Posted: Vintage Finds, Free, This Saturday
Logan Malone
Grandma stuck it out for two years and ten rounds of chemo before cancer won. Ten years before her, Grandpa had had a heart attack in his office and was dead within ten minutes. They’d spent their whole relationship in one long argument, the origin of which I never learned. I’d been closer to Grandpa as a child; after all, I was their only male grandchild. He’d pull me under his arm and whisper to me, “She’s a queer one,” pointing back at Grandma in her no-children-allowed kitchen. Even after Grandpa died, Grandma spent most of her time brooding silently in her kitchen with a cake in the oven, a cigarette in her mouth, and a glass of red nearby. Lung cancer got the better of her about a month after I graduated high school.
I didn’t have a job that summer, so I was tasked with cleaning and taking stock of all the items in Grandma’s house while Mom grieved and planned the funeral. I’d always lived according to lists, so I was a natural at sorting and documenting all of Grandma’s remaining possessions, room by room. I then categorised the items into additional lists of the furniture, knick-knacks, photo albums, potential heirlooms, Christmas items, books, and junk (like magazines, coupons, birthday cards, and so on).
But, other than in the photo albums, there was basically no trace of him left in the house.
After the house was cleaned and properly categorized, I got a ladder to climb up into the attic crawl space. I’d never seen the pull-down door opened or anyone ever go up there. Now I realised why. Once in the dark, empty space, my eyes began to focus on the sole occupants: a pile of rectangle boxes tucked under the eaves. I dragged them closer and counted a dozen of them. Some were marked with years like “40-45” or “1960s” and others were unmarked. With a peek into each of them, I felt my face heat up and heart begin to race. I shoved them away from me and quickly climbed back down to the main house. I put away the ladder and resolved to not think about what I’d seen.
A couple days later, Mom set a date for the estate sale and called her siblings to go over my detailed lists. Furniture was marked with Post-Its. Photo albums, Christmas decorations, and heirlooms were cried over and then sorted into boxes to mail. Ten full trash bags were piled in my backseat, fated for a dumpster. We put up signs and Mom sent in an ad for the newspaper. All the while, I thought about the boxes in the attic but never mentioned them.
With a few days until the estate sale, I knew something had to be done, so I posted in the Free Stuff section on Craigslist.
The morning of the sale, Mom walked through the house, rechecking tags and grabbing last minute trinkets she’d decided to save after all. Even though I’d tried to talk her out of it, she had bought two canvas-colored aprons for us to wear, and she was already filling the pockets with memorabilia instead of leaving them open for cash.
As the first car parked outside, I tied the apron around myself and told her, “Just so you know, I have some . . . friends coming by, too.”
“Okay.” She was absent-mindedly petting a blanket on the old couch, lost in memories. When she saw the first people step onto the porch, though, she put on a smile and opened the door for them. We’d decided I would take the upstairs, and she would handle downstairs.
Of the four rooms upstairs, one was Grandpa’s old law office and it had been cleared out after he died. Grandpa’s law books had been donated to the public library, but I had no idea where his plaques and files had gone. All that remained was a large desk and a couple of empty bookcases. I sat on a metal chair at the desk and looked towards the attic. I thought about Grandpa and how little I knew about him. Had he lived longer, maybe he would have even passed the boxes down to me as a rite of becoming a man. I shuddered thinking about the hypothetical conversation. I’d have to either pretend to want the boxes or be honest and say, “I’m gay, Grandpa.” Probably for the best the conversation never happened.
Over the next couple hours, many people wandered through the house, and I sold the bookcases, a bedroom set, a quilt, and a wall-mounted mirror. We weren’t looking to make money, so everything was marked low and OBO, “or best offer.”
Finally, late in the morning, Mom called up the stairs, “John, your friend, Greg? Greg is here.”
I called back as naturally as I could, “Okay.”
Thankfully, no one else was upstairs at the moment so I went to the hall and set up the ladder. A guy who looked to be college-aged greeted me, “John, I take it?”
I shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, Greg.” I lowered my voice, “I’m glad you came. I was worried no one would show and I’d be stuck with all this.” I motioned above me to the ceiling.
Greg smiled and looked behind him. “Didn’t tell your mom then, huh?”
“Shit, would you?”
“Hell, no.”
I started up the ladder and pressed the board up and away from the opening. I called back down, “How many do you want?”
“Just one.”
I pulled the nearest box towards me and then lowered it down. Greg reached up, his face turning pink, and grabbed the box. I then made my way back down the ladder.
“There’s eleven more up there. You want to take a quick look and decide if you want more?”
I looked behind me. Greg was gone.
“Well, shit. Could’ve said thanks at least.”
I closed the attic and dragged the ladder back into the office.
The next hour dragged by and I struggled to stay awake. I kept checking my phone, but there were no new messages on Craigslist. Seven people in total had responded asking for the address, and I decided that if anyone else showed, I would force them to take more than one box.
