The Rummage Sale Price War

I have priced a lot of things wrong in my life, but nothing like the morning I stood in the basement of Grace Community Church in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and watched a woman named Sherry Talmadge pick up my dead mother’s gravy boat, turn it over to check the maker’s mark, and set two crumpled dollar bills on Dorene Pruitt’s card table like she was doing us a favor.

Two dollars. For Opal’s gravy boat. The one that had sat at the head of a Sunday dinner table for fifty-one years, the one my mother wrapped in dish towels every single Thanksgiving of my childhood because she said a chip in the spout was a chip in the whole meal, the one I had personally wrapped in the same yellow dish towels not six weeks earlier when we cleared her house.

It should not have been anywhere near a folding table with a hand-written sign that said EVERYTHING MUST GO on it. It should have been in a box in my garage, waiting for me to have enough good sense in me to go through it without crying on it. Instead it was sitting on my rival’s table, marked at two dollars in Dorene Pruitt’s unmistakable block handwriting, about to go home with a woman who buys up rummage sale china by the box and flips it on the internet before the church coffee’s even gone cold.

I want to explain how that gravy boat got there before I tell you what happened next, because if I just tell you the end, you will think Dorene Pruitt is a saint, and you will think I am a fool, and neither one of those is entirely fair. It is a longer story than a gravy boat. It is eleven years long, and it starts, like most wars in a small town, over something that should never have mattered as much as it did.

*THE WAR*

Dorene Pruitt and I have run competing tables at the Grace Community rummage sale every October since I was fifty-six years old. For those of you who have never had the particular pleasure of a small-town church basement sale, I will explain the geography. There is a coat rack on the north wall that has held the same donated winter coats since roughly the Clinton administration, and around that coat rack, in the back left corner, is where I have set up my table every year for eleven years. Across the room, back right corner, under the upright piano nobody has tuned since 2014, is Dorene’s corner.

Everybody in that basement, from Pastor Gene Holloway down to whichever grandchild has been dragged along to carry boxes, calls those two corners exactly what they are. Franny’s corner. Dorene’s corner. And for eleven years, the unspoken rule of that basement has been that whatever I priced my items at, Dorene priced hers a little lower, and whatever Dorene priced hers at, I priced mine a little lower right back, until by two in the afternoon every October Saturday the whole sale had collapsed into what my friend Lu Ann Sadler calls, with real affection, “the Franny and Dorene fire sale.”

It started, if you want the honest truth, over a set of dishes. It always starts over dishes with women like us. But I did not understand that until much later, and for eleven years I believed the war started over something almost embarrassingly small: a hand-crank ice cream maker.

My late husband’s mother had given me that ice cream maker in 1987 and I had used it exactly twice before deciding that an electric one from the drugstore worked just fine, and by the time I brought it to my first rummage sale table it was still in its original box with the pamphlet inside. I priced it at eight dollars, which felt generous. Dorene, three tables over on her first year running that corner, had an identical model, same brand, same box, and she priced hers at six.

I do not know why that got under my skin the way it did. I have turned it over more times than I care to admit, and the only honest answer I have is that I was fifty-six years old, two years widowed, and looking for something, anything, to feel a little bit competitive about again. So the next Saturday I brought a Crock-Pot I did not need to sell and marked it a dollar under whatever Dorene had on her table for a Crock-Pot. She noticed. The Saturday after that, she brought a whole box of Tupperware and undercut my Tupperware by fifty cents a piece. I brought lamps. She brought lamps cheaper. By the third October of this nonsense, half the church had figured out what we were doing, and the smart shoppers had learned to walk the room once, note the prices at both our tables, and then wait fifteen minutes for the second markdown war to break out, because it always did, and it always got them a better deal.

Pastor Gene, in his gentle way, tried exactly once to broker peace between us, in the spring of our third year, over coffee in the fellowship hall. He said something about how the Lord surely had bigger plans for two capable women than pricing casserole dishes fifty cents under each other’s noses, and Dorene and I both nodded and said he was right, and then we went right back to it that October like he’d never said a word. It was not that either of us was cruel. It was that neither of us knew, yet, why we were really doing it.

