Priceless

Shafts of June sun peeked through the clouds. It was a day created for being outdoors because the wind diminished the heat. The weather had been unspeakably beautiful since my grandmother's funeral, and now we were all gathered around the picnic table in her backyard—but we weren't having a picnic. We were getting ready for some sort of twisted rummage sale where there were no marked prices.

Part of this "sale" had taken place last week. My aunts and uncles had bargained hard for her possessions, cajoling and tears becoming legal tender as they bartered for what had sentimental or monetary value. Now, it was time to let the grandchildren loose to pick over what was left. I felt like a vulture, or a bargain-hunter at some bizarre garage sale.

We waited outside of the large white colonial like race-horses waiting for the starting bell. My aunt Joan was the one to start us, merely with the words: "I suppose you can go in, now."

And we're off.

I hadn't been inside of my grandmother's house for five years, and I wasn't really prepared for the onslaught of memories. There were things I recognized, but it wasn't like I remembered it. The house seemed smaller than it had when I was twelve. Her kitchen table was gone, and I recalled hearing that my aunt Donna had wanted it. That was the just the first thing I saw missing.

I stopped in the doorway, staring at the empty space where the kitchen table had been, at the marks it had left on the faded yellow linoleum, as my cousins pushed their way past me.

"You coming?" Cindy asked, peering over her shoulder at me. I nodded and she shrugged, following the other three into the dining room.

I felt like crying. My eyes burned with feeling, seeing the bareness here. It seemed like forever since I'd sat in this kitchen on a Sunday morning in winter, my feet tucked under me, spreading homemade jelly on toast and watching Grandma flip pancakes. I hated eggs and she always made something else for me, like waffles, or her specialty: rolled pancakes filled with apple sauce, topped with a generous dollop of whipped cream and then sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.

"Oh, look at this!"

I started toward the dining room where my cousins were exclaiming over the little treasures they were finding. Sharon was dangling a necklace over tented fingers. Paula and Lynn were both looking over the things on the table, digging through a box full of odds-and-ends.

Just like some surreal garage sale, my aunts had gathered her things up and put them in open boxes, displaying some of them on the dining room table. I looked around in the whole, strange, dream-like lunacy of it all, my throat aching with regret as I saw her necklaces hung on coat hangers from the chandelier on the low ceiling, linen folded neatly and stacked on the table, the purse she had used when I was twelve next to the salt and pepper shakers shaped like pilgrims that I remember using at Thanksgiving dinners.

Her plants that were beginning to droop from lack of attention, her knick-knacks, like the ceramic kissing boy and girl she had bought in Italy, were all spread out on tables for our perusal. I felt uneasy, looking around at the remnants of her life put on display for us to choose from.

"This is going to go great in my apartment!" Lynn, one of my uncle Ralph's three girls, held up a white and blue bedspread, the one that had been in the front bedroom. I couldn't count the number of times I had snuggled under that. It seemed unreal that in the fall that bedspread would be in Lynn's apartment at Eastern Michigan. She was ecstatic about all the wonderful things she wouldn't have to buy to get started at college.

Paula, Lynn's older sister, stood piling up stacks of dishes. She was getting married in a month and didn't have a set of her own. I watched her put the dishes we had eaten quiet lunches on, the ones with the blue flowers on them, and glasses to match, into a box.

Cindy, the oldest of us at twenty-eight, was walking around and taking dibs on the furniture. There wasn't much left—the dining room table, a few lamps, the couch, a coffee table. The front bedroom, or guest room, enclosing an armoire, a bed, and a vanity worth nearly two thousand dollars, was off-limits. My aunt Donna had nabbed that. I knew that Cindy was actually hoping to get the house for herself and her seven-year-old son, Noah. She had just been through a divorce and was living with her mother, my aunt Joan.

"Oooo! Look!" Sharon, the youngest of us at fifteen, was now rummaging through a box full of jewelry. My aunts had taken anything of real monetary value from our grandmother's jewelry box, but to Sharon, this was a treasure chest. She held up a beautiful silver necklace that I remembered our grandmother telling me a story about once. It was a thin, shiny silver heart with a tiny silver key laying flat against the heart's surface. My grandfather, who had died before any of his grandchildren were born, had made that heart himself before they were married, giving it to her before he had gone off to war. The key to his heart. She had worn it often, I remembered, and I was always so fascinated with it and the romantic story behind it. I wondered if Sharon knew the necklace's history.

"Do you think it's valuable?" Sharon asked, showing it to Lynn. My heart cried out. Money, always money. She obviously didn't know the story. Lynn peered at it, interested.

"If it's real silver, it is," Lynn said, reaching for it, and examining the heart and key. Sharon wouldn't let go of the chain. "Let me have it."

"No, I found it first!" Sharon's eyes blazed at her sister.

"So? I'm older than you. Give it to me!" Lynn tried to pry Sharon's fingers from the chain. Seeing that Lynn really meant to keep it, Sharon was fighting in earnest now. I stared at them, open-mouthed, transfixed.

"No! It's mine! I found it and it's mine!" Sharon's voice had that exact whiney tone I remembered from childhood, the one she used to get what she wanted. Unfortunately, she usually did.

