Two Estate Sales

The alarm rips me out of a deep-dream sleep at five thirty a.m., so groggy I can barely find it, much less turn it off.

I zombie-drag myself into the hallway, pound Joanna’s bedroom door with the side of my hand a few times.

“Mom. Time to get up.”

I hear the squeak of the mattress as she turns over, hear her breathe out heavy a few times. But she doesn’t answer.

“Mom.”

“Put on a pot of coffee, Daya,” she calls out. “I’ve got a migraine trying to break through.”

On my way to the kitchen, I stop to fold the crocheted blanket back up and toss it over the arm of the couch. The brew I set up before bed last night is already going, so I pour myself a bowl of cereal and eat standing up, waiting for it to sputter to a finish.

As soon as the smell of coffee hits the air, Joanna’s bedroom door creaks open. We pass in the hallway, mumbling good morning at each other as I slip into the bathroom. I don’t need to pee, I just don’t want to be in the same room with her. Not yet. There’s not a lot of space in this house for privacy, and I’ll be a captive audience in the car with her for what could be a few hours. I need to hoard my solitude—like carb-loading before a race—just to get me through.

I close the bathroom door, flick on the light, stand in front of the mirror as I brush my teeth. Stare at my reflection after I rinse my mouth out. Lift my hand, fluff up my bangs. Touch the scar on my cheek that I wish maybe-Naomi hadn’t noticed that one time we danced. The scar that’s been part of my face for over half my life. I can almost forget it’s there, at least until someone says something about it or stares at it too long. Then I stumble right back into a memory of the day I told my mother I wanted to marry my first-grade teacher, Miss Zu?iga. I didn’t know that was a no-fly zone at the time. Eventually, I learned to keep that baby-dyke shit to my six-year-old self, but not soon enough. That day, I just wanted to understand why my mother said I couldn’t marry her.

“Only a boy can marry Miss Zu?iga.”

The answer made no sense to me, so I pushed. I kept asking: But why?

“Because it’s a sin, Daya,” she finally said. “God didn’t create you for that. You were created to fall in love and marry a boy, like I did with Daddy, so He could bless your marriage and give you children.”

But I didn’t want to fall in love with a boy. I wanted to marry my teacher, because she was kind and pretty, because she knelt down next to my desk and looked me in the eyes when she talked to me and smiled a lot, and she never raised her voice at anyone. Wanting to marry Miss Zu?iga didn’t feel like a sin. It felt like love.

That’s what I told my mother, and that’s when something inside her snapped.

She said, “Do you want to be a boy, Daya, is that it? Is that why you want to marry Miss Zu?iga? Okay. Let’s see how you like being a boy.”

She went and got the scissors—not the good ones from her beauty salon box, but the dull ones from the junk drawer that she used for cutting up cardboard boxes and opening hard plastic packaging. It scared me. I wriggled as she sawed through my hair, fought to get away from her as she held my face with one hand and cut with the other. I only have camera-clicks of memory from that point—her fingers clamped on to my cheeks, me fighting against her, the sharp pain biting into my right cheek as the broken tip of the scissors caught me in mid-squirm. More camera-clicks, this time of Joanna, sweeping my hair up off the floor as she apologized to me.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Daya. Mommy’s just tired. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Trying to clean the blood off my face and shirt before my dad got home.

My dad, livid at the sight of me, asking, “What the hell did you do to her, Joanna?”

A look of fear on her face that was different from the fear on mine. Hers was made up of things I couldn’t see or understand at the time.

“She cut her own hair behind my back,” my mother said. “I was just trying to fix it.”

What the hell did you do to her, Joanna?

I’ve thought of her as Joanna ever since.

“Daya, hurry up!” she calls from down the hall.

I snap off the light and go meet her by the front door.

The sun is climbing over the edge of the desert rock as we head out to the first estate sale. Sunrises in Arizona can be pretty extra sometimes—all that earth-toned drama and big beams of sunlight shooting out, casting long shadows off the rocks and saguaros. My grandpa taught me to see shapes in those shadows, the way most people look for shapes in the clouds.

