The Ferryman's Auction

The auction thing started because I owed Ruth a favor, and Ruth keeps a ledger of favors the way some people keep track of their step count.

"You're twenty-three, you have working legs, and I have boxes," she said on the phone, Tuesday before the auction. "Come help me set up and I'll buy you dinner."

"Ruth, you buy me dinner anyway."

"Then come help me set up and I'll keep buying you dinner. This is how friendship works, Whitney."

So that's how I ended up at the ferry terminal at six on a Thursday, hauling trays out of storage while she arranged a folding table under the fluorescent lights like she was setting a banquet for a wedding nobody wanted. The annual lost-and-found auction. Everything left on the ferries or in the waiting room for over a year goes up on the block, and the money goes to the volunteer fire department. It's a small town thing. You'd be amazed what people abandon. We had four umbrellas, a cane, a boxed set of someone's needlepoint, and a whole shelf of stuff from the photography shop that closed on Water Street two winters back.

"Careful with those trays," Ruth said, pointing at the box I had by the handle. "Those are the darkroom ones. Timer's in there too. Nobody's going to want them, but they go in the pile anyway."

"Who leaves a darkroom timer on a ferry?"

"Nobody did. It got left at the lost and found desk by a guy moving apartments who said he'd come back. He did not come back. That was over a year ago, so by the rules, it's ours."

I set the box down next to a plastic chair and that's when I saw him. Well, heard him first. There was a group of passengers clustered near the doors, waiting on the last crossing, and one man was doing something to the air around them that made all of them laugh at once. Tall, brown-skinned, dark hair going a little gray at the temples, mid-to-late twenties, wearing a crew jacket that said the cruise line's name on the chest. He was telling a story with his whole body, hands going, and the group kept getting bigger. A woman in a raincoat actually clapped.

"That's Benjamin," Ruth said, not looking up from her clipboard. "He works one of the ships that docks here. Entertainment staff. Comes through maybe twice a month."

"Is he always like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like a person performing being a person."

"He's charming," Ruth said, in the tone of someone stating a fact about weather. "He fixed my registration problem once just by talking to the right guy. I don't know how he does it."

He came over, of course. He saw Ruth and made a beeline, and I stood there holding a needlepoint set like an idiot.

"Ruth! Is it auction week already?" His voice was warm the way a heater is warm. "I've been telling everyone on the ship about this. Ken didn't believe me that a town still does this."

"It's tradition, Benjamin. Tell your friend to come Thursday and bid."

"He'll be there. He'd bid on a bag of hair if you put a paddle in front of him." Then he turned to me and I got the full effect up close, and I hated how well it worked on me. "Hi. I'm Benjamin."

"Whitney. I'm helping."

"She's my right hand," Ruth said.

"My left hand does nothing," I said, and he laughed, and I hated that too, because the laugh was real and my irritation was real and the two things sat in my chest like oil and water.

"I should let you work. Good luck with the auction." He did a little two-finger salute and went back to his group of strangers, who welcomed him like a returning king.

"Don't," Ruth said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't make that face. He's a nice young man."

"I wasn't making a face."

"You were making the face you make at opposing counsel."

I was. I'll admit it here, to you, before we go further. I'm twenty-three, I've dated casually through college starting when I was twenty-one and nothing had ever stuck, and I had spent my whole adult life so far being the girl people liked and nobody chose. And this man walked into a waiting room and chose the whole room at once, which is somehow worse than choosing nobody. It made me want to win something he was in. That's the ugly honest start of it. Attraction wrapped in spite. I'm telling you how it actually went.

Thursday, auction night. Fifty plastic chairs, maybe thirty occupied, Ruth at the podium with a gavel she clearly bought for the occasion because it still had a sticker on it. I sat at the money table with a cash box and a clipboard, taking payments as things sold. Everything gets paid on the spot, cash or e-transfer, before it leaves the table. Ruth is strict about that and honestly so is the fire department.

Ken showed up, exactly as advertised. Twenty-something, loud shirt, sat in the second row and narrated everything to the poor man beside him. Benjamin sat one seat over and clapped politely for a boxed set of needlepoint that went for three dollars.

Then the darkroom stuff came up. Ruth held the timer aloft.

"Darkroom timer and three developing trays, from the old Water Street photography shop. Condition unknown, probably fine. Who needs to develop film the old way?"

"I do, actually," Benjamin said, hand up, casual. "I've got a camera at home and a bathroom I never use. I've been meaning to get back into it. Ten dollars."

"Twelve," said Ken, immediately, just to be a problem.

"See, this is what I deal with," Benjamin told the room. "Fifteen."