Lynn swore at her, Sharon swore back. Lynn pushed, Sharon pulled. Eventually, as I knew it would, the chain broke and the heart and key slipped off.

I watched, my breath held, as it clinked off of the table near the window and fell to the floor. They both lunged for it at the same time.

"No!" I cried, but it was too late. They knocked it down the heating grate.

"Stupid!" Sharon said to Lynn. "See what you did!"

"It wasn't my fault!" Lynn picked herself up from the floor.

I stood, dumbfounded. If I could have chosen one thing, it would have been that heart. I could have cared less if it was real silver or not.

"I think I'll look upstairs," I said, feeling something heavy turn over in my stomach.

"Hey, great idea!" Paula jumped up. "There's probably tons of good stuff up there!"

I had started a stampede. The necklace forgotten, the other objects on the first floor abandoned for the thought of things even more precious on the second, I found myself alone, Cindy calling for me to "come on!"

Now, the silence was stifling. My memories were fuzzy, like faded black and white pictures. They were little-girl memories of baking cookies and making Rice Krispie Treats, raking leaves and jumping into the piles, helping her in the garden behind the garage, and coloring in the living room with broken and blunted Crayolas while she dozed in the armchair with a green and white afghan tucked around her legs. That afghan was now in Lynn's pile, and would probably adorn her couch in her apartment at Eastern.

I got down on my hands and knees and peered down the heating grate. I could see nothing but darkness. Sitting back on my heels, I sighed. We had lived in the same town for the past five years, and I had only seen my grandmother a few times. My father had fallen out with her, and as I got older, I thought about it less and less. I had my friends, and when I finally got a car of my own, I had a job and a social life and school and no time. The last time I saw her was at Christmas, but she had come to our house.

From upstairs, there were cries of delight as new treasures were found and confiscated. I glanced toward the ceiling, knowing I shouldn't feel so bitter, knowing that she was gone, and that if we didn't take her things, they would just be thrown away. What I couldn't understand was why they weren't awash with memories, like I was? I could still smell her faint lilac scent on everything here, and yet they were fighting over her possessions. It just seemed to me that her death had turned everyone into predators—even her own children—especially her own children.

I wandered into the living room and stared at the empty space where the television used to be. My uncle Ralph had taken that. He had been the one to take the stereo, her car, and most of the other valuable stuff, with the exception of the furniture in the front bedroom which, according to my father, my aunt Donna had fought hard for.

I went around the couch to the two double doors that opened up to the front bedroom. It was off-limits, but still, I wanted to see it. I had spent many nights in this spare room, staring at shadow-slats on the ceiling made by the Venetian blinds before drifting off to sleep. It seemed strange to see the doors shut. She had always left at least one ajar.

I pushed the doors open and stepped inside. Sound seemed muffled in here, and there was a slight musty odor, as if no one had been in the room in a long time. The bed was minus its bedspread, but the wispy white curtains covering the blinds I remembered were still there, along with the antique furniture waiting to be shipped off to my aunt Donna's.

I thought there should at least be price tags, something that read: Donna gets this because she let Joan have the pearl necklace.

I opened the armoire and knelt in front of it. I remembered how big it had looked when I was four and five, how I had to stretch to reach the handle. No clothes hung on the rod but, overlooked in the bottom of a beaten-up old box, were all of the toys, discarded, waiting for a child's eager hands.

I picked up a faded red and white stuffed dog from the top of the pile. He had a ragged left ear (I used to chew on it) and a grape juice stain on his back. I don't remember his name, but I knew that he had one once. There were several decks of playing cards, old and faded and mismatched, but I remembered making card houses with them, or just pretending to play "real" cards with them like the grown-ups. Resting on stacks of building blocks, there were the plastic army men that I had used as people in my houses made of Lincoln-Log-Lego-block combinations, and two Barbie dolls that had gone nearly bald from all of the hair brushing they had been put through. And then there were the coloring books—Raggedy Ann and Andy, Mickey Mouse and Pluto, and a huge Kentucky Fried Chicken tub full of Crayolas. I looked at them through prisms.

I heard the pounding of feet on the stairs. I quickly picked up the box and came out of the front bedroom, shutting the door behind me.

"What'd you find?" Cindy asked, meeting me at the bottom of the stairs, her arms around a large box of her own, full of books. "Anything interesting?"

"Some toys," I replied. "I don't know, are you interested?"

She set her box down and sifted through mine. "Nope," she said, shaking her head, "Noah's too old for most of this stuff. He's into computer games, now."

"Oh. Okay." I went past her toward the kitchen and out the back door. My parents were sitting with the rest of the family at the picnic table, smoking and talking. They all looked up as I approached.

"So, are you done?" my aunt Donna asked. I nodded.

"I'll help you carry the rest," my uncle Ralph said, standing up. "Just tell me which boxes are yours."

"This is," I said.

"You've got to be joking!" My uncle Ralph was staring at me. "Didn't you want anything else?"

I shrugged.

My aunt Joan eyed my box. "Are you sure that's all you wanted?"

"Yeah," I replied, glancing back at the house and hefting my box. "It's all I really wanted."