“Need anything?” Frank said, brushing back a shock of hair from his forehead.

“No bedroom sets,” she said.

Frank licked an index finger and chalked one in the air.

“But I could use a salad spinner.”

He saluted and clicked his heels.

Emily returned to the bedroom. No bedroom sets was only half joking on her end. She suspected Frank had several headboards and bedframes, not to mention bureaus and vanity tables, stashed in their garage and basement. Lighter fare—radios and all manner of small appliances (he had a passion for vintage metal fans and porcelain-based soda-fountain milkshake makers)—he’d sneak up into the attic when he thought she wasn’t looking. Even when Emily was shut away in her tiny upstairs office with its white pleated window shades, jar of freshly sharpened pencils (she never used them, but looking at them pleased her), and well-ordered files, she could feel Frank’s finds restively revving up, like a phalanx of Sorcerer’s Apprentice brooms mustering to invade the main house.

It wasn’t all junk. Only last week he’d scored the original cover art for an issue of one of his favorite 1960s horror comics, Creepy. The signed watercolor had been tucked between the pages of a scrapbook priced at two dollars. So not Emily’s taste, it featured a hairy beast, teeth bared and fist raised, threatening a voluptuous blonde who cowered in the foreground. When Emily looked up the artist, turned out individual pieces of his cover art sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

As if on cue, the house trembled. Emily recognized the sound of the back door slamming shut. She crossed to the window and looked down into the driveway. Frank’s ancient Chevy Suburban (he didn’t take his BMW Z4 to yard sales) lumbered below her as it backed out into the street.

Pick your battles had been her mother’s sage advice on the day she and Frank married, and Emily had tried to do just that. Still, the irony of her upstairs, sorting and culling, and Frank out in the world, hunting and gathering, was not lost on her. She liked to think of theirs as a zero-sum game, though what she was about to rid from her closet was undoubtedly a spit in the ocean compared to what he’d soon drag into their house.

But there was no point dwelling on it. There were worse hobbies than compulsive yard-sale-ing, and he wasn’t about to change. Besides, she had to get busy. She and Becca had an appointment to meet a new client this afternoon and it would take Emily hours to get this video done.