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  “Before I forget, Cassy,” Will said, “Jackson will definitely be at the American Trust Foundation dinner in January, right?”

  The Foundation’s Awards dinner was a biannual event celebrating excellence in journalism. “He will be there,” she confirmed. “But he thinks only DBS News is getting an award.”

  “What’s Mr. Darenbrook’s award for?” the young man from RIT asked.

  “Lifetime achievement,” Will answered. “And it’s a surprise, so that information is not to leave this room.”

  “I should hope everyone at this table will be attending the dinner,” Cassy said.

  “Depends on how many tickets corporate picks up,” Alexandra said while writing something. “The suits don’t give us a whole lot of money for extracurricular activities.” She looked up. “As you should well know, Cassy. And I do like your suit, by the way.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “All right, guys, let’s get back on point here,” Will said, picking up his legal pad.

  “Yo,” Cassy concurred, making them laugh again. She slipped on a pair of half glasses and scanned the agenda that had been passed to her. When she looked up she saw that Alexandra was watching her. The anchorwoman smiled and looked away.

  As she listened to Will, Cassy sat back in her chair slightly to cross her legs. Then she leaned forward, picked up her pen and made a note in the margin of the agenda. And then, somewhat idly, she wondered if she had ever not been in love with Alexandra Waring.

  DECEMBER

  II

  9

  Celia Has a Gift

  A FRIEND OF a friend of Rachel’s came to pick up their old refrigerator before the new one arrived. The guy was apparently some kind of fix-it whiz and he was somehow going to restore the Freon and put taps in the side to dispense beer and soda. Celia said if he could fix it why didn’t they just hire him to fix it while the refrigerator was still theirs instead of getting a new one. “Daddy’s getting it so don’t worry,” Rachel said. Celia was not worried in the least; she just hated what felt like arbitrarily replacing things for the sake of something new.

  “Charlie,” the man said when he arrived, holding out his hand to politely shake hers.

  He was huge, this Charlie, filling the doorway. Behind him stood an upright steel dolly with big straps. He was much older than Celia had expected for Rachel’s friend of a friend. He was like her dad’s age, neatly dressed in a sweater (that Celia could wear for a dress), jeans, work boots and big blue parka.

  “I feel kinda guilty,” Charlie said later, sipping the cup of black coffee Celia made for him while looking in the back of the refrigerator. “I should just fix this for you.”

  “Thanks for the thought,” Celia said, sitting at the breakfast bar, well wrapped in her terry-cloth robe, “but there’re always appliances mysteriously falling off the back of one of my roommate’s father’s trucks. This time it was a stainless steel refrigerator.” She was drinking coffee, as well. Nine-fifteen was early for her to be up; she didn’t get home from work until almost three this morning.

  “She’ll never keep it looking clean,” Charlie commented, coming back around from behind the old refrigerator, “not without a full-time maid.”

  “One of those hasn’t fallen off the back of the truck yet,” Celia told him.

  Something on the counter caught Charlie’s eye. It was an old door knocker, covered in years of crud, that was waiting for Celia to clean up. She bought it off a janitor last week who had been cleaning out a basement. The knocker was the head of a horse, made of what Celia believed to be solid brass.

  “I might be interested in making you an offer for that,” he said, moving closer.

  “This?” Celia handed it to him. “Sorry, but I’m totally in love with it. Someday I’m going to buy a house with a front door that will do it justice. I think it’s solid brass. Maybe a hundred years old.”

  “It is,” he confirmed, hefting it in his hand. He took reading glasses out of his pocket and slipped them on to examine it further. “But my guess is around 1880. Where’d you get it?”

  “On One Hundred and First Street. Guy was cleaning out the basement of the building. Ten bucks.” Actually, she had paid the janitor ten bucks so that she could climb into the Dumpster to see what he was throwing out. Celia didn’t know why she felt compelled to do things like this, but she felt no shame about it; she had always been fascinated by junk piles, looking for something that spoke to her. To a certain degree her mother shared her interest, but would never dream of the lengths Celia had been known to go.

  Charlie carefully placed the knocker back on the counter. “He gave you two, two hundred fifty bucks for ten dollars.”

  “I guess it’s going to have to be a very expensive house, then.”

  He looked at her. “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging, “it’s never really been about money.”

  “Spoken like a girl who grew up with a lot of it.”

  She looked up at him. “I beg your pardon?” She knew she sounded like her mother when she got on her high horse, but she didn’t like the way he said it.

  He held up his hand as a caution. “No offense. I just meant you obviously haven’t had to try to make a living selling antiques. If you did, well, then, the money would mean a lot.”

  “I’m a bartender,” she told him.

  He frowned slightly. “You seem kinda classy for a bartender.”

  “I’m a classy bartender,” she said, sliding off the stool to get more coffee. She was starting to feel depressed. “I just like old things.”

  “I work weekends at an auction house in the Bronx.” When she turned around, holding the coffeepot out to him, Charlie nodded and she poured. “Thanks. That’s why the money means something to me. I gotta kid trying to get through college. That’s what I use the money for.”