The first estate sale is a bust, even though we get there pretty early.

That one is in Greenville, the same bougie neighborhood where Justin Tadeo’s party was last night, where the houses are majestic and they give away full-sized candy bars at Halloween. Joanna always likes to start where the rich people live. Everything there is bigger, even the yard sales. Houses made of brick or stucco, with grand archways and elaborate wrought iron fences and even more elaborate gardens out front, full of plants that need more water than the native succulents do, in spite of how arid it can get here during the dry season. None of the houses in Greenville have blue tarps on them to keep the rain from leaking through holes in the tiled roofs. Blue roof tarps are as common as front doors on the houses in my neighborhood.

The churches in Greenville are bigger too. As if rich people deserve a more glorious God than the rest of us.

As we leave Greenville, and the big stucco houses get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, Joanna says, “Rich people might have better stuff, but poor people have better stories.”

We get stuck at the tracks as we head to the west side, to sale number two. Joanna taught me to count train cars when I was little, whenever we’d get stuck at the tracks. My grandpa taught me to appreciate the graffiti on the train cars as they went by.

This estate sale looks like a win, at least on paper. The couple had been married for sixty-two years before dying five days apart.

But my mother isn’t interested in a love story with a happy ending. She doesn’t believe in them.

In the living room, Joanna inspects a hand-quilted blanket that I pray she doesn’t bring home. It looks old enough to have been a wedding present when the couple were newlyweds.

“I guess I just have different taste,” she whispers.

I’m pretty sure that’s code for: She’s ready to leave.

Back in the car, Joanna consults the GPS on her phone as we head toward sale number three. It’s pretty desolate out this way—flat and dry and rocky, without some of the trees we have in town, but still. It only takes a second of distraction to plow your car into one of the huge boulders off the side of the road if you’re not paying attention.

Not to be all morbid.

“You shouldn’t look at it while you’re driving,” I tell her.

“I just want to make sure we’re going the right way.” She swipes between screens a couple times. “It’s taking us out near the electric towers.”

“Let’s just go home,” I say. “There’s no rule that says we have to hit all of them.”

But I know she won’t go home until she’s gotten her sad story. She just keeps taking her eyes off the road like she doesn’t trust it. Like she knows better than the GPS.

The directions take us onto a long dirt driveway. At the far end is a beat-up house to the right, a beat-up pontoon boat to the left, and a sprawling yard in the middle filled with so much junk, a dozen or so rickety tables can’t contain it all. As we slow to a stop, I spot a rusty, mustard-yellow VW wagon that looks suspiciously like B’Rad’s. That would be funny if he and I showed up at the same estate sale.

“This looks promising,” Joanna says once she’s out of the car.

I sweep my gaze in a panoramic arc across the yard, on the lookout for B’Rad, yes, but also wondering about the word promising.

“What could you possibly be looking for that makes this look promising?” I ask.

She picks up a glass vase with a chip in the rim and inspects it. “Your aunt told me to get something to finally put Grandpa’s ashes in.”

I drop an open stare on her. “I think she meant from the funeral home. Don’t you get a discount?”

“It’s not Walmart, Daya,” she says, like I’m the one who’s out of touch with reality. “There is no employee discount at the funeral home.”

I lean up against the car and cross my arms. Joanna can pick her way through every table and pile on the property. I’m not moving.

“Greetings, earthling!”

I spin around. B’Rad Anderson is right behind me.

The dude is all smiles, as usual.

“Greetings,” I say. “What are you doing here at this ungodly hour?”

“I live here.”

The shack behind him dials into focus—cracked stucco falling off the exterior in patches, warped wooden lattice where the windows should be.

“Oh,” I say. “I didn’t... I had no idea.”

“Most people don’t even realize anyone lives out this way.”

