The Auctioneer's Second Chance

I turned off the county road at seven in the morning with my truck windows down and the fair already waking up around me, and I thought about the birthday card the whole way in. Not my birthday card, hers. Lizzie Whitmore's birthday card, from ten years ago, which I bought and stamped and never mailed. It sat in a box in my closet through three moves and two different states, and every time I packed the box I saw the corner of the envelope and told myself I'd deal with it later, and later never came. This morning, for no reason I would admit to, I'd put the box on the passenger seat.

Today was my forty-seventh birthday, which is a fact I'd been ignoring for about a week, and the fair board had hired me to run the Harvest Auction because Ambrose Conway finally retired and put my name in the hat. I said yes before I thought about who ran the fair now. That was stupid of me, because I knew. Of course I knew. Anja Lynch posted about it on social media every August, honey jars and pie contests and Lizzie in her straw hat, and I looked at those posts like a man checking a sore tooth.

The fairgrounds smelled like hay and fried dough already, even at that hour, and the livestock barns were waking up with cows complaining about something. I parked by the grandstand and got out and just stood there a minute. Same grandstand. Same green paint peeling off the rails. I auctioned my first calf there when I was twenty-seven, fumbled the chant so bad that Ambrose had to jump in and save the sale, and he laughed at me all the way home and then told me I'd be good at it someday. He was right, which annoyed me for years.

I found the office tent behind the pie booth, because Anja's booth is always the first thing you hit when you come in the back gate, and the office used to be wherever Lizzie decided it was that day. Clipboard under her arm. Radio clipped to her belt. She was talking to a kid about where the 4-H rabbits were supposed to go, and her back was to me, and for a second I thought about getting back in my truck.

Then she turned around.

She saw me and her face did about four things in two seconds, surprise and something softer and then the soft thing shut off and the door locked. She was forty-five now and she looked good, better than good, gray coming in at her temples like she'd decided she didn't care who saw it, and I remembered that I'd always liked that about her, that she never pretended.

"Lachlan Conners," she said. "They actually hired you."

"Guess they did." I put my hand out like an idiot and she looked at it and didn't take it, so I put it back down. "Morning, Lizzie."

"Morning." She turned back to the kid and said, "Rabbits go in the far pen, honey, next to the goats but not with them, we've been over this," and the kid left, and then it was just the two of us and the pie tent and the smell of frying batter coming up from Anja's griddle.

"I didn't know it was you until Tuesday," I said. "Ambrose told me. I almost called and backed out."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I'm fifty thousand dollars of mouth and no spine, I guess." That got nothing out of her, not even the little huff I used to be able to buy with a bad joke, so I tried the truth instead. "I asked for you. Not by name. I asked if the fair was in good hands, and he said the best, and I knew."

"You knew," she said, and she set the clipboard down on the pie counter real slow, like she was keeping her hands busy so they wouldn't do anything else. "You walked out of my house eleven years ago, Lachlan, without a real reason, after six months of telling me you'd never been happier, and you're standing in my fair on your birthday talking about what you knew."

"Ten years. Eleven in the spring."

"You're counting."

"Yeah," I said. "I am."

Anja came around the side of the tent then with a tray of test pies, thirty-eight years old, flour on her apron, and she stopped dead when she saw us. She and I had met a few times back when, and I watched her do the math on the whole situation in about one second flat.

"Well," Anja said. "Look what the fair dragged in."

"Morning, Anja."

"Morning yourself." She set the tray down and looked at Lizzie. "You want me to stick around?"

"No," Lizzie said, too fast. "Go check on the pie contest tables."

Anja looked at me like she was filing my face away for later and went. Lizzie picked up her clipboard again, which was a signal if I ever saw one, and I stayed where I was anyway.

"I bought you a birthday card once," I said. "After I left. Your thirtysomethingth birthday, that first year. Wrote something in it, too."

"And?"

"And I never mailed it. It's in a box in my truck right now, if you can believe that."

She laughed, and it was not a nice laugh. "You know what's funny? I waited for that card. First year, anyway. I told myself the mail was slow, then I told myself he's proud, he can't say it, then I got to February and I stopped telling myself anything."

"Lizzie."

"Don't." She held up one hand, and her voice dropped low and even, which was worse than yelling. "You don't get to stand here with that story like it's sweet. You bought a card and you kept it. That's the most you thing I ever heard. You kept the idea of being sorry because it cost you nothing."

"That's fair," I said. "That's real fair."

"I've got a fair to run. Sign-in for the auction is at the office tent at ten, your sale sheets are with Ambrose's boy, and the livestock barn is that way if you've forgotten in ten years." She pointed, and her hand was steady, and I hated how steady it was.

"Two minutes," I said. "One thing, and then I'll be a professional all week, I swear it."

She crossed her arms. "Go."

"I'm sorry. Not for the card. For the rest of it. I was thirty-six years old and scared of the one good thing I had, and I did the math on my own life like it was a sale and I backed out of the ring, and it took me about eight years to figure out what I'd actually done." I rubbed my jaw, because my hands needed something. "That's the one thing. I'll be at the barn."

She didn't say anything while I said it, and she didn't say anything after, and then Anja's voice came around the tent corner asking about cream for the coffee, and Lizzie turned toward the sound like a rope had pulled her.