"Twenty," said Ken, grinning like a gremlin.

I said "Twenty-five."

The room turned. Ruth turned. Benjamin turned, and looked at me with genuine surprise, eyebrows up, like I'd been a piece of furniture that suddenly spoke.

"Whitney," Ruth said carefully, "are you bidding?"

"I have a bathroom," I said, which made no sense and somehow ended the matter. Ken laughed and withdrew like a gentleman, Benjamin shrugged and smiled at me, and Ruth knocked it down at twenty-five. I walked to my own table, paid myself twenty-five dollars out of my own wallet into the cash box, wrote my name in the ledger, and stood there with a box of somebody else's abandoned hobby while my ears burned.

Because I realized something about four seconds after the gavel hit. I didn't want the timer. I wanted to take something he reached for. Now I owned a darkroom timer and three trays and zero darkroom knowledge, and the object of my spite had watched me do it and probably thought I was collecting vintage photography gear, which I was not, I collect unpaid invoices at a law firm, that's my whole collection.

"You could have just let him have it," Ruth whispered during the next lot.

"I know."

"Twenty-five dollars."

"I know, Ruth."

"He's going to come talk to you about it, you realize. He's friendly."

"I'm counting on it," I said, before my brain cleared security on that sentence, and she gave me the opposing counsel face back at me.

He did come talk to me, but not that night. The auction wound down, the fire department got three hundred and forty dollars, everyone carried their umbrellas home, and I went to bed feeling like someone who had spent twenty-five dollars to lose an argument with herself.

The next evening I was back at the terminal because Ruth had me returning the gavel to the hardware store, don't ask, and when I came out the front doors it was dark and the last ferry had already gone, and there he was, sitting on the bench by the bike rack, jacket zipped, a man waiting for a bus that doesn't run at night.

"Whitney, right?" He stood up. "I didn't stalk you. Ruth told me you'd be here. I asked her, technically, so it's only medium creepy."

"That's still a little creepy."

"Fair. Okay, so, straight to business before you can escape." He put his hands in his pockets. "The darkroom stuff. I've been thinking about it all day, which is embarrassing, but I've got a camera I've barely touched since I left the ship I started on, and I keep saying I'll get back into it and never do. I'd like to buy it off you. I'll pay you more than you paid, obviously. Thirty?"

"It's not for sale," I said.

"Oh!" He blinked. "Okay, no worries, I just thought I'd..."

"It's not for sale," I said again, and then my mouth kept going without filing the paperwork first, "but I don't know how any of it works. The timer, the trays, any of it. I bid on it for reasons that made sense at the time and have since stopped making sense, and now I own it. So if you want it, you can come set it up and show me what it does, and then we'll talk about money after. Maybe."

He looked at me for a beat, and then he smiled, and it was different from the waiting room smile. Smaller. Like something that wasn't for an audience.

"That," he said, "is the best offer I've had all month, and I get offered a lot of terrible trivia nights."

"Saturday," I said. "I'm off at noon. There's coffee in it for you and a bathroom that currently contains nothing but a toilet and my regret."

"I'll bring the camera. And Whitney? Thanks for outbidding my idiot friend. It was honestly the highlight of his week that someone beat him."

"Tell him it was my pleasure and my twenty-five dollars."

He laughed, that same real laugh, and walked off toward the crew lodging, and I stood in the parking lot holding a gavel receipt and thinking, well. Now I had to actually learn photography.

Saturday I got home at noon, ate half a sandwich standing over the sink like an animal, and cleaned the bathroom, which contained the toilet, my regret, and now a roll of toilet paper I put out specifically so the place would look habituated. Then I dragged the box of darkroom stuff into the second bedroom, which in my apartment is technically a bedroom the way a closet is technically a bedroom, and waited.

He knocked at two. "Whitney. I brought the camera, and also a bag of trays I bought myself, because yours have developer stains from 2019 and I'm not sentimental about other people's chemicals."

"That's very romantic," I said.

"I also brought coffee, which you promised me, so really I'm the one holding up my end here." He handed me the cup. He was not in the crew jacket. He was in a plain gray shirt, his brown forearms bare, and he looked like a person instead of a brochure, and I had to go answer the kettle about it.

My bathroom does have a tub, so we filled the three trays in there, which involved him kneeling on my bathmat with a measuring cup, and then we shut ourselves into the second bedroom, taped garbage bags over the window, and turned on the one lamp with the red bulb he'd brought in a paper bag like it was contraband.

"Okay," he said, and the room went red. "This is the fun part. Total darkness except this. Can I show you how to load the film?"