He pushes his glasses up by the nosepiece. He doesn’t seem awkward about living someplace like this, the way a lot of people might. B’Rad doesn’t seem awkward about a lot of things. That time we danced together, he actually dive-bombed me as we pretend-swayed to a Maya Xanadu song at the end of the night. It wasn’t a good kiss, but I’m not sure how much that had to do with him being a bad kisser and how much was about me one hundred percent not being into guys.

I follow B’Rad over by the house as Joanna sorts through a table at the far end of the yard. A low hum overhead makes my head feel weirdly heavy. It’s probably from the electrical towers nearby, but it’s the kind of sound that can drive a person insane over time.

He looks up. “You hear that?”

“Yeah. What is it?”

“Electricity running between towers. I block it out, for the most part.”

It would take a mind of steel to block out that low-grade hum.

“So, whose stuff is all this?” I ask him.

“It’s my granddad’s.”

Shit. I take another slow sweep around the yard, and say, “Damn. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Oh, he’s not dead.” B’Rad runs his fingers through the patch of hair on top of his head.

I go, “Wait... so... this is your grandpa’s stuff, but he’s not dead?”

“No, he’s fishing.”

“But... this is an estate sale,” I say, leaning against the wrought iron railing. I realize quick that it’s too wobbly to hold me up.

He goes, “Yeah, that’s what I’m calling it. Drives more business out this way.”

I nod, but I don’t completely get it. B’Rad seems to sense this.

“It’s simple economics. I work twenty hours a week on average, only it’s never enough because the old man literally won’t pay for anything. On the other hand, there’s so much shit in this yard, and he doesn’t do anything with it. Hell, he doesn’t even know what’s here anymore. So occasionally, if I’m in a pinch, I’ll just... sell some of it off.”

My disbelief turns into a strange sense of admiration.

“That’s very enterprising,” I say with a smile.

B’Rad smiles back. “I know, right?”

I peek over at Joanna, edging toward the back of the yard. I know she’s looking for something specific. And I know he’s trying to earn some cash. So, what if...

I swallow my better judgment and lower my volume a couple of clicks.

“If you can hook her with a really sad story, you can probably get her to buy something.”

He leans back, nods knowingly.

“Gotcha,” he says, nice and quiet. He starts to make his way over.

I carefully follow him to the table where Joanna is sorting through a collection of dusty tin canisters.

“Good morning!” He greets her like a guy who was born to sell shit.

She shades her eyes with her hands, says good morning in that tone of mistrust, like she’s afraid he might steal her purse and then try to sell it back to her.

“Looking for anything in particular?” B’Rad asks.

“Not really,” she tells him.

“Aren’t you looking for an urn or something?” I say.

Maybe it’s not cool of me to chuck my own mother under the bus, but B’Rad did do me a solid last night. I feel like I need to return the favor.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s right. I was keeping an eye out for something that would hold my father’s ashes—”

He snaps his fingers. “I have just the thing.”

He starts digging around in a pile of what looks like spare car parts and old cooking utensils and a bike wheel with no tire but the spokes still intact, and the bones of a basketball hoop, and just when I’m convinced he’s going to pull up a rattlesnake next, he resurfaces holding—

“Wait, you have an actual urn?” I blurt.

“I have two,” he says. “Actually.”

I’m a little weirded out by this, but he could work it to his advantage if he’s smart about it. From behind Joanna’s back, I point at her and make an exaggerated sad face.

He pushes in closer.

“This one belonged to my mother. My father killed her when I was nine, and then he killed himself. That’s who the other one belonged to.”

Man, he went all the way there, zero to sixty.

Joanna touches the urn. “That’s... awful.”

“It is. I won’t sell my father’s, though. I never want to set his bad energy loose on some unsuspecting person, you know? After they died, it took us a few months to go through all their stuff, and that’s when we came across my mom’s handwritten will and testament. She said if anything ever happened to her, she wanted her ashes scattered into the Grand Canyon, so. We finally just got around to doing that last summer.”

I shake my head at him.