"There's coffee in the office tent," she said to the clipboard. "Help yourself or don't."

Then she walked off toward the grandstand, and I stood there in the pie tent smelling burnt sugar, and Anja came back around the corner and looked at me with her arms crossed the same way Lizzie's had been.

"So," she said. "You're the auctioneer."

"That's me."

"She's leaving, you know. Two weeks. Job in Vermont, running a big operation, the kind of thing she's turned down twice before for this town."

"I heard something about that."

"Well, hear it from me too," Anja said, and picked up her tray, "because I've watched her put herself back together once already, and if you're planning to make her do it twice, I've got a pie fork and a bad attitude and a whole week to use both."

Then she went back to her griddle, and I went to find the livestock barn, and I thought about the card the whole way there. All those years I told myself keeping it meant something, that a man who couldn't throw it away still had a heart somewhere down deep. Standing in that tent I finally understood she'd had it exactly right. I kept the sorry and spent nothing on the fixing, and now she was leaving in two weeks and I had no idea what I was going to do about it.

The morning went fine, is the thing. I found Ambrose's boy, who was Ambrose's actual boy, Denny, twenty-four years old and built like his old man, and he handed over my sale sheets and asked me three questions about the auction and one about Lizzie, which I dodged. I walked the livestock barn twice. I checked the sound system in the auction ring and hollered a practice chant into an empty grandstand, which is a thing every auctioneer does and every auctioneer pretends he doesn't. Around noon I ate a fried dough the size of a hubcap and watched 4-H kids wash goats, and by two o'clock I'd convinced myself the day was going to be professional and painless.

Then Ambrose found me at the ring.

He looked older, but he'd earned it, sixty-two years of talking fast and twenty of them spent on me. He sat down next to me on the bleachers with the sound of a man whose knees find bleachers objectionable, and he handed me a thin booklet with a cracked spine and a coffee ring on the cover. It was a fair catalog, the Harvest Auction program from years back, the pages gone soft and brown at the edges.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Found it cleaning out my office in the spring. Been meaning to give it to you." He tapped the cover. "Open it."

I opened it, and a piece of paper slid out into my lap, folded in thirds, thin as onion skin. I knew the handwriting before I unfolded it all the way. I'd have known it in the dark. Lizzie wrote lists and signs and fair schedules in a hand that was neat but always in a hurry, and there it was, my name at the top of the page, written in that hurry.

"Ambrose," I said.

"Read it, Lachlan. I've read it enough for both of us."

So I read it. She'd written it the spring after I left, and it wasn't a letter so much as it was everything she couldn't say to my face, that she was angry and then she wasn't, that she'd found my flannel shirt in her closet and couldn't throw it out, that she hoped someday I'd stand in a ring somewhere and think of her, because she'd be thinking of me every time the price climbed and the crowd hollered. The last line said she forgave me, but she wanted it noted she was mad about it.

I read it twice and my eyes weren't working right either time.

"How," I said. "How did this."

"She mailed it to the auction house in Portland, care of me, the spring after you left. I was supposed to give it to you." Ambrose looked out at the empty ring the way he used to look at a slow bidder. "And I didn't. You were twenty pounds underweight and drinking too much and I thought a letter from her would either fix you or finish you, and I didn't have the nerve to find out which. Then a year went by and it seemed too late, and then ten years went by and there's no version of late that isn't too late, so here we are."

"You sat on this for ten years."

"I did," he said, and he didn't flinch from it. "I've regretted it about every day since, if that helps any. It doesn't get you the ten years back, but you can have my regret, it's no use to me." He stood up, knees cracking, and put his hand on my shoulder. "She's still here, son. That's more than most men get."

He walked off toward the office tent and I sat there with a letter in my hands and a hole in my chest where my professional morning used to be.

---

Meanwhile, unknown to me, Anja was doing her own work.

I found this out later, the way you find out most things, but I'll tell it in order anyway. That afternoon Lizzie ran the beekeeping demonstration in the small tent by the orchard, the one she'd been putting on every year since before I knew her, and I stood at the back with my hat down and watched her work a frame of bees for a crowd of maybe forty people. She was good. She was always good at the things she cared about, and she talked about hive life and winter stores and how a colony will starve in January a foot away from honey if the cluster can't move, and I thought, well, there's a sermon in there somewhere, but I kept it to myself.

The demo ended at six. The fair thinned out, the fried dough stand started wrapping its grease in silence, and the vendors packed up under the rainbow tents. I helped Denny stack barriers by the ring, and then I walked past the beekeeping tent, because I had no willpower, and the lights were still on, and Lizzie was inside capping jars.

She saw me and didn't tell me to leave, which I took as progress.

"I've got mead," she said, after a minute. "A guy in Bend trades me honey wine for beeswax every year. It's been a long day and I'm not drinking it alone. Sit down or don't."

I sat down. She poured two plastic cups of the stuff, cloudy gold, and it tasted like honey and apples and a little like a campfire, and we drank it on folding chairs in a tent full of empty hive boxes, and for a while we just talked about the fair. The rabbit entries were up. The pie contest had a scandal, somebody's crust was store-bought and Anja had taken it personally. I told her about the worst auction of my career, a horse sale in Montana where the microphone died and I had to chant for two hours at full voice, and she laughed, actually laughed, and I felt it land somewhere I'd forgotten I