Over the years the war developed its own folklore, the way these things do in a small town where everybody knows everybody’s business and half of them show up on a Saturday morning just to watch. There was the Year of the Lamps, when I brought eleven lamps to sell and Dorene, not to be outdone, brought fourteen, and by noon there were so many lamps plugged into the one extension cord behind the piano that Cletus had to go find a second outlet strip before somebody tripped a breaker. There was the Christmas Ornament Incident, when Dorene priced a box of vintage glass ornaments at a dime apiece out of pure spite after I’d priced mine at fifteen cents, and we both ended up losing money on ornaments that were, by any honest appraisal, worth at least a dollar each. Lu Ann started keeping a running tally one year, just for her own amusement, of how many times one of us re-marked a price tag in a single Saturday, and the record, set the year I brought a whole box of my late husband’s fishing lures, stands at nine markdowns on a single Coleman cooler between nine in the morning and one in the afternoon.

The regulars loved it. I will admit that much. There was a certain crowd, mostly the same dozen or so bargain hunters, who had learned to time their arrival for exactly eleven-thirty, because by then the second wave of markdowns had usually hit and the pickings were, in Cletus’s words, “better than Black Friday and a lot less likely to get you trampled.” Sherry Talmadge herself was one of the regulars who benefited most, filling boxes for her online shop off the back of a rivalry she never once had to lift a finger to encourage. Neither Dorene nor I minded that other people got good deals off our foolishness. What neither of us said out loud, for eleven years, was that the foolishness had stopped being about lamps and Crock-Pots a long time before either of us admitted it, and had become, without either of us quite noticing the turn, the only way we knew how to show up for each other every October at all. You cannot spend eleven years standing forty feet apart in the same church basement, watching each other’s tables like a hawk, without some small part of you starting to depend on the person doing the watching.

*THE MIX-UP*

This year, my daughter Reagan drove up from Lafayette to help me clean out the last of the boxes from my mother’s house, boxes I had been putting off for six weeks because grief has its own schedule and mine kept saying not yet, not yet. We spent a Thursday going through Mom’s kitchen things in my garage, and near the bottom of the third box we found the good china, Mom’s Briar Rose set, service for twelve, wrapped in those same yellow dish towels I remembered from every holiday of my life.

I could not decide what to do with it. Keep it, obviously, but keep it where, and packed how, and did I even want to unpack a whole set of Sunday dishes into my own cabinets when my own cabinets were already full and my Sundays did not look anything like my mother’s Sundays anymore. So I did the thing you do when you cannot decide something: I put it off. I taped the box shut, wrote MOM’S CHINA, FRANNY LOOK FIRST, DO NOT TOUCH across the top in permanent marker, and told Reagan we would take it to the church basement Friday night, ahead of the Saturday sale, just to get it out of my garage and into the church’s storage closet until I had the heart to sort through it properly.

I told her to have Wyatt carry it in.

Wyatt Combs is Cletus Yoder’s grandson, sixteen years old, built like a fence post, and the most reliable pair of hands in that basement on setup night, which is exactly why I trusted him with it. What I did not know, what I only pieced together days later, was that Wyatt had come straight from football practice and was carrying four boxes at once when Reagan called across a noisy room, over the sound of somebody’s radio and three separate conversations, “Take that one to Franny’s corner, she wants to look at it first!”

What Wyatt heard, by his own account, standing red-faced in front of me the following Monday, was “Take that one for anybody’s corner, whoever wants it first.” He is a good kid and I believe him completely, because I have stood in that same basement on setup night myself and I know exactly how much noise is bouncing off those cinderblock walls with the folding tables scraping and Lu Ann’s radio playing gospel quartet music at a volume that makes conversation an act of faith.

Wyatt, thinking he’d been handed one more box of general donations, and running out of surface space near my corner, set MOM’S CHINA down on the closest open table, which happened to be the near edge of Dorene’s territory, tucked half under her tablecloth where nobody would notice a stray box among forty other stray boxes.

The marker had smeared, too, sometime between my garage and that basement floor, one corner of the box getting damp from somebody’s spilled coffee on setup night, so that by Saturday morning what had once clearly read FRANNY LOOK FIRST DO NOT TOUCH now looked, to anyone glancing at it in a hurry, like a box that had been rained on and forgotten, no name legible at all.

And Dorene, doing exactly what I would have done in her position, exactly what either of us has done every single October for eleven years, looked at an unlabeled box of beautiful china sitting in her corner at six-forty-five on Saturday morning, decided it must be part of the overnight donation pile, unwrapped one plate to check the pattern and the maker’s mark, saw that it was a truly lovely set, Briar Rose, hand-painted trim, the kind of china that could bring real money at a proper estate sale, and did the thing that eleven years of habit had trained her to do without a second thought.

