home, still in my work slacks, and the last half hour of that drive was nothing but white ground and blue sky and the occasional road marker. You start feeling like the only person left alive. I had the windows down and I kept thinking about Galen, which was stupid, because I hadn't thought about him on purpose in maybe a year. Five years since we'd dated. I was forty-seven then, he was forty-nine. We met at a grief workshop for adults, both of us there for reasons we didn't explain until the third week, and we fell hard for about eight months before we amicably wore ourselves out. Amicably is the word we actually used. Nobody cheated. Nobody yelled. We just got quiet.

The observatory sat out on the flat like a white teacup somebody had abandoned. Tonight was the charity auction, the big annual fundraiser, and I'd come because one of the hospice nurses I work with begged me to fill a table seat. I parked between a pickup and a sports car that had no business on salt, and I went in.

The main room had folding chairs and card tables of auction items. Silver tray with a meteorite shard. A quilt. Some pottery. And up front, laminated in a plastic sleeve, the star-gazing package. Two hours of private dome time with the big telescope, an astronomer for the first half hour, then they leave you alone. Champagne. A cot, for some reason. I read the cot line twice and felt my face get warm for no reason I could defend.

That's when I saw him.

Galen was across the room holding a paper cup of coffee, which I later learned he'd brought himself because he didn't trust anyone else to make it. He was still built like someone who owns a coffee shop and lifts bags of beans for a living. He wore a plain blue shirt buttoned to the collar. He looked up, and his whole face changed, and I know mine did too.

We didn't yell across the room or anything dramatic. We just looked at each other and smiled like idiots, and then he nodded toward the coffee station as if to say later, and I nodded back, and my chest was doing something inconvenient.

The auctioneer was a woman named Margie, mid-forties, crisp, clearly new to town because she mispronounced the name of the highway. She worked the crowd well though. She got through the quilt and the meteorite and then held up the plastic sleeve.

"The star-gazing package. Two hours, private dome access, tonight, after the event. Who'll start us at two hundred?"

A hand went up near the front. A guy in a linen blazer, silver hair, the kind of relaxed rich that takes years of practice. I found out later his name was Lukas and he'd made his money in tech and retired to a house on the flats three years ago.

"Two hundred, thank you sir. Do I hear two fifty?"

"Two fifty," I said, before my brain signed off on it.

He looked back at me. "Three hundred."

"Three fifty."

Margie was delighted. The room was delighted. I was not delighted, I was in it now, and there was no version of me that was backing down in front of a room where Galen was watching. That's the ugly honest truth. I wasn't bidding on the stars. I was bidding on not losing.

"Four hundred," Lukas said, sounding amused.

"Five hundred."

Someone behind me said "oh my god" in a whisper. Margie said, "Five hundred, ladies and gentlemen, do I hear five fifty?"

Lukas turned fully around this time and studied me. I looked at him the way I look at people who think the estate sale price is negotiable. He smiled, raised his glass slightly, and sat back. He was done, and he wanted everyone to know he was done on purpose.

"Five hundred once. Twice. Sold, to the lady in the funeral business, and yes, I read name tags."

There was scattered laughter and some applause. I sat down feeling flushed and slightly sick about the money, which I'd settle at the table before anything else happened, because I pay first and feel things later. That's just how I'm built.

The auction wrapped twenty minutes later. I paid Margie at the card table, wrote the check out with a steady hand that surprised me, and got my receipt and a little printed pass for the dome. Then I turned around and Galen was there.

"Kayla."

"Hey, Galen!"

"Five hundred dollars."

"I know."

"For stars."

"There was champagne involved in the package. And a cot, apparently."

He laughed, and hearing it stirred something inside me. We stood there in the noise of chairs folding up and people leaving, and then he said, "Can I buy you a coffee? I mean, I have coffee. It's mine, but I'll share."

We took our cups out to the low wall on the east side where you could see the whole flat going purple with dusk. We talked about the easy stuff first. His shop, my business, how the workshop crowd had scattered. Then the pauses started getting longer, and not in an uncomfortable way. In a way where I could feel him choosing his next sentence like a man picking his way across ice.

"You look good," he said, looking at the horizon instead of me.

"So do you. The gray suits you."

"It came in fast. Like it was waiting for permission." He turned his cup around in his hands. "Kayla, there's something I've been carrying around for five years and I think tonight, of all nights, I might have to say it."

"Say it."

"You remember what you bought me. For my birthday, that last year."

I did remember. I remembered it constantly, in fact, though I'd never told anyone that. Galen had told me early on, shy and halting, that he loved wearing women's lingerie, and instead of it being a problem it had become the best part of us. I'd bought him a set for his