  “Where is this auction house?”

  He told her. It was way uptown, but it would have to be to make any money. “So if you ever want to sell anything like that, the knocker, I can move it for you. That’s the kind of thing people go nuts over.”

  Celia, standing there, sipped her coffee and lofted an eyebrow. “Maybe I should show you something, then.” She led Charlie to the maid’s room which she and Rachel shared as a kind of studio space. Rachel used her side for art stuff. Celia gestured to the wall and bookshelves on her side. There were various small oil and watercolor paintings and prints, some hanging in old frames, others in new, some prints vaguely speckled while others were almost clean. (She’d zap them in the microwave to kill the mold spores and then, if it was in good enough shape, use an artist’s soft putty eraser on the spots. The paintings she left alone.)

  Her best find in terms of a document had been rescued from a carton of ancient newspapers on the East Side that had been put out with the garbage. It was a single sheet, a 1787 playbill from the Drury Lane in London advertising Sarah Siddons and her brother, John Philip Kemble, starring in Macbeth. Celia had carefully matted it and used an old frame from another one of her finds, outfitted with new glass. She gave it to her mother, the intrepid theater goer, for her birthday last year and was amazed when her mother burst into tears, she was so moved. (Celia had been nervous her mother would think her cheap or something.)

  On the shelves were other pretty or well-made things that had caught her eye: a variety of crystal doorknobs, an iron crucifix, a satin rope pull, a small circular silver serving tray, a crystal decanter (without its stopper), a silver calling-card holder. She also had a box holding Victorian calling cards she had been collecting forever.

  Charlie was staring at the wall behind her. She laughed. “I see you’ve spotted Madame X,” she said, turning to look at the ink-and-watercolor sketch hanging next to the powder-room door. “It’s not a Sargent sketch,” she said, “but it sure looks like Madame X in the Met, doesn’t it? My guess is someone made a sketch of the real thing. Or maybe they copied it from a print.”
<
br />   “Where did you get it?”

  “I talked my father into buying it for me at an estate sale in White Plains when I was in junior high. I think I must have liked her attitude,” she added, cracking a smile. Yeah, Madame X in the old days. Just putting myself out there with all the confidence in the world.

  “You could get good money for that,” Charlie told her, stepping closer to look at it. “It’s well-executed, the subject is recognizable and it’s got some age to it.”

  “What’s good money?”

  “Five or maybe even six hundred.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said, looking at it with new appreciation. “I think Dad bought it for twenty-five dollars.” She grimaced. “But I love it, how could I ever sell it? Besides, my father got it for me.”

  “What I’m trying to say here, Celia,” Charlie said, taking off his glasses and gesturing with his hands. He hesitated, looking for the words. “You’ve got,” he said slowly, “an eye. And damn, little lady, I’d sure like to have whatever your father didn’t buy you.”

  They laughed. She was starting to enjoy herself, starting to feel the same kind of connection with Charlie she felt with these things. It was hard to explain. “What about those doorknobs? I have no particular attachment to them.”

  “Well, you could go two ways. You sell them as a boxed lot or you could pitch each one on eBay, for example, to find those particular buyers who are looking to match or replace in a period house. That one’s pretty common,” he said, pointing, “but that—” he held one up to the light “—that looks European. Eighteen-fifty or so.”

  “I always look around on eBay but I’ve never registered or anything.”

  “Well, you should,” he told her. “For someone like you it would be a lot of fun. You know, I mean, why not?”

  “Charlie,” she said, “I’ve got a ton of stuff in storage. Furniture, Victorian photo albums, tools, china, God, you name it. My roommate made me get it all out of here. Would you go through it with me? See if there’s anything you could sell?”

  “Sure! That’s part of my job. Scouting. I get a bonus.” He slapped his back pocket while explaining the sliding commission rates of the auction house, took out a well-worn wallet and pulled out a card.

  “These are about to go into storage,” she said, opening the closet door. They were simply boards, planking and slats standing on end.

  Charlie put his glasses on again and went through them. “Oak, ash, cedar, burled walnut—that’s gorgeous, that walnut.”

  “I know. It’s that nutty color that makes me all zingy,” she confessed.

  “Kid, you gotta do something with this eye of yours,” he said, closing the door and taking off his glasses. “You gotta make it a gift or I’m tellin’ ya, it’s gonna be a lifelong curse. People yelling at you to get rid of stuff and you can’t.”

  “I know,” Celia said, “because you just know it’s important. But you don’t quite know where in the scheme of things it’s important. I keep thinking if I learn enough I’ll know where all these pieces should go to make everything whole.”

  “It’s an affliction all right,” he said. “So what else do you have?”

  She looked down at the Oriental rug. “Even Rachel loves this. I bought it from an estate sale in the building.”

  He was turning one of the corners up. “She should love it. It’s all silk thread.”

  She took him to her bedroom, apologizing in advance for the mess. It was even worse than she remembered, with clothes piled high, books and papers all over the place and then, of course, the stuff all over she always meant to do something with.