Too much, man, too much! Pull back!

He pushes his glasses back in place and I watch as he recalculates, like a GPS when you take a different route from the one it says to.

He goes, “Well, anyway. That’s why I’m selling hers now. It’s classic pewter. We never even got it engraved.”

“That must have been so hard for you,” Joanna says.

B’Rad nods back like one of those bobblehead dolls.

She goes, “How much are you asking?”

“I can let it go for twenty.”

“I have fifteen,” she tells him.

I know she has more than that, but Joanna reaches into her bag and pulls out a ten and a five, swaps them for the unengraved pewter urn. She rolls it gently between her hands a few times, turns it over, looks at the mark on the bottom.

“Nice,” she murmurs.

As we leave, I throw B’Rad a look over my shoulder and flash him a peace sign. I hope that fifteen bucks makes things a little easier for him. Life looks kind of hard out here.

He lifts a hand as he watches us head down the driveway.

The urn is the only thing Joanna ends up buying today.

On the way home, we stop at Fool City, the main grocery store on our side of town. It’s really called Food City, but the curve of the D burned out sometime around fifth grade, and they’ve never fixed it. Stella and I have called it Fool City ever since.

Joanna doesn’t like grocery shopping, never has, but around the time she got her job at the funeral home with its unpredictable hours, we settled into an unspoken routine where she’d do the shopping once a week, and I’d cook some form of a dinner most nights. When I was nine, that mostly looked like reheating something out of a can or a box.

Tonight, it will look like chicken Caesar salad.

When we get home, she sets the urn on the bookshelf in the living room, but she doesn’t clean it out or put my grandpa’s ashes inside. They’re still in a plastic baggie, in a plain wooden box at the back of her closet. She hasn’t taken them out once since my grandpa died—that would mean having to deal with her feelings about it. She can’t even deal with her memories, much less her feelings. That’s why we have a house full of other people’s memories. Their stories, their losses. I guess for some people, it’s easier to grieve what isn’t theirs.

Joanna sits at the table while I make dinner. She has her day planner open like when she’s working, but I can tell she’s scrolling on her phone, stopping every now and then before swiping on.

“Oh, look. Nicole got her hair done,” she says. “I love it curled like that. Pretty.”

“Yeah, I... I don’t follow my cousins online.”

That’s only half the story. Because not only do I not follow them, I’ve always walked the other way whenever I’ve seen them at school.

“Well, it was on Suzanne’s Instagram.” She swipes again.

I stop for a second, hover over the cutting board with the knife.

“You follow your sister on Instagram?” I say. “I thought you didn’t like her.”

“I like her.” She keeps scrolling. “It’s the whole, Nicole had her first date on Friday. Gabby made cheer squad this year. It can be a bit too much sometimes.”

I go back to chopping lettuce and biting my tongue. What can “be a bit too much sometimes” is Suzanne always telling my mom what she should do. That’s been true since they were kids—my aunt has always had this weird power over my mom. Less like an older sister and more like a surrogate mother. Suzanne is the queen of “should.” As in: You should make Daya grow her hair out. You know, Jo, if you’re going to keep paying for Daya’s clothes, you should monitor what she buys. Less T-shirts and jeans, more dresses. I even coined a secret phrase for it: bull-should. What’s “a bit too much” for Joanna is that my mother has no cute-new-hairstyle or new-outfit pictures of me to show off. I’m not the youth group treasurer, not dating the captain of the football team. What’s “a bit too much” is that Suzanne always asks her what’s wrong with me or when I’m going to start coming to church instead of how I’m actually doing, and that conversation must get stale for Joanna after a while.

My mother has stopped scrolling again. She’s staring at something on her phone from point-blank range.

As I scoop the grilled chicken into the salad bowl, she pitches back and goes, “Where were you last night?”

I look up from bringing the bowl to the table.

“At a party you said I could go to.”

“With who?”

My throat goes dry. She knows I was with Stella. Even though I know she doesn’t like Stella, I don’t lie about hanging out with her.

