Drunk Husband Crashes Yard Sale by Alice Kinerk

Drunk Husband Crashes Yard Sale | Alice Kinerk

You decide to hold a yard sale, because it’s a nice thing to do, a homey, all-American thing to do. Also, you’re broke. You place a classified ad, mark the date, start stickering. 

Night before the sale, Drunk Husband goes out drinking, and by dawn has yet to return. Nothing unusual there, but given his recent promises, it hurts.  It’s for the best, you tell yourself. He’s sleeping it off somewhere. With all the hauling to do that morning, all the folding tables to set up.  Linens, CDs, tapes, pot holders, trivets, posters, books, magazines, clothes, garden tools, shoes, clothes, unused wedding gifts and parental cast-offs, beach stuff, utensils, plant pots. Everything out the door, down the steps, onto the front yard for liquidation purposes. 

It’s for the best. It is. It is. It is.

But then, Drunk Husband is rounding the corner. He’s tipping back a paper bag, stiff-legging it. Trespasser! he bellows at the old lady Q-tip who is your first customer. He’s half a block away, bellowing. 

Then he gets close, hovers over her like an interrogator. The Q-tip drops an eggbeater and beelines it to her Cutlass, drives away.

Another customer appears.  Scene repeats.  

You tell Drunk Husband to go to bed, but he doesn’t hear you. Instead he does a King Kong through your cityscape of folding tables, picking things up and dropping them. 

You cajole. He refuses. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Until finally, mercifully, he does go. He stumbles inside to use the bathroom, some time passes, and he doesn’t return. Peace falls again upon the yard.

More customers arrive. Sales are made. 

But then, from inside the house, the bedroom window opens.

Trespassers!  

It won’t be the final time he hurts you, nor the worst. But one day, twenty years later, remarried, middle-aged, you will watch the sunset through wildfire smoke, and this is the image which will surface.  Drunk Husband’s face in the window that morning, round and red like the sun is now. Just as angry.  Every bit as impossible to contain.

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