Reasonable Offers

On the morning they sold the marriage, June priced the colander at fifty cents and the kitchen table at four thousand dollars.

Ellis, coming behind her with a second roll of stickers, changed both. The colander became three dollars. The table became reasonable offers.

“You can’t edit my prices.”

“Four thousand dollars isn’t a price. It’s a restraining order.”

“Then make an offer.”

At half past seven there were no collectors, only Felicity next door pretending to water one hydrangea for the sixth time. June and Ellis had posted photographs at midnight, left the price fields blank, and promised pickup between eight and four. The objects waited inside: kitchen things on the counter, books in fruit boxes by the stairs, tools on a towel in the hall, and the green lamp in the sitting room. The table remained in the kitchen because neither of them had been willing to photograph it before coffee.

They had three rules. They would split the money exactly. They would not explain the separation to strangers. They would not call anything ours.

The rules had seemed better at midnight.

Their first customer lifted the colander. “Fifty cents?”

“Three dollars,” Ellis said.

“Sticker says fifty.”

June gave Ellis the look that once meant we will discuss this at home and now had no obvious jurisdiction. “Fifty is fine.”

The man turned the colander over. One foot was missing, so it listed on a flat surface. Ellis always wedged it straight with a teaspoon when he washed rice on Thursdays. June had watched him do this roughly eight hundred times and had found it irritating for at least six hundred.

“It tips,” she told the customer.

“I just need it for pasta.”

“The holes are too large for angel hair,” Ellis said.

The customer looked from one of them to the other. “Do you want to sell it?”

“Yes,” June said.

“No,” Ellis said.

Felicity turned off her hose. The sale had begun.

By eight fifteen, six strangers had tracked damp footprints through the hall and Felicity had come in through the open front door carrying a travel mug. She believed they were clearing the house before renovating. June had allowed this belief to live for four days because correcting Felicity required a conversation and a conversation required stopping.

“Good turnout,” Felicity said. “You’ll have the extension finished in no time.”

Behind her, a woman switched on the green lamp. Its shade threw a peaceful circle over a box marked ELECTRICAL / MAYBE. June had bought it during their first winter in the house, when the sitting room’s overhead fixture made everyone look interrogated. In her new flat there was no ceiling light at all.

“Six dollars?” the woman asked.

“The wiring’s unreliable,” Ellis said.

June stared at him. “You rewired it in March.”

“Exactly.”

“He knows how to wire a plug.”

“Not under pressure.”

The woman removed her hand from the switch.

“It’s thirty dollars,” Ellis said.

“Sticker says six.”

“Inflation.”

She left without the lamp but bought three coasters for a dollar. June put the coin in the biscuit tin that served as their cash box.

“Fifty cents each,” Ellis said.

“We are not dividing every coin as it arrives.”

“That was rule one.”

“At the end.”

“The rules didn’t specify.”

June set the coin on the hall table between them. “There. Take your half.”

Felicity made a sound into her mug. It might have been coffee going down the wrong way.

There had been no single catastrophe to offer people. June and Ellis had reached the end by a route made of cancelled dinners, conversations scheduled for later, and one holiday on which both had been relieved when Ellis caught a stomach bug. In April, June had said she was lonely. Ellis had cleaned the gutters. The gutters needed cleaning, which had made it worse.

They had signed leases on separate flats in June. The landlord wanted the house empty Monday. What each person indisputably owned was boxed and labelled. What neither wanted was for sale. What both wanted had remained in place until one in the morning, when they added most of it to the listings too.

A student in a red coat crouched over Ellis’s toolbox in the hall. June had marked it one dollar.

“Does this include everything?” the student asked.

“No,” June said. “The medium Phillips screwdriver is missing.”

Ellis looked at her.

“And the tape measure sticks at eighty-three centimetres.”

“I don’t mind.”

“The hammer has terrible balance.” June lifted it and demonstrated, nearly striking the kettle beside her. “See?”

“It’s a hammer.”

“You say that now.”

The student paid Ellis five dollars for a stack of gardening books and left the toolbox.

“One dollar?” Ellis asked when she was gone.

“Market price.”

“You borrowed the tape measure yesterday.”

“It sticks.”

“At eighty-three centimetres.”

June moved a chipped blue bowl three inches to the left. “Your kitchen drawer is exactly seventy-nine.”

The next hour made them popular. People forwarded the listings to friends. A small white dog, left on the front step, urinated on a box of travel guides waiting for collection, and its owner bought the whole box rather than discuss cleaning costs.

Anything with no history sold easily. The unopened fondue set left for twelve dollars. So did duplicate scissors, a novelty ice tray, and a cushion that had always made Ellis sneeze. The objects they had actually used developed sudden defects and complicated prices.

At ten, a broad man in a cycling jersey sat in the blue armchair.

Ellis read there when he could not sleep. The cushion had a permanent shallow trough made by his left leg. June had put twenty dollars on it because his new flat had one room and already contained a bed, a desk, and, according to the floor plan, almost no remaining air.