Mom called up, “John, your friend Dan?”
My heart quickened. “Okay!”
After I set up the ladder, I turned to face a fiftyish man in tennis gear.
“Dan. Nice to meet you, John.”
“Yes, sir.” I shook his hand even though mine was feeling a little clammy. Dan looked like a dad. “Um, how many boxes do you want, sir? There’s eleven left and I need to get rid of them.”
“May I see what’s inside first?”
I swallowed. “Well, sir, they need to just get out of the house. The deal is you take the whole box. I promise it’ll be, um, worthwhile.”
Dan smiled and crossed his arms. “What if there’s something in one box but not in another?”
“Then I recommend you take all eleven?” I managed to smile back. “I mean, it’s free, so you’re not really losing anything. I’m sure there’s places that’d take what you don’t want, but I just can’t do it myself, you know?”
Dan studied me for a second. He then said, “Okay. I’ll take two off your hands.”
“Great, thank you, sir!”
I rushed up the stairs and handed two down to him. As I came down the steps, Dan asked, “So, why not keep them for yourself, son?”
I blushed as I folded the ladder and glanced back at him. Dan was smiling and holding the boxes stacked on one another.
I said, “They’re not really my . . . thing.”
Dan started to laugh and walked away without responding.
After he left, Mom poked her head upstairs and asked, “John, who was that?”
I cleared my throat and felt sweat on my neck. “Gym teacher. He was looking for, for linens for his wife. I don’t know.” I shrugged.
The next customer was actually a guy I’d just graduated with, so thankfully Mom had no questions. He was a moody guy I’d never really talked to before, but he took two boxes.
Then there was Alex, who hadn’t mentioned online that she was a woman, so I had to think hard how to explain that one to mom later. The big sister of . . . James, a guy I ran with in cross-country that Mom doesn’t really know. And she wanted four boxes for… a craft project. Perfect.
As I handed down each box to Alex, I asked her, “So, why do you want them?”
She grinned up at me. “Why do you think?”
I laughed. “Similar reason to why I don’t want them?”
She winked in response.
I walked with her to her car with two of the boxes. As I came back inside, Mom raised her eyebrows at me but she was with a customer. I leaned toward her and said, “She does crafts,” and then ran back upstairs.
I only had three boxes left, and I felt a wave of relief. Three other responders left. One of them had to show up. For the right person, this was a gold mine.
I sold a dresser and the desk I sat at before my next “friend” arrived. Thankfully, he had not encountered Mom so she hadn’t had to announce him or know to ask me questions later. He was another guy who looked like a dad, but this time the grungy, overweight, overworked, under-rested kind.
He said nothing when I introduced myself and said I had three left. He held up two fingers.
“Peace? Oh, you want two.” I set up the ladder and continued, “Are you sure?” I began to go up the ladder and looked behind me. He kept his two fingers up, his cheeks turning pink above his beard.
“Okay…” He didn’t even look up as he held up his hands to receive the two boxes. He then silently hurried away.
I said quietly, “I guess I’ll just call you Silent Bob, then, huh?”
I laughed to myself as I came down the ladder.
“What are you doing?”
I quaked at the sound of Mom’s voice and stumbled off the ladder to the ground.
Mom had giant eyes and her hands on her hips.
I swallowed. “Nothing?”
She pointed to the chair in the office. “Sit. Talk.”
I sat and said, “Mom, it’s just some old things of Grandpa’s. Don’t worry about it. Trust me. Wait, where are you going?”
I rushed to the ladder and began to stutter as she ascended. “Se-se-seriously, Mom.”
“There’s nothing even up here. Oh, this?”
I heard the scrape of the last box on the floor and then the cardboard flaps pull apart. My face instinctively began heating up.
Mom began laughing as she rifled through the box, and then she began to cry again. “Oh God, John,” she said. I stayed silent as my mortification turned to sympathy. Mom was being forced to grieve both her parents now, which was what I’d hoped to avoid by getting rid of the boxes.
After a minute or so, Mom looked down at me and began laughing again, but clearly at me. As my sympathy hardened back into mortification, she held her hand to her chest as if to stop the laughs from coming.
I couldn’t stop myself from yelling, “What? What’s so funny?”
In response, she turned the whole box over the opening. I shielded myself with my arms against the wave of magazines and loose pictures. Hundreds of yellowed and faded images of naked women’s boobs, butts, and vaginas rained down on me.
I looked back up at her, horrified.
Mom wiped her face and then asked with a wink, “What makes you so sure these were Grandpa’s?”
Logan Malone lives in Nashville, TN with two brown cats and a supportive and loving Paul. Logan is a contract editor, ghostwriter, and part of the Nashville Writer’s Collective, where a second novel was recently born.
Twitter: @WriterLMalone