Garage Sale of the Damned

Nicola had both hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road, which she felt was the bare minimum, and yet Shay still found things to say about it.

"You're riding the brake on that hill," Shay said, from the passenger seat of a van that smelled faintly of old parade float. "You know that, right? You're riding the brake."

"I am aware of my own foot, thanks."

"Just checking. Some people aren't."

Nicola, forty-four years old and eleven years removed from competitive eating, adjusted the rearview mirror out of pure spite. "You've lived in this van for two years. You don't get to critique driving. You once drove for miles with your turn signal on and told everyone who pointed it out that it was 'a lifestyle.'"

"It is a lifestyle. It's called ambiguity."

The highway they were on wasn't really a highway. It was one of those state roads that exists mainly so maps have something to fill in, two lanes of cracked asphalt with heat shimmering off it in waves. They had been driving for three hours and the conversation had deteriorated through karaoke, karaoke criticism, and finally into Shay narrating Nicola's driving like a disappointed flight instructor.

"You drifted back over to the right there," Shay said. "Nice correction, though. Really confident."

"Are you going to do this the whole way to Vegas?"

"Probably. It's either this or talk about my feelings, and my feelings are mostly about how the theme park replaced me with a person in a worse dragon costume."

Nicola laughed despite herself. Shay was forty-six, unemployed, and currently living in the very van they were driving. She could be genuinely infuriating for forty minutes and then say one thing that made you glad she was in the seat.

"Vegas," Shay said, stretching the word out. "Burger competition. What's the record again?"

"Six pounds, eleven ounces of finished burger in twelve minutes. I need to beat it to get the invite to the finals."

"And you've been training how, exactly?"

"I ate four burgers on Tuesday."

"That's not training, that's lunch with ambition."

Nicola was composing a retort when the sign appeared. It was hand-painted on what used to be a closet door, propped against a mailbox at the top of a side road, and it said, in letters that got worse the further right you read: CUL-DE-SAC OF THE DAMNED. GARAGE SALE. ALL WELCOME. NO REFUNDS ON DISPUTES.

"Nicola. Nicola. Turn here."

"I'm not turning there."

"Nicola. It says damned. Somebody painted that on purpose. That's an invitation."

"That's a warning, is what it is."

"Same thing, out here." Shay was already digging through the glovebox for sunglasses she did not need. "Come on. We've been driving three hours and the last interesting thing we saw was a cow lying down in a way that suggested a lawsuit."

Nicola looked at the sign. She looked at the clock. She was, if she was honest with herself, and she tried not to be, bored in a way that had nothing to do with the drive. The burger competition was in four days and she had been looking forward to it the way you look forward to a dentist appointment you've already paid for.

"Fine," she said, and turned.

The cul-de-sac was at the end of a quarter-mile lane lined with identical mailboxes, and when it opened up in front of them Nicola actually slowed down, which Shay declined to comment on, a first.

There were perhaps twelve houses arranged in a horseshoe, and every single one of them had stuff in the yard. Not garage sale stuff, not folding tables with a few lamps. Yards of stuff. Ramps of stuff. One house appeared to have a full dining room set arranged on its lawn as if expecting a family of ghosts to sit down to dinner.

"This is the greatest thing I have ever seen," Shay said. "Park next to the canoe."

There was a canoe. There was no visible water for miles.

Nicola parked and they got out into heat that hit like opening an oven. Somewhere a radio was playing. Somewhere else, two people were already shouting, which they would learn was the normal condition of this place.

A woman in a pink visor appeared at Nicola's elbow with the speed of someone who had been waiting all morning for fresh blood. She was maybe fifty, sun-freckled, holding a clipboard the way some people hold a weapon.

"Welcome," she said. "Quick question before you browse. Are you here for the sale, or are you here for the cause?"

"The cause," Nicola repeated.

"The Pink Flamingo Posse." The woman gestured at her own lawn, which featured, Nicola now saw, forty-one pink flamingos arranged in a perfect spiral. "We believe in traditional lawn ornamentation. Freedom of flock. That sort of thing."

"And the other side?" Shay asked, already drifting toward the canoe.