She priced it low. Not just fairly low. Insultingly, spitefully low, the kind of low she only ever went when she was trying to make a point at my expense, because in her mind, God love her, she was looking at a truly excellent set of donated china that had turned up, for once, in HER corner instead of mine, and some old competitive reflex in her decided the fastest way to win this particular October was to move it before I ever got a chance to price my own table against it.

Two dollars a place setting. The whole twelve-piece set, gravy boat and all, for less than the cost of a church potluck casserole.

*WHAT I SAW*

I did not find out until nearly eleven that morning, because I had spent the first four hours of the sale at my own table, and because it honestly did not occur to me, not for one second, that anybody would have set my mother’s china out on a rummage sale table. I had told Wyatt myself, in plain English, that box was not for sale. I had written it on the box in my own handwriting. It was, in my mind, the one thing in that entire basement that was completely, unmistakably safe.

Lu Ann found me first. She came around the coat rack at a near run, out of breath in the way a sixty-nine-year-old woman gets out of breath when she has been moving faster than her hips would like, and she grabbed my arm and said, “Franny, is that your mother’s Briar Rose over on Dorene’s table?”

I want to tell you I walked over there calmly. I did not. I do not remember crossing that basement floor at all. The next clear memory I have is standing at the edge of Dorene’s table, staring down at a hand-lettered sign that said CHINA SET, TWELVE PIECE, TWO DOLLARS EACH OR TWENTY FOR THE LOT, sitting next to my mother’s gravy boat, which Sherry Talmadge was at that exact moment turning over in her hands to read the maker’s mark on the bottom, the way she reads the maker’s mark on everything in that basement before she buys it up to resell online, a habit both Dorene and I have quietly despised in each other’s company exactly zero times, because we have never once in eleven years had a friendly conversation to despise anything in together.

“That’s my mother’s,” I said, and my voice came out strange, too high, not like mine at all.

Sherry looked up at me with the mild, unbothered expression of a woman who has heard a hundred rummage sale sellers change their mind about a price mid-sale and has learned to simply wait them out. “It’s marked two dollars,” she said, and set her two crumpled bills down on the table like the conversation was over.

And here is the part of this story I did not expect, the part that eleven years of watching Dorene Pruitt price a Crock-Pot fifty cents under mine had not prepared me for at all.

Dorene got there before I did.

*DORENE*

I do not know exactly what alerted her, whether it was the sound of my voice or Lu Ann’s face or some instinct sharpened by eleven years of watching me across that basement, but by the time Sherry Talmadge reached out to actually pick that gravy boat up off the table and put it in her bag, Dorene’s hand came down flat on the table beside it, not hard, but final, the way you’d stop a child from touching a hot stove.

“That’s not for sale,” Dorene said.

Sherry blinked at her. “It’s on your table, Dorene. It’s marked.”

“I priced it wrong,” Dorene said, and I watched her face do something I had never once seen it do in eleven years, which was go soft and uncertain all at once, like a woman realizing mid-sentence that she has stepped somewhere she should not have stepped. “It’s not mine to sell. Give me the two dollars back and I’ll write you a proper refund.”

Sherry Talmadge is not a woman who gives up a good deal without a fight, and for a second I thought we were going to have a genuine standoff in the middle of Grace Community Church’s fellowship basement over a gravy boat, which would have been, in its own way, a fitting end to eleven years of pettiness between Dorene and me. But Dorene did something then that I think surprised Sherry as much as it surprised me. She reached into her own apron pocket, the one she keeps her cash box change in, and pulled out a five dollar bill and pressed it into Sherry’s hand along with the two dollars back.

“For your trouble,” Dorene said. “The good candlesticks are on Franny’s table if you want something today. Go look.”

Sherry, who has never in her life turned down a five dollar bill she did not have to work for, shrugged, pocketed it, and wandered off toward my corner, muttering something about how church sales get more complicated every year.

And then it was just Dorene and me and Lu Ann and my mother’s gravy boat sitting on a folding table between us, and eleven years of silence trying to figure out what to say first.

“How did you know,” I finally managed, “that it was mine?”

Dorene did not answer right away. She picked the gravy boat up, both hands, careful the way you are careful with something you already understand is precious even before anyone tells you why, and turned it over to look at the bottom, at the maker’s mark, at the small hairline crack near the handle that Opal always said gave the whole set its character.

“I didn’t,” she said quietly. “Not for sure. Not until I actually unwrapped the second box a little while ago and found the papers underneath the tissue.”

