The Corkscrew Bid

Every wedding I've ever been to, I end up feeling like the furniture. Not a guest, exactly. More like the coat rack that people hang their goodbyes on before they drift back to the dance floor. That was me at my cousin Allie's reception on Saturday night, forty-three years old, standing by the punch bowl in a green dress I'd bought online at eleven p.m. on a Tuesday.

The reception was at the fire hall, which is the only venue in Miller Creek that holds more than forty people. Somebody had strung fairy lights along the rafters and wound tulle around the support posts, and honestly it looked kind of sweet, if you didn't think too hard about the fire trucks that usually parked where the dance floor now was.

Allie was radiant. Her new husband, Todd, was radiant. Everyone was radiant except me and the guy guarding the punch bowl like it owed him money.

And here's my problem with weddings, and I want to lay this out plainly because it matters later. At thirty-eight I had a thing with a married man. It lasted eight months and it ended with me sitting in my car in a drugstore parking lot at two in the morning, wondering how I became the kind of woman who does her crying next to the propane tanks. After that I made myself a promise. No more men who belong to somebody else. No more being the secret. If I ever feel anything again, it's going to be with a man who's actually mine, even if it's just for one night.

So far that promise has gotten me exactly nowhere. Which is why weddings make me feel like furniture. They remind me of everything I've sworn off and everything I haven't found.

"Win! You're not dancing!"

Allie grabbed my hands and spun me in a half circle. She'd had about four glasses of champagne and her veil was starting to look like it had lost an argument.

"I'm pacing myself!" I told her.

"You've been pacing yourself by the punch bowl for an hour." She laughed and spun away again, back into the crowd, and just like that I was furniture again.

So I did what I always do. I found something useful to do. Allie's mom, my aunt Aileen, had mentioned that the fire department was running a lost-and-found auction the next morning as a fundraiser, and they needed volunteers to set up tables. I signed my name on the clipboard in the lobby before I could talk myself out of it. Setting up tables is way better than making small talk with a man named Todd.

* * *

The next morning the frost was thick on the gravel lot, and the pines behind the hall were breathing out wood smoke smell from somebody's stove. I had coffee from the gas station and a couple of layers on, and I got to the fire hall at eight sharp expecting chaos.

It wasn't chaos. It was one man.

He was maybe six two, built like somebody who actually uses the fire equipment instead of just fundraising for it, and he was moving down a row of folding tables with a clipboard, setting out auction items in some order that clearly made sense to him. Gray at the temples. Flannel jacket. Hands that looked like they'd been broke at least once.

"You must be Winnie," he said without looking up. "Aileen said we'd get one good volunteer. She said the rest of the family would show up around eleven and eat the donuts."

"That sounds about right. And you are?"

"Gundy. Leon Gunderson." He shook my hand and his grip was careful, like he'd learned somewhere that women's hands aren't made of cast iron. "I run planning for the county. And I volunteer here. And I apparently run auctions now, which nobody voted on."

"How does a county planner end up running a fire hall auction?"

"Same way everybody ends up doing everything up here. You were standing still too long and somebody handed you a box." He grinned, and wow, that grin did something I hadn't felt in a while. Something I'd almost forgotten the shape of.

We worked. He assigned me the small stuff, the box of earrings and walking sticks and a fondue set that somebody had apparently lost at a previous fundraiser, which seemed ironic. I set out items and he wrote lot numbers. It was easy. Working next to a stranger should feel awkward, but it didn't. He hummed a little under his breath, old country stuff, and every so often he'd hold up some piece of junk and ask me if I thought it was worth a dollar or five dollars, and I'd give him a completely unqualified opinion and he'd take it seriously.

"That corkscrew there," he said around nine, holding it up. It was a vintage one, brass and wood, the kind with a folding blade and a little horse head on the handle. "You've looked at it three times."

"It's pretty."

"It's a corkscrew."

"It's a beautiful corkscrew, Leon. Somebody loved this corkscrew. You don't lose a corkscrew like this, it loses you."

He laughed, a real one, head back. "Okay. Fair. You want it?"

"I want it, but I'm not gonna win it. I've watched enough auctions to know I bid like somebody apologizing."

At ten the hall started filling up. Donuts vanished as predicted. Aunt Aileen showed up wearing a name tag that said BOSS and immediately tried to set me up with her dentist, and I escaped to the item table and hid behind the fondue set.

One thing about Leon that I noticed while he ran the auction, and I noticed it even though I was pretending not to notice. He was quiet, but when he talked, people listened. He didn't wave his arms around or tell jokes into the microphone. He just knew where everything was, knew every bidder's name, and kept the whole thing moving like a current under a boat. Half the women in that hall kept glancing at him. So did I. I'm not proud, but I'm also not going to lie about it in my own story.

The auction went on for two hours. A fishing canoe went for four hundred dollars. The fondue set went for three dollars to a guy in a hockey jacket who I don't think knew what fondue was.

