Free The Auctioneer by Joan Samson Page A

television set and begun the journey toward the kitchen. “What right had you, you fresh miss?” she hissed. What right had you? This is my house and I had things to say to that man.”
    “What can you want to say to him?” Mim asked. “What can a body say? He don’t care—”
    “No. That’s what,” Ma said. “No. No. No. Not the pair of you together can muster an ounce of gumption. Give the man a chance. You never said a word to hint you wasn’t just as happy to give away your dressin’ table. You never-”
    “It’s not the dressin’ table, Ma,” Mim screamed. “I don’t give a hoot about the dressin’ table.” She turned abruptly and sat down on the piano bench with her back to Ma, staring at the dusty keys that no one knew how to play any more.
    Ma sighed. “Miriam dear,” she said. She turned and hobbled back to her couch. She settled herself with a cushion against the small of her back and her bad leg up on the stool. Then she said, “Was a weddin’ present from your mother, if I remember right.
    Mim nodded.
    “Such a pretty thing you was,” Ma said. “A dressin’ table she gave you. This was a mean place for the likes of you.
    “It was not,” Mim said crossly, standing up and walking to the window so that she looked out over the green lawn, the stretch of garden yellow with the first marigolds and zinnias, the ribbon of field where they used to pasture the work horses, and then the pond, blue beneath the summer sky. “My mother never had a scrap of sense.”
    “Perly ain’t the kind would of gone off with it, child, if you’d let him know.”
    “He knows, Ma,” Mim said, her voice rising. “He knows. John told him. I told him. You just wait. He won’t stop.” She started out the front door, but banged back in to say, “All you can do is run, Ma. There are people like that. Either you give in or you run.”
    Mim ran out and up the path to the garden to face John. He stopped work and stood grasping the shaft of the hoe tightly with both hands. He watched Mim come and thought about catching her at the waist and shaking her until her waywardness came loose like chaff. But when she was near, running the tips of her fingers over Hildie’s face and hair, watching him warily, he took his hoe to the soil again. He would have touched her then, for his comfort and hers, but it seemed a difficult thing to do.
    Alone in the house, Ma sighed. “It’s that crazy streak comin’ straight down the line from her ma.” She settled back to catch the last wisps of her program. She had missed the whole scene where the doctor told Angela that Dirk had leukemia. And now, in the last few minutes, Angela was staring wildly, balling up a handkerchief, screaming, “No! Oh, no, no, no!”
     
    “You’ll pay worse if you try to say no,” Mim said, scraping her chair back from the supper table and stamping to the sink.
    “If I’d spent my life doin’ what other people had in mind for me, I wouldn’t be settin’ here right now and neither would you,” Ma said. Ain’t nobody goin’ to tell me to give away nothin’ I prize.”
    “He’s not tellin’ you, Ma. He’s makin’ you.”
    “He’s just doin’ his job. There’s never any harm in askin’. But you needn’t keep answerin’ the call. If you was a real Moore, you wouldn’t be so eager to give away our belongin’s.”
    “I’m a Moore as much as you,” Mim said. “It’s you that’s on his side, refusin’ to see what he is.”
    All week the women wrangled, while John sat, sometimes with his head buried in his arms. When he could stand it no longer he shouted and they sulked in silence.
    At night, after they were alone in bed, he pressed himself on Mim. “What happened with him? What did he do?”
    “It’s not the table, Johnny,” Mim said. “And it’s not the fact he took it. It’s what he is all through. He just made that clear as clear.”
    “Well tell him no,” John said, “both of us—no bickerin’ this time to