  “Where did you get that?” he said, making a beeline for the steamer trunk she used as a table.

  “It’s cool, isn’t it? It’s got like forty travel stickers from the thirties.”

  “And that’s what people want, with the old stickers.”

  “And what about this?” she asked him, gesturing to her bed. It was unmade, of course, and since she had a habit of pulling out all her sheets and blankets in the night, at the moment it looked sort of like a large animal nest.

  He examined the headboard, which had boughs of leaves and flowers carved in it. “French,” he said. “Turn of the century. Nice.”

  “It was my grandmother’s. What about the footboard?” she said, pulling the mound of covers up so he could see it.

  He circled the end of the bed and then squatted, running his hand over the dark wood. Then he frowned and got down on his knees to examine the legs. Then he sat up. “This is friggin’ Regency, where did you get it?”

  She burst out laughing. “It’s great, isn’t it? If you can believe, my brother and I found it on the side of the road in Massachusetts.”

  “So what are you using as rails?” he wondered, lifting the comforter to look at the sides. “Not bad. Where did these come from?”

  “I can’t even remember,” she said truthfully. “They were just up in my parents’ attic and it was like, duh, I get it, Nana’s headboard, these rails, the foot board.”

  “French headboard circa 1900,” he said, getting to his feet, “English footboard circa 1820, American rails circa 1930.” He smiled and threw his hands up. “It works. You couldn’t pass this off as anything real—”

  “I wouldn’t want to,” she told him. “It’s my bed.” Celia didn’t tell him that no one except herself had ever slept in this bed. That it was the bed she had created after her boyfriend took off. That was the rule. No dirtying her nest. Never again. Not here, not where she was surrounded by the things she loved.

  “Boy, I can sell that,” he said, walking across the bedroom, pointing to the lamp on her dresser. It was a large, silver-colored metal sculpture of a nude woman holding up a globe of light in each hand. “The decorators from the Village will go nuts.”

  “I bought that off the street. But not with the globes. I had to pay more for those globes than I paid for the lamp.”

  “Which was how much?”

  “Fifty, I think—which at the time I couldn’t afford but I just had to have it. I didn’t find the globes until last year. I think I had to pay around a hundred and twenty for those.”

  “I can get you a thousand. Net.” He turned around. “After commission. A thousand bucks for that lamp.”

  She blinked.

  “So when are we going to your storage unit?” he asked, eyes still roving the room. He walked over to her barrister bookcases.

  “Anytime during the day, really,” she said. “My parents gave me those bookcases.”

  Charlie straightened up and turned toward her, rubbing his face for several moments, as if to judge whether or not he needed a shave (which he did). Then he dropped his hand. “You’re in the wrong line of work, Cindy.”

  “Celia,” she corrected him.

  “People spend thousands and thousands of dollars trying to learn what comes naturally to you.”

  “I didn’t know they had junk school.”

  “I’m serious,” he said, sounding somewhat grave. “You shouldn’t turn your back on this. You need to start doin’ something with it. Make it the gift it was meant to be.”

  The intercom buzzed in the front hall and Celia went out to answer it. When she came back she told him someone else needed to use the loading dock downstairs. “So you better get your refrigerator before they tow your truck.” She felt a spring in her step as she led him back to the kitchen. She wondered if maybe she really could do something with this. A general auction house sounded appealing. And eBay. She was going to have to sit down and do it. List something. Try the oldest doorknob. She needed to update her reference books, too, something she hadn’t done since she had conned her parents into believing several volumes published by Antiques Collectors’ Club were part of her required textbooks.

  “Come to the warehouse Saturday,” Charlie said, starting to maneuver his dolly into place. “The address is on the card. Be there about noon. There’s an auction at two but I can show you aroun
d a little first.”

  “That’d be great,” Celia said, crossing the kitchen to mark it on the wall calendar. Then, while Charlie wrestled with the refrigerator, she went back to her bedroom to throw on some clothes. Since they didn’t have a fridge Celia would have to go out to get something to eat. She went down in the freight elevator to the basement with Charlie to make sure his truck was still there and then went back upstairs to exit through the lobby.

  “Miss Cavanaugh,” the concierge said. “I have some flowers for you.” He disappeared into the holding room behind the desk and reemerged holding a gift bag and a cellophane sleeve of multiple flowers, the kind you got at the Korean markets.

  “I guess I better put them in some water before I go out,” she said, signing for them and walking to the elevator.

  “A present?” the elevator operator asked.

  “So it would seem,” Celia said, waiting to get into the apartment before she looked in the bag. She cut the cellophane off the bouquet, snipped the ends off the flowers and stuck them in some water in a vase. She pulled open the gift bag, which was stapled, to find an iPod and an elaborate box of Godiva chocolates. There was also a square cardboard gift envelope which contained the new Norah Jones album. Utterly baffled, she tore open the card. There was a picture of a kitten and a puppy on the front. The inside of the card was blank, save for the inscription, “Love, Jason.”

  Uh-oh, Celia thought.