The Gavel Drops

I was halfway through a box of estate jewelry when Karina started reading out loud from the couch. She does that. Reads a line she likes and just fires it across the room at me like I'm going to catch it.

"'The grief of others is a kind of weather,'" she read. "'It passes over you and moves on.'"

"Nice," I said, holding a brooch up to the kitchen light. "Write down who said that."

"Does it matter? It's about weather and grief."

"It matters because I'm trying to catalog a Victorian mourning brooch at the same time, and now everything's bleeding together." The brooch had a woven lock of hair under glass, which sounds creepy until you learn that in 1860 it was considered tender. I logged it at ninety dollars, maybe one-forty if the right bidder was feeling sentimental.

Karina is twenty-eight, a year younger than me, and she was stretched out on the couch in a thin black top and shorts, one foot hooked over the armrest, reading a library book about a plague village. She was an art restorer before we moved out here, still picks up freelance work cleaning varnish off dead painters. Her hands are steadier than mine. That's not a compliment I give lightly, because my hands are how I make my living.

I went back to the box. There was a jet bracelet next, then a locket with a hinge that needed oil. Somewhere in the middle of all that I opened my laptop to check the board, which is a thing I do more often than I'd admit to anyone at, say, a wedding.

Some background, since you're new here. My name is Noel, I'm twenty-nine, I run auctions. Estate sales, farm liquidations, the occasional charity thing where somebody's aunt donates a quilt. I've been calling bids since I was twenty-two. I met Karina at a county fair auction when she was twenty-three and I was twenty-four, and she bid on a painting I was selling, a bad landscape, and afterward she came up and told me my chant needed work. Married a year later. She was right about the chant, by the way. I got better.

About six months ago I found a private forum where men post pictures of their wives. Not my usual corner of the internet, but there it was. And here's the part I'll own: I didn't post Karina's face. I posted her hands, the back of her neck, her standing at the kitchen sink in a sundress. And I wrote about her the way I write about lots. Condition report. Provenance. That sort of thing. Described her like property headed for the block, except I always ended every post the same way. Display only. Not for sale.

It got attention. It got a lot of attention. And about three months ago one member started messaging me privately. Handle was TimmyH34. Persistent guy.

"Whatever you're smiling at," Karina said, not looking up, "is either the jewelry or the internet."

"Jewelry."

"Liar. Your smile does a different thing for the internet."

I closed the laptop. "Fine. There's a new guy on the board. Keeps asking for a private show."

"A private show of what, exactly?"

"Of you. He wants me to put the camera on you for an evening. Just talking, he says. Just watching you be normal."

Karina set the book face down on her chest. "And what did you say?"

"Said no. Obviously!"

"Obviously," she repeated. She swung her legs off the couch and came and sat at the kitchen table across from me, next to the box of dead women's jewelry. "Let me see the messages."

"There's nothing to see."

"Noel. Let me see the messages."

So I opened the laptop and turned it around, because when she uses that tone I've learned the evening goes smoother if I just hand over the evidence. She scrolled. Her eyebrows went up at one point and stayed up.

"'She moves like a lot that knows its estimate,'" she read. "You wrote that? About me?"

"Last month. You were carrying the laundry basket."

"That's a real sentence that exists on the internet now."

"It got forty-two upvotes."

"It got forty-two upvotes," she said, and she put her hand over her mouth, but not fast enough. She was grinning. "Oh my god, you're insane. You're completely insane."

"I'm a professional. Describing things is what I do."

"You described my ankles, Noel. You gave my ankles a condition report."

"Your ankles are in excellent condition."

"They are. And from now on you ask me before you post them."

"Formally asked: may I keep posting the ankles? No face, ever."

"Yes. Ankles are fine." She waved a hand. "And this Timmy person. He's been writing you for how long?"

"Three months. He found the board six months back. He's thirty-four, lives somewhere in the Denver area, does something with HVAC, and every week he asks a little more directly."

"And every week you tell him no," Karina said, "in a voice that sounds a lot like a man taking a bid he doesn't want to take."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means you keep saying no and then you keep answering. If you meant the no, you'd have blocked him by now. You block rude bidders all the time. You blocked that guy in Castle Rock over a butter churn."

"The butter churn thing was a matter of principle."

"Uh huh." She closed the laptop and slid it back across the table to me. "So tell me about the no. Tell me why you say it."

Here's the honest answer, which took me a while to find. I like that other men want her. I like it a lot, in a way that surprised me when I first noticed it, somewhere around the fourth or fifth post. Writing her up like a lot and watching strangers react to it did something for me that calling a real auction never quite did. Except I'd built the whole thing around a wall. Display only. Not for sale. The wall was the fun part and also the thing keeping the whole enterprise honest.

"I say no because the no is the point," I said. "The whole thing works because it doesn't go anywhere."

"Does it, though." Karina pulled the mourning brooch out of the box and turned it over in her fingers. "You spend hours on those posts. You check the board before breakfast. This morning you checked it while the coffee was still brewing, which means before you'd said a word to me, your actual wife. And you've got a stranger asking to watch me through your own camera, and you're telling me about it, which you didn't have to do. So the no sounds tired, honey. It sounds like a gavel coming down on a lot nobody wants to sell."

"That's a lot of analysis from a plague book."

"I contain multitudes." She set the brooch down and looked at me straight on, the way she does when she's about to be entirely too reasonable about something. "I'm not saying I want anything. I'm saying you should figure out what you want, because the wanting is leaking out of you all over the kitchen table."

