by Melissa Miles McCarter

Created on: November 18, 2009

The Garage Sale

She had been preparing for the garage sale for days. Mary Beth started in the children's room, pulling out toy after toy that her children didn't play with anymore. She looked at the trucks her son had pulled the wheels off. She ran her fingers along the battery-less toys, the ones she had told her children no longer worked and they had believed her at the time and then forgotten about them. She started in the corners of closets, pulling out books, puzzles, and old clothes that her children would never wear again. She looked at the headless dolls that sat in the corner of the room, trying to decide whether to put them in the sale. Mary Beth put them in a box and labeled it "Doll parts: 25 cents" and thought perhaps someone might find some use for these decapitated bodies.

After she was done with the children's room, she went into her husband's closet and began to pull out threadbare shirts that her husband could no longer wear because he was a size (a number of sizes) too big. She did this when her husband was at work or asleep. She pulled out the bright mustard colored shorts that he husband would never part with. If he saw what she was doing, he would tell her that these were his favorite shirts. If he saw her going through his clothes, he would insist that he was going on a diet as soon as the summer started and there was no need to get rid of these clothes. She had watched the girth of his stomach expand for years, and listened to his claims of impending bouts of diets and exercise for just as long. She covertly placed these too-small and mustard-colored shorts into the garage.

She had to plan the garage sale secretly. Mary Beth was not good at secrets. Whenever she bought anything for Christmas, she eventually would tell her children, by way of widely inventive hints, before the holiday. "It is something you can ride," she would say, her son guessing that it was a bicycle. "It is something you can snuggle," she would say, her daughter guessing that is was a stuffed animal. She was the one in her family that knew everything that was going on, and she was diligent in her duty to pass this information on. Yet, she knew if she told anyone in her family about the garage sale, that they would all want to review what she was planning to sell. This review had occurred the year before when she had first been motivated to have the garage sale.

"Mama, you can't sale this vase," her oldest child, Georgia, had said. "I made this when I was in third

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