Then it was Wednesday afternoon, the beginning of her three days off. Her feet hurt. Buddha and Krishna and Jesus and all the rest of them have long since washed their hands of us, Alice thought.

When she got home, the side doors of the bus were open and clothes, bedspreads, and blankets were belched out across the lawn and spread over bushes. Jeremy was arranging things on the edge of the porch—a broken plaster-of-paris statue of Adam and Eve was set up on the porch rail, the snake dangling out of a papier-mâché tree with just a few leaves, Eve’s hand outstretched for the apple, and Adam broken off at the ankles, lying facedown at her feet like a fallen warrior. In the bathroom, rayon shawls were draped over the towel bar, dripping pools of colored water from their fringes. Crystal had set up a kind of cottage industry in the living room. She had her magnifying lamp set up at the sofa and spools of colored wire, skeins of feathers, balls of string and jars of beads, colored stones and glass, spread out on the table. Finished necklaces hung in the window, and Doobie was yapping furiously, scampering and pouncing on elusive colored spangles that danced across the floor.

“We’ve decided to have a yard sale,” said Crystal, “to raise money for the bus.” Alice called in an ad to the paper and the radio station: “Household items, some artwork, jewelry,” she said. After supper she pulled out some things from the backs of cupboards and pantry shelves. She would sell her aunt’s set of dishes from the 1950s, eight juice glasses with hand-painted flowers, a George Foreman grill. Crystal began gluing rocks together—“A rock from almost every state in the Union,” she said. Alice collected boxes and bags and a tin box for change. She wrote YARD SALE, YARD SALE on posterboard with a black marker. She called Frankie from Axelrod’s Garage to come look at the bus.

By Saturday morning the front porch looked like a gypsy carnival. The colorful beads hanging along the railing attracted attention from the street, but it wasn’t really a hippie-bead kind of town. Alice’s aunt’s Ballerina dishes went to a young couple with a baby in a stroller. An old lady with diabetes bought the George Foreman grill and the hand-painted glasses from Memphis. The woman next door bought the pretty blue-and-white ginger jar Alice had meant to make into a lamp someday.