And then the corkscrew came up.

"Lot forty-one," Leon said into the mic. "Vintage brass corkscrew, circa maybe nineteen fifties. Horse head handle. Clearly an object of great emotional significance to at least one person in this room."

I turned red. Half the room turned to look at me. Aunt Aileen hollered "That's my niece." like she was at a livestock show.

Bidding started at a dollar. I bid two. Somebody bid three. I went five. A guy in a blaze orange cap went seven. I went nine, and my heart was in my throat, which is a stupid thing to say but that's where it was.

"Going once, going twice..."

"Twenty-five," Leon said, calm as Sunday, and nobody in that hall was going to outbid the man running the auction, and it was finished. Hammer down. He'd won my corkscrew.

He walked it over to me afterward, holding it out on his flat palm like a butler.

"You bought this," I said. "You don't even want it."

"Maybe I did want it." He shrugged. "Or maybe I wanted to give it to you. It's yours either way, no strings, and that's separate from anything else I'm about to say."

"What else are you about to say?"

"I'd like to share a drink with you tonight, if you want to. Under the porch lights out there. I've spent eight years at these things and I've never once sat under those lights with anybody."

Eight years, I thought. That's a long time to wait for a drink.

* * *

The auction wrapped up around one. People hauled their canoes and their three-dollar fondue sets out to their trucks, and Aunt Aileen cornered me one more time to ask if I'd at least take Dr. Pell's card, and I said sure, and put it in my pocket, and I intend to lose it.

Then it was four in the afternoon, and the hall was empty except for folding chairs, and I was stacking them because stacking chairs is the kind of job you give the volunteer who doesn't know anybody. Leon came out of the office with his jacket on.

"I owe you a drink," he said.

"It's four in the afternoon."

"So it's wine. I checked the glovebox situation this morning. I planned ahead." He held the door for me. "Porch lights come on at dusk anyway. That's the whole point of the invitation."

"You're very bossy for a man who wasn't elected to anything."

"It's been mentioned."

So I stacked my last chair and we walked out to his truck, which was a big gray Ford parked at the far end of the gravel lot, and the frost was already coming back on the grass where the sun had quit. He opened the tailgate and set a folded blanket down on it, which I pretended not to notice, and got two glasses out of a paper bag, actual glasses, which I also pretended not to notice. A man who packs real glasses for a maybe is not a man who does this often.

"Merlot," he said, pouring. "It was in the glovebox since the Fourth of July parade, so if it tastes like fireworks, that's on me."

"It tastes like a glovebox."

"Course it does. Drink it anyway."

We sat on the tailgate and the fairy lights on the porch railing came on one by one, and for a while we just drank and didn't say anything, which was fine. I don't get fine silences much. Usually I'm filling them up with words like a woman bailing out a boat.

"Can I ask you something?" I said finally.

"Probably."

"Do you do this often? The truck, the wine, the porch lights?"

"No." He turned his glass around in his fingers. "Never, actually. You're the first."

"Eight years of auctions and nobody ever sat out here with you?"

"Eight years of auctions and I never asked." He looked at the lights. "I was married. To Ami. She passed eight years ago, cancer, and after that I just, I don't know, I stopped. Stopped asking. Stopped noticing, mostly. People around here stopped inviting me to things around year four, which I earned."

"Leon, I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It was a long time ago and also it wasn't, both those things are true." He drank. "What about you? What's Winnie Holcomb's story? You don't stack chairs like a local. You stack chairs like somebody visiting."

Wow, okay, sharp eyes. I looked at my wine instead of him.

"I had an affair," I said. "Eight months. He was married. I was thirty-eight, which is old enough to know better, and I knew better the whole time, and I did it anyway. It ended the way those things end, which is badly, and I sat in my car in a drugstore parking lot at two in the morning and cried until my face hurt. And when I was done crying I made myself a promise. No more men who belong to somebody else. No more being the secret."

"That's a good promise."

"It's a great promise. Here's the part I haven't told anybody." I made myself keep going. "I've been with men since. Not many. But I did the math the other night, sitting in my motel room, and every single one of them had somebody else waiting at home. A wife, a girlfriend, somebody. I have never once in my whole life been the only woman in a man's bed. Do you know how that feels? It feels like being the exhibit. Like I'm there to prove something to them about themselves."

The lights buzzed a little. Somewhere down the road a dog was barking about nothing.

"And I thought," I said, "maybe that's just what I get. Maybe that's the market rate for me."

"Hey." He set his glass down on the tailgate. "That's garbage. Whoever taught you that taught you wrong."

"Nobody taught me. I signed up for it, every time. That's the embarrassing part."

"It's still garbage." And he wasn't loud about it, but he meant it, and something in my chest went loose, like a knot finally slipping. "For what it's worth, I haven't touched