Free Antiques Maul by Barbara Allan Page B

Bernice forgotten how to climb down offstage and just live?
    I pondered this as I watched the woman return to her car and drive away too quickly, before I got back in behind my own steering wheel.
    Jake was the first to speak. “Wasn’t much of a fight,” he said disappointedly from the backseat.
    I looked disgustedly at Mother. “Really! Did you have to be so mean? She used to be a good friend.”
    “Key phrase,” Mother said acidly, “‘used to.’”
    “She was crying!”
    “Those weren’t real tears! Those were acting tears!”
    How could I argue with that? I’d had my own suspicions.
    Mother was saying, “Honestly, Brandy, sometimes you can be so gullible.”
    I started the car, making a mental note to call Mother’s doctor about her agitated behavior. (We regularly ratted each other out to our respective shrinks.)
    But soon we were tooling along picturesque Elm Street, the recent unpleasantness having vaporized in the bright autumn sun. As we drove by, a woman who was out for a morning walk stopped in her tracks and gawked. Couldn’t blame her…wasn’t every day a pedestrian saw both a woman with a fur ball growing out of her chest and an Indian chief glide by in a car.
    I smiled and waved.
    You’d think people would be used to us by now.
     
    A Trash ’n’ Treasures Tip
     
    Most antique dealers have a “buyer beware” attitude about their merchandise…so before laying down the cash, examine the item closely. Mother uses a magnifying glass and, if she finds the slightest defect, demands a deep discount.

Chapter Five

Teacher’s Pet
    W ith Mother, Sushi, Jake, the Indian, and the trailer in tow, I drove down Main Street, five blocks of regentrified Victorian buildings, quaint retro lampposts, redbrick sidewalks, and the occasional ornate wrought-iron bench.
    Most store windows displayed colorful fall and Halloween decorations and merchandise…with a glimpse of Christmas waiting impatiently in the wings. Our destination was Pearl City Plaza, at the end of Main, where an antiques mall recently opened in a four-story building built in the 1860s that had been originally—according to Mother, who knew Serenity history—a wholesale grocery business for over a hundred years; since then the building had been occupied by a variety of businesses: a disco, a sporting goods store, an exercise club, a photography studio, a Mexican restaurant, and an antiques shop. Proprietors came and went so fast that townspeople were beginning to say the building was cursed.
    But all the bad luck the corner spot had endured did not faze the building’s current owner, Mrs. Norton, a retired teacher (I had her for Algebra and got a D, which in this case stood for “deserved”) who had transformed the venerable structure into an antiques mall with fifty-odd dealers—and I do mean odd.
    I pulled my Buick into the alley behind the antiques mall and, remembering Mother’s think-opposite instructions, backed the trailer up to a loading dock on the first try. I got out and so did Mother, sporting Sushi on her chest. We left behind a Game Boy–playing Jake in the backseat to guard the goods, and I did my best not to picture the entire trailer being pillaged while my son’s focus remained on the blips and bloops of his game.
    Even though the mall wasn’t due to open for another hour, the eternally officious Mrs. Norton wanted us there early (would she take attendance and report tardiness—to the janitor, maybe?) to fill out the necessary paperwork and give us pertinent information regarding what could, and what could not, be put in our booth (which Mother, naturally, would ignore)(risking detention).
    We found the door next to the loading dock unlocked, and went on in—Mother, me, and Sushi makes three—then up a short flight of cement steps to the first floor.
    Mrs. Norton had done some remodeling since the last tenant, the original wood floor now covered with gray industrial carpet, the once cavernously open area