Riverside Park

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.)