"It is not leaking."

"It's a little bit leaking."

I picked up the locket with the sticky hinge and gave it a quarter turn, which is what I do when I don't have an answer. The evening went on around us. She went back to her book. I finished the box, all eleven lots, and typed up the descriptions, and if a couple of them came out more lyrical than usual, well, the material was inspiring.

Around nine the doorbell rang.

That was the first strange thing, because nobody rings our doorbell on a Tuesday night. We live in a ranch house in a development outside Denver where the doorbell means Girl Scouts or a roofing salesman, and it was October, too cold for scouts.

Karina looked up from the couch. "Expecting anyone?"

"No!"

I went to the front door, and through the narrow window beside it I could see a man standing on the mat, stocky, maybe thirty-something, wearing a nice jacket and holding his car keys in one fist like he'd been gripping them the whole drive over. He looked nervous in the specific way men look when they've rehearsed something in the car.

I opened the door partway, the chain still on, because I'm not an idiot.

"Can I help you?"

"Noel?" he said. "Hey. Uh. Hi. It's Timmy. Timmy Harris. From the board."

I want to tell you I had some clever reaction ready. I didn't. I just stood there with the chain on and the cold coming in around my ankles, and behind me, from the living room, I heard Karina close her book.

"Okay," I said finally, because it was the only word available. "You want to explain how you got my address, Timmy?"

"Three months of messages, man. You slip up once, a license plate in a photo, a street sign, anything." He held up his phone, then seemed to think better of it and put it away. "I know how this looks. I know exactly how this looks. Can you just, can you ask Karina if I can come in for five minutes? Just five. I drove a long way to ask something I should've asked over messages, and I'll leave whenever anybody says so. You got my word."

I looked at him for a second, then I closed the door, took off the chain, and called down the hall.

"Karina? You might want to come hear this one."

Karina came down the hall in her slippers, took one look past my shoulder, and said, "Huh. He's shorter than his typing."

"Ma'am," Timmy said through the gap. "Sorry. Hi. Sorry."

"You already said sorry twice." She looked at me. "You going to leave the man on the porch in October?"

"That was kind of the plan, yeah."

"Well, the plan's dumb. It's cold. Come sit down for five minutes and say your thing."

I want it noted that I got outvoted in my own living room by a woman in cat slippers. Timmy sat on the edge of the couch like the cushion might bill him. His jacket stayed on, zipped halfway. He kept his car keys in his fist.

Before anybody got two sentences in, the doorbell rang again.

"Oh, for crying out loud," Karina said. "It's a convention."

It was Maggie Levy, from next door, holding a bottle of red by the neck. She's thirty-one, moved in two years back, and she's had dinner at our table enough times that she doesn't knock politely anymore, she just rings and walks in like weather.

"Hey, I opened a bottle and couldn't finish the thinking alone," she said, then stopped, because there was a stranger on the couch and the energy in the room was sort of humming. "Oh. Bad time?"

"Kind of a weird time," Karina said. "This is Timmy. He's from the internet."

"Which part of the internet?"

"The part Noel plays with," Karina said, and I will admit Maggie's eyebrows went somewhere interesting.

Maggie held up the wine. "I'll just, uh, pour three glasses and sit here being not curious."

"You're being extremely curious," I said.

"I'm being so curious," she agreed.

She'd changed out of her work clothes into jeans and a flannel, and she was wearing this sheer gray thing underneath, some camisole with a lace edge, and I caught her noticing Karina's top, which was new to her too. Karina had put on a black top before dinner that was technically a shirt and technically also a window. You could see the shape of everything under it and the color of nothing.

"When did you get that?" Maggie asked her, nodding at it.

"Oh, ages ago. Never wore it!"

"It's a late date thing," I said, before my brain could vote on it. "She's wearing it for me tonight."

"For a Tuesday?" Maggie said.

"He complains I dress like I'm cataloging things," Karina said. "So tonight I dressed like the catalog."

Timmy made a small noise into his wine glass. Maggie looked between the three of us like she was watching an auction and trying to figure out what lot was on the block. To be fair, that's more or less what was happening, minus the part where anybody had called it.

"So, Timmy from the internet," Maggie said, settling into the armchair with her glass. "What do you do?"

"HVAC. Furnaces, mostly."

"Season's starting. People are about to be so glad to see you."

"That they are," he said, and smiled for real for the first time, and just like that he was a person instead of a username, which I hated a little.

"Okay," I said, standing. "Five minutes was the deal. Say your thing, Timmy."

He put his glass down. He took a breath like a man about to give testimony.

"Three months I've been reading your posts. And I know how they read, I'm not dumb, they read like a guy showing off his truck. Except they don't, really, they read like someone who loves his truck. The condition reports. The provenance. The way you wrote about her hands like she was a piece you'd never let go of. And every post ends the same. Display only. Not for sale." He turned his wine glass a quarter turn. "And I kept messaging anyway, because I figured the wall was the fun part, right? That's the game. So here's my thing, the thing I couldn't ask over messages." He looked at Karina, then at me, then back, like a tennis spectator. "What if the wall is tired?"

Silence. The furnace kicked on somewhere in the basement, because October.

"That's a hell of a question," Karina said.

"It's out of line," Timmy said quickly. "I know it's out of line. I drove out here to say it to your faces instead of typing it like a creep, which apparently I did anyway by showing up, so, bad on both counts. But I've watched you two circle this for months, man. You answer every message. You could block me any day. You don't."