Harriet pursed her lips, though whether in disapproval or to simply blow over her tea, Sally wasn’t sure. The wrinkles along her cheeks deepened into ridges.
“Well, that couldn’t have been cheap. Sorry. There I go again.”
Of course it hadn’t been cheap. “I imagine,” was all she said.
“So,” Harriet added half-and-half to her tea, “you and the world domination one. What about the third?”
“He’s a little … off. I mean, not crazy or anything. Just weird. Doesn’t play well with others.” She gave up on the ossified sugar and took a bite of a donut. Maybe the excessive sweetness of that would magically merge with the tea. “What did you…” She was going to ask what Harriet had studied in college, but it occurred to her that the question might be offensive. Had women her age gone to college? Could she have gone to Cornell, in fact? There’d been women there since the 1870s, after all.
“What did I what?” Harriet said. The table was a far cry from the glorious Shaker she had plucked from something called a “backhouse” in someplace called “Homer,” but it was lovely in its own way: dark, with legs of twisted wood and a surface that was honestly marked by age.
“Um … I was going to ask what you studied in college? Did you study furniture?”
“God no!” Harriet yelped, finding this, apparently, hilarious. “Nursing at the University of Rochester. I was a nurse for nearly forty years. I stayed up near Rochester for a lot of that time, but I started picking around on the weekends. Didn’t do a course or anything, just learned as I went. I’d plan my shifts so I could take off for three or four days at a time, all the way out to Buffalo and up to the Canadian border, knocking on doors. I just loved everything about it. The driving and the little towns and the people you met. How strange people are. Always so mystified when they figured out you’re offering actual cash for old stuff they consider junk.”
“Did they just say come on in, help yourself to whatever?”
“Almost never,” Harriet said. She was on her second orange donut. Sally broke her own into smaller and smaller sections on her plate. “Best-case scenario, they get the basic idea you’re there to offer money for something they might have, and they’re willing to let you inside. Worst-case, they got an arsenal and they think you’re from the government or a holy roller or something. Got chased away from people’s houses, more than a few times. Once, this old guy on a farm up near Geneseo nearly shot at me when I drove up his driveway. Didn’t believe I wasn’t a missionary from Palmyra! Just kept yelling he was going to shoot me if I took another step. Less than a month later they wheeled him into my cardiac intensive care unit. I had to take care of that old man for seven weeks, but he finally apologized to me. Actually, he ended up having a nice Sheraton table and a very early piece of mourning silk work. He sold them to me for so little even he must’ve known he was getting the short end. I guess he was embarrassed about the shotgun.”
“Wow,” Sally said. Everything about this story was fascinating to her.
“Did you find this in a house somewhere?” she asked, tapping the table.
“No. Family piece. From my father’s side. I’m not sentimental. I’d sell it if there was anyone to buy it, but nobody wants this stuff now. Victorian, Empire. All pretty worthless. They call it ‘brown furniture.’ When this was my grandparents’ house the table was in the dining room. We had Christmas dinner here.”
“Wow,” Sally said again. She was starting to feel ridiculous. To be so moved? By a table? Or was it imagining the Christmas dinner in the once-formal dining room next door, now crammed with draped furniture? Covered in an embroidered linen tablecloth, set with china, silver, glass. To sit at a table one’s ancestors had sat at; it was an insane notion, and it thrilled her. This humble example of “brown furniture” was singing to her just as sweetly as the Shaker table had, albeit a subtler tune.