“Comfortable,” the cyclist said.

“The right spring catches,” June told him.

He shifted. “Not on me.”

“It catches eventually.”

Ellis ran his thumb down the cash list. “Twenty dollars.”

“I’ll give you fifteen.”

June waited for Ellis to mention the stain under the cushion or the narrowness of the cyclist’s van. Instead he said, “Done.”

The man brought the car around. Ellis helped him angle the chair through the front door and into the back. For a moment only Ellis’s shoes were visible beneath it. Then the chair was gone, leaving four clean squares in the dust on the floorboards.

“You could have kept it,” June said.

“Where?”

“You would have found somewhere.”

“You priced it.”

“You sold it.”

“That is generally what prices are for.”

Felicity was beside them again. She had acquired the fondue set from its buyer, though neither June nor Ellis had seen how. “What exactly are you renovating?” she asked.

June could have named a room. Ellis was looking at the four clean squares.

“Nothing,” June said. “We’re moving.”

“Both of you?”

“Separately.”

Felicity considered this. The sympathetic change in her face lasted less than a second. “Right,” she said. “Which of you has my drill?”

Ellis said June. June said Ellis. Felicity finished her coffee while they searched two boxes and the kitchen drawer. She left with the drill and the fondue set.

At noon they ate cheese sandwiches over the ironing board, which was priced at three dollars and too low to stand at comfortably. There had been messages about the kitchen table. One woman offered sixty after seeing one corner in a photograph, provided they could deliver. A dealer offered twenty and called it disposal. Ellis answered each inquiry by saying the table required an in-person inspection. June answered by raising the price.

“Neither flat has room,” he said.

“It fits in mine.”

“Not with the leaf.”

“I don’t need the leaf.”

The removable leaf had been upright in the hall cupboard for seven years. They used it twice a year and spent both occasions blaming it for the table’s wobble.

“Then take it without the leaf.”

“And you take the leaf?”

“For what?”

“A very narrow table.”

He laughed with his mouth full. June did too, unwillingly. Cheese lodged behind one of her front teeth. Ellis pointed to the exact place. She turned away to pick it free.

At two, when most of the rooms had acquired gaps, the student in the red coat returned with her roommate. They had brought a tape measure—theirs worked at every length—and thirty-five dollars.

“For the table,” the roommate said.

“You haven’t inspected it,” June told her.

“We saw it when we collected the books.”

“It wasn’t in the listing,” Ellis said.

“It was behind you.”

The two women had just rented an upstairs flat. They needed something for four people to eat at, study at, and, one added, leave post on until it became legally irrelevant. They had measured the turn in their staircase and drawn a diagram on the back of the five-dollar gardening receipt.

June led them into the kitchen.

The table looked larger without the usual piles. Its top bore a pale ring from the winter Ellis used a houseplant to conceal a burn and a row of dents from June’s brief attempt to make jewellery. One corner had been sanded smoother than the others because Ellis’s forearm rested there.

The student pressed both palms on the top. It rocked.

“Leaf,” June and Ellis said together.

They fetched the leaf from the cupboard and fitted it. The table became longer and less stable.

“Forty,” the roommate offered.

“Sixty,” Ellis said. “Chairs separate.”

June looked at him.

They settled at fifty. June held the table while Ellis lay beneath it with a screwdriver. One screw had stripped. He turned the driver, muttered, reset it at an angle, and tried again. June knew to press down above his right hand. She did it without being asked.

The legs came free. The students carried the top through the hall, stopping twice to save the paint. At the front door, the dog’s owner bought the four chairs for ten dollars, so the students tied the table top to a borrowed roof rack and promised to sit on boxes.

June nearly called them back. Ellis put the stripped screw into their hands and told them the angle it preferred.

By four, the cash tin held two hundred and eleven dollars. The house held the colander, the green lamp, and several things no one had asked about. Ellis counted out one hundred and five dollars for each of them. The final dollar lay in the bottom of the tin.

“You take it,” June said.

“We can leave it for the landlord.”

“For emotional damage.”

Ellis put it in Felicity’s letter box with a note saying DRILL DEPOSIT.

They moved the unsold things out of the hall. In the kitchen, the table had left a clean oblong on the floorboards surrounded by seventeen years of scratches. Without it, there was nowhere sensible to put the lamp.

Ellis peeled off the thirty-dollar sticker and held the lamp out to June.

“Your flat has no ceiling fixture,” he said.

June took the lamp. She removed the fifty-cent sticker from the colander and pressed the dented metal into his hands.

“Three dollars,” he said.

“It tips.”

“I own a teaspoon.”

He put the lamp behind her passenger seat. He tried it upright, frowned at the angle, then laid it across the back and fastened both seat belts around the shade.

June waited until he had finished. Ellis hooked two fingers through the colander’s rim.

She got into the car. He tapped the glass and she lowered it.

“The bulb’s loose,” he said. “One turn clockwise.”

“I know.”

The traffic light at the end of the street changed. June pulled away.