"The so-called Garden Gnome Liberation Army." The visor woman said the name the way you'd say a disease. "They think the gnomes are, and I am quoting their newsletter here, 'political prisoners of the yard.' They keep stealing our flamingos and replacing them with gnomes. We keep stealing the gnomes back and bending their hats."

"They bend the hats?" Shay called back. "That's psychological."

"It's war," the woman said simply.

Before Nicola could answer, a man came around the side of the ghost-dinner house at a jog. He was wearing a shirt with a gnome on it and the gnome, someone had added, in marker, a tiny raised fist.

"You're recruiting customers into your flock nonsense," he said. "Again. Doreen, we talked about this at the meeting."

"It's a garage sale, Gerald. People can talk to whoever they want."

"People can browse whoever they want. Talking is factional."

Nicola looked between them. Gerald was breathing hard from his jog, which had clearly been more of a fast walk with ambition. Doreen had her clipboard raised like a shield.

"The flamingos were here first," Doreen said.

"The gnomes represent something," Gerald said.

"The flamingos represent something too."

"The flamingos represent nothing, Doreen. They represent flamingos."

There was a pause in which Nicola realized she was going to have to live inside this argument now, at least for the afternoon. She felt something in her chest that she hadn't felt in months. It took her a second to identify it. Interest. Actual, unforced interest.

"I have a question," Nicola said, and both of them turned to her with the hunger of people who had been shouting at only each other for weeks. "How long has this been going on?"

"Fourteen months," they said together, and then glared at each other for saying it together.

"Fourteen months," Nicola said. "Over lawn ornaments."

"And principles," Gerald said.

"And a bet about the Hoebigs' hedge," Doreen said, quieter, and Gerald's face did something complicated.

"That hedge is not part of this," Gerald said.

"The hedge is entirely part of this and you know it."

Nicola looked over at the van. Shay had gotten the canoe down off its blocks and was sitting in it on the driveway, paddling motion, sunglasses on, entirely at home.

"Your friend has claimed the canoe," Doreen observed.

"That's the Prusaks' canoe. It's been in three disputes already."

"It's a good canoe," Nicola said.

"Everything here is a good canoe," said Gerald, "until someone puts a gnome in it."

Nicola sighed, in the way of a woman accepting her fate, and followed them deeper into the yard.

Shay had abandoned the canoe by then, which was probably the problem. If she had stayed in the canoe, the canoe could not have been in the middle of the Hoebigs' driveway, and if she had not been in the middle of the driveway, she would not have been standing between Doreen and Gerald with both hands up, saying the words every mediator says right before everything goes wrong.

"Okay, okay. Let's take a breath here," Shay said. "You both clearly love this street. That's, what, common ground?"

"It is not common ground," Gerald said. "It is contested ground."

"Contested ground that you both love," Shay pressed on, because she had never once in her life read a room. "Like a couple going through a divorce."

"That's not," Doreen started.

"Or a karaoke night where everyone wants to sing the same song," Shay continued. "Which, by the way, is the worst karaoke night. I've lived them."

"Ma'am," Gerald said, in the voice of a man about to explain something to a stranger for the last time, "you are standing next to the commemorative plates."

Shay looked down. She was, in fact, standing next to a card table holding what appeared to be two hundred plates, each one in its own little stand, each one depicting a season or a bird or a lighthouse. A handwritten sign said PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH, WHICH INCLUDES BREATHING ON THEM.

"Oh, I'm not touching anything," Shay said, and gestured, widely, the way she did when she was making a point about something.

Her elbow found the table.

Nicola would swear later that she heard it happen before she saw it, a crack like the world clearing its throat, and then the first plate went over the edge, and then the world's slowest chain reaction began, plate knocking plate, stand knocking stand, until the whole table folded with a noise like applause from hell and two hundred commemorative plates fanned out across the driveway in a glittering tidal wave.

Nobody said anything for a full three seconds. In a cul-de-sac of twelve houses, three seconds is enough time for everyone to come outside.

"The Hoebig plates," someone whispered.

"No," said another voice. "The hedge."

That was when Nicola understood that the plates had not finished. They had gone somewhere. She followed the general pointing of forty fingers to the far side of the driveway, where a hedge stood, clipped and dense and clearly lovingly maintained, and where the plates, having traveled, had struck it at its base, near what she