*THE PAPERS*

I had forgotten, in eleven years of feuding, that my mother was the kind of woman who tucked things into places. Underneath the tissue paper lining the bottom of that china box, Opal had left a small stack of index cards, recipe cards in her own looping handwriting, the kind she used to keep her Sunday gravy recipe and her Christmas ham glaze and the little notes she’d write to herself about which grandchild liked what. On top of that stack, in pencil, faint but legible if you looked close, was a note that had nothing to do with recipes at all. It read: For Franny, when she is ready. Set the table the way I taught you. Love always fits on twelve plates if you make room.

Dorene had found that card while I was still four tables away, not knowing any of it was happening, and by the time I reached her corner she already understood, in a way that had nothing to do with maker’s marks, exactly whose china she was holding and exactly what it meant to have almost let it walk out the door in Sherry Talmadge’s canvas bag for two dollars a plate.

“I sell things that don’t matter for a living every October,” Dorene said, and her voice cracked in a way I had never once heard from her before, not in eleven years of Crock-Pots and lamps and hand-crank ice cream makers. “I know the difference the second I see it. I just didn’t see it fast enough this time. I’m sorry, Franny. I am so sorry.”

I want to tell you I said something gracious right then. What I actually said was, “Why do you even care? You’ve spent eleven years trying to beat me out of every dollar in this basement.” It was not kind, and I knew it wasn’t kind even as it came out of my mouth, but eleven years is a long time to hold something in, and it came out sideways the way old hurt does.

Dorene set the gravy boat down very gently, and she looked at me for a long moment, and then she said the thing that finally, after eleven Octobers, explained the whole war to both of us at once.

“Because eleven years ago,” she said, “it was my mother’s china sitting on your table, and I let it walk out the door for four dollars because I was too proud to ask you to hold it for me while I ran home for my checkbook.”

*WHAT I NEVER KNEW*

I did not remember it, not at first, not until Dorene walked me through it piece by piece, standing right there in that basement while the rest of the sale went on around us like nothing had happened, Lu Ann quietly waving off anyone who wandered too close.

Eleven years ago, the same October the ice cream maker war supposedly started, Dorene’s mother Idella had died that spring, and her family had split up the estate the way families sometimes do, fast and a little bit cruel, with Dorene’s older sister claiming most of what mattered before Dorene had even gotten back into town for the funeral. The one thing Dorene had wanted, more than the furniture, more than the jewelry, was her mother’s everyday china, a simple pattern with a wheat sheaf border that Idella had used every single day of Dorene’s childhood, not the fancy Sunday china, just the ordinary plates that had held ten thousand ordinary suppers. Her sister sold it in an estate sale before Dorene ever got the chance to claim it, and Dorene had spent that whole first grieving year quietly looking for anything close to that pattern, at every rummage sale and flea market and church bazaar within forty miles, hoping to rebuild even a fraction of her mother’s table.

That October, at my very first year running a table at Grace Community, I had a partial set of dishes with a wheat sheaf border, donated from my husband’s aunt’s estate, not a perfect match to Idella’s pattern but close enough, close enough that Dorene had stood at my table for a long time turning one plate over in her hands with an expression I mistook, at the time, for simple browsing.

She had asked me to hold them for fifteen minutes while she ran home for her checkbook. I told her, the way I told everyone that year and every year since, that we did not hold items, first come first served, church policy, no exceptions, because I had watched sales get complicated and unfair the one year we did make exceptions. I was not trying to hurt her. I did not know what those plates meant to her. I did not know anything about Idella, or the sister, or the year Dorene had just come through. I was a widow of two years myself, running my very first table, trying to keep things simple and fair in the only way I knew how.

By the time Dorene got back with her checkbook, another woman had bought the whole set for four dollars.

Dorene never told me why it mattered. She went home that night, she told me, and cried in her own kitchen over four dollars’ worth of somebody else’s donated dishes, and came back the following October with a hand-crank ice cream maker priced two dollars under mine, because pricing me out of something, anything, felt like the only way she had left to make sure nobody ever took something that mattered to her out from under her again without a fight.

*THE REST OF THAT SATURDAY*

We did not solve eleven years of pride in five minutes standing over a gravy boat, but we solved enough of it. I took my mother’s china home that afternoon, all twelve place settings, safe in the back of my car, and Dorene helped me carry the boxes out to it herself, refusing every time I tried to take one from her, saying only, “Let me. I’ve got it,” in a voice that meant more than the words did.