I set the salad bowl on the table.

“You know who I was with. I told you.”

“What kind of party was it?”

“What’s this about? Why are you asking me all these—”

She flips her phone around, shows me a grainy picture of me and Stella from Justin Tadeo’s party last night. It looks like it was taken when we were conspiring for me to distract Edgar Garibay away from Yasmin. We’re leaning against each other in a way that could be totally misinterpreted by someone who wanted to. And plenty of people around here would want to misinterpret a photo like that, just so they’d have something to talk about.

I take the phone from her.

“Where’d this come from?” I ask.

“Your aunt got it from one of your cousins.”

It had to be Gabby—Nicole graduated last year.

“What was she doing at a party?” I ask.

Joanna’s face twists at the thought. “She wasn’t at a party—”

“Then where did she get it?”

“She saw it on someone’s Instagram from school.” Her arm flops into her lap. “Daya...”

“Okay, so... ?” I pull my chair out slowly, keep my eyes on her as I sit. “It’s not like it’s a picture of us making out or anything.”

“People will see this and think it means what it looks like it means. They won’t know you’re not... together.”

“So what? I know we’re not together. You know we’re not. Right?”

She leans back in her seat, eyes glued to the photo. “Things like this... they add fuel to the fire. Everything you do—all the time you spend with Stella. Letting her cut your hair off—”

“Why are you still on that?” I say. “Are you mad because I let her talk me into it, or mad that I didn’t let you cut it?”

“That’s not fair.”

Joanna puts her phone down, but she never takes her eyes off me. She taps the screen.

“You know how these things go, Daya. Someone sees you at a party, takes a picture, puts it online, gossip spreads like wildfire—”

“Okay, but it’s not like someone snapped a nudie of me. I don’t get why you’re freaking out about this. I was at a party you knew I went to. I wasn’t sneaking around. And I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

She can’t decide what to do with her hands. She picks up her phone again, puts it down, runs her fingers up and down the side of her water glass.

“Should I be worried about you?” she finally asks. “Suzanne says I should be more concerned about the influence Stella has on you.”

Oh gawd. “Mom—”

“Daya, people like Stella can be hard to resist. If you’re not careful, you could end up doing things you regret and... you know how vicious kids can be.”

I know how vicious adults can be. I’ve seen it firsthand, how rumors can chew through a person’s life in this town.

Escondido ate my mother up and spit out everything but her guts. And I know how long it’s taken for her to come back from the near death of what that did to her. I know why she’s worried. But Stella’s not the problem, and I don’t know how to convince Joanna of that.

“I don’t know what to do for you,” she says.

“You don’t need to do anything. Just... try not to freak out again. Okay?”

Joanna picks at her dinner, excuses herself without finishing, falls asleep on the couch in front of the TV not long after I finish doing the dishes. The episode of Shunned Nuns she’s watching is so loud, I have to turn the volume down just to hear myself think.

As I pull the quilt up over her, I spot the urn she got today on the bookshelf across the room. A used urn she bought based on a made-up story that was bad enough to hook her. That’s what’s so messed up about this town. I didn’t have to get caught having an actual lesbian moment with my best friend at a party last night. Someone just had to make it look like I did. Snap one picture and the story takes care of itself.

Then there’s Beckett, who tells her parents she’s going to Bible study, but goes to a house party instead. And apparently, they trust that’s where she was because that fits their perfect-daughter narrative. They’ll believe she’s at Bible study because they want to believe she’s at Bible study. Another story that just takes care of itself. No questions asked.

Me? I have a lot of questions. About everything.

Especially Beckett.

And even though talking to her at that party last night was a blender-whirl of luck, chance, and confusion, I’m still hoping with everything in me for one more opportunity to talk to her. Just talk. Maybe bask a little too.

That’s not too much to ask, is it? The chance to linger in Beckett Wild’s sunlight for a few seconds?

Because I know that’s all it can ever be.