We closed our two corners early that day, for the first time in eleven years, and Lu Ann and Cletus stood there watching the two of us push my table and Dorene’s table together into one long row under the piano, both of us laughing about it in the particular helpless way you laugh when eleven years of foolishness finally lands on you all at once. Cletus, who has watched this whole feud unfold from a folding chair by the coffee urn every October since it started, just shook his head and said, “Took a china cabinet’s worth of guilt to get you two to share a table. Should’ve told you both sooner.”

We spent the last hour of that sale running one table together instead of two, and something strange and wonderful happened that neither of us expected. Without a rival to price against, we started pricing things fairly, generously even, and the sale did better in that last hour than it had in years, because people were not waiting around anymore for a second markdown war, they were just buying things at honest prices from two women who were, for the first time in eleven years, laughing together instead of competing.

Sherry Talmadge came back through around one o’clock, saw the two of us at one table, and actually stopped in her tracks. “Well,” she said, looking between us. “This is new.”

“Long time coming,” Dorene told her, and did not elaborate, and Sherry, sensing correctly that there was a story there she was not going to get out of either of us that day, moved on to the book table instead.

*WHAT CAME AFTER*

That was six weeks ago now, and the two of us have been to each other’s houses more times since that Saturday than we managed in the eleven years before it combined. I have sat at Dorene’s kitchen table and heard the whole story of Idella, the wheat sheaf plates, the sister she still has not fully made peace with, the ice cream maker that started nothing and meant everything. She has sat at mine and helped me finally unpack my mother’s Briar Rose into my own cabinets, both of us reading Opal’s pencil note out loud together, love always fits on twelve plates if you make room, until we were both crying and laughing about it at the same time, the way you do when a piece of grief finally settles into something softer.

We have already started planning next October’s table together, one corner instead of two, and Pastor Gene, who tried and failed to make peace between us eight years ago over fellowship hall coffee, told us last Sunday that he intends to frame this as a personal ministry victory whether we like it or not. Dorene told him he could frame it however he wanted as long as he did not expect either of us to admit, out loud, in front of the whole congregation, exactly how long it took two grown women to figure out that they had been fighting over the exact same grief the entire time.

I still have the gravy boat. It sits in the center of my mother’s china cabinet now, hairline crack and all, and every time I look at it I think about how close it came to leaving that basement for two dollars in a stranger’s canvas bag, and how it was Dorene Pruitt, of all the people on God’s earth, who put her hand down flat on that table and stopped it.

We have started a joke between us, Dorene and me, that we tell Lu Ann and Cletus every time we run into each other at the grocery store now, which is often, because it turns out we shop at the same Kroger on the same afternoon and neither of us had ever noticed in eleven years of not really looking. We tell people the rummage sale price war is officially over, and when they ask who won, we both say the same thing at the same time now, without planning it, like we have practiced it, which by this point I suppose we have.

Nobody won. We just finally stopped keeping score long enough to notice we had both been carrying the exact same thing the whole time, wrapped in yellow dish towels, waiting for somebody to unwrap it gently instead of pricing it to move.

Lu Ann says she saw it coming before either of us did, which I am fairly sure is not true, but I have decided to let her have it, because she has earned the right to say so after eleven Octobers of standing between our two tables trying to keep the peace with nothing but a clipboard and a look. Cletus, for his part, has taken to calling us “the Corner Sisters” whenever we show up together to set up chairs for Wednesday night supper, which neither of us has managed to talk him out of, and which I suspect we are both, somewhere underneath our complaining, a little bit fond of.

We have added a rule to our joint table this year, the first rule either of us has ever agreed to without an argument. If either one of us hesitates over a box, even for a second, even without saying why, the other one sets it aside without asking a single question, no explanation required, until whoever brought it in has had time to decide what it is worth to them. Dorene came up with it standing in my kitchen, turning one of Idella’s wheat sheaf saucers over in her hands, the one I finally tracked down for her at an estate sale two counties over as a kind of apology I do not think either of us needed anymore by the time I gave it to her, though we both cried over it anyway. It is not a church policy. It will never make it onto any official rummage sale flyer. But it is ours now, hers and mine, the one rule two stubborn women needed eleven years and a box of somebody’s mother’s china to finally agree on.

This October, for the first time in twelve years, there will be one table in the back corner of Grace Community Church, not two, no coat rack war on one side and no out-of-tune piano rivalry on the other, just Franny and Dorene, pricing things fairly, keeping half an eye out for Sherry Talmadge and her canvas bag, and setting aside, without either of us having to ask, anything that looks like it might still matter to somebody who has not walked in yet to claim it.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.