Say Their Names

Chapter 1

“Damn, Atty, you weren’t kidding when you said it was crammed to the door, and you needed Todd’s van,” Jessie said, after I’d rolled up the door on my latest storage unit clean-out. The ten-by-twenty unit was, indeed, crammed right to the edge with neatly stacked rows of plastic totes, boxes, and other mismatched containers.

All taped or sealed so their contents would be a complete and utter surprise.

That was part of the fun of buying storage units.

Jessie hated surprises, but her husband owned a small fleet of rental limos and vans, and Todd was great about letting me use their biggest box truck for clean-outs. Discounted rate, of course. I paid Jessie for her labor in food, gas, and first pick of any vintage clothing or purses I uncovered for her consignment boutique.

She wagged her finger in the air as she began counting the first row of visible containers, much like I’d done yesterday during the auction, guess-stimating exactly how much we’d need to move. “Dude, you’ve got to have a hundred boxes of crap in here,” Jessie said. “Maybe more. It’s going to take at least two trips for us to empty this sucker out.”

“Maybe less if only the first wall has stuff in it,” I teased with an exaggerated eyebrow wiggle. After I’d won the locker, I had poked around a little, and the first row was pretty solid. I wasn’t tall enough to see behind it, though, but whispers from the other bidders gave me the impression it was full all the way to the rear.

Sometimes it sucked being only five-foot-six, but I made up for my lack of height with muscles. Muscles built not only from working out at the gym after my divorce three years ago, but also from hauling my merchandise around.

Jessie pulled a scrunchie out of her pocket, tied her thick brown hair up with it, then rolled up the sleeves of her hoodie and said, “Well, let’s get started. I want to look through something today and not just move shit around.”

I laughed. “Yes, let’s.”

With the help of a lift gate and two dolleys, we managed the first load faster than I expected, locked up, and headed to my house.

Home was in a suburb of Wilmington, Delaware, a place I’d lived my entire life. I’d even gone to college locally, so I could stay near my parents, who had already been aging when I turned eighteen. Told their entire lives they couldn’t have kids, I’d oopsied into their lives when Mom was forty-six, and despite doctor’s warnings, she’d had me.

Sure, I was grateful for that choice, but it had taken its toll on her health, and she’d had multiple medical issues my entire life. Dad, too, thanks to smoking four-packs-day until right before I was born. But despite their limitations, I’d loved growing up on the little piece of land they’d owned, in the single-story ranch-style home that I’d inherited after their sudden deaths last year.

Sometimes thirty-nine felt way too young to be an orphan. And sometimes all the space was too big, all the empty rooms too damned lonely. Especially after once having a wife and stepson in my life.

After emptying load number one into the detached garage, I treated Jessie to hoagies from Wawa, before we went back for round two. By the end of the day, we were sweaty, exhausted, smelled like wet cardboard, and all I wanted was to face-plant in my bed. The back of Jessie’s SUV was loaded with garbage bags of clothes for her to sort. I didn’t like dealing with clothes, but she knew to bring back any vintage band tees she found.

I had a good customer who always bought those from me at fair prices.

Once Jessie left with her haul, I nuked a frozen burrito, and then took it outside to admire my wall of boxes, neatly stacked in the two-car garage. The cleanout had been exhausting, but participants agreed to complete it within a specific time frame when registering for the auction. I wanted to get it done so I could dive into the fun part: digging for treasure.

I really should go inside, take a shower, play a video game, and leave all the work of sorting for tomorrow. But my curiosity wouldn’t let me. After scarfing down the scalding burrito, I unfolded a work table, put on a pair of gloves, and grabbed a black rubber tote with a yellow lid. It rattled and rumbled, hinting at small things inside, possibly games or toys.

Shaking it too much ruined the surprise. Even as a kid on Christmas morning, I wouldn’t shake the package. I didn’t want hints before the big reveal.

I used a pair of shop shears to snip the zip ties on two ends, and then pulled off the lid. And cringed.

Games. Mostly kiddie games and not even cool vintage ones. They were maybe ten or twenty years old, the kind that sold for a buck max at a yard sale. Which I did hold occasionally at the house to get rid of excess inventory that wasn’t worth donating to a thrift store. My best donations went to my favorite family-run store called All Saints Thrift Shop. Games were okay thrift items if complete, but that was a lot of work I wasn’t into. And I’d only opened one tote.

No way was the entire storage unit full of someone’s game collection.

Right?

That night, I dreamed I was running across a massive game board, an amalgamation of Candyland and Backgammon, and I was being chased by Monopoly pieces, the top hat and shoe, in particular. Games were on my brain after going through eight totes and boxes of them. A few had been vintage, including a Monopoly set from 1961, but most were not. I’d gone to bed exhausted and discouraged.

After returning the box truck and retrieving my own car from Todd’s car lot, I resumed sorting. The first things I’d opened were the last things we’d retrieved from the unit, which meant they were the first things stored by the previous owner. Hopefully, the good stuff was somewhere in the middle.

Bored with games and eager for something new, I shoved some stacks aside to pull out a random gray tote. It was smaller than the others, maybe thirty gallons, and it was heavy. And full of paperwork. Letters, envelopes, postcards, most with postmarks from the 80s and 90s, so older stamps but not necessarily collectible. Bummer again.

With rock music blasting from my vintage Pioneer radio, I steeled myself for this unit to be a break-even buy at best, and kept going.

Between managing my online storefronts, shipping orders, rummaging around at a church-run yard sale on Saturday, and other odd jobs that kept me out of the garage, it took about two weeks to go through everything from the storage unit. And by “go through,” I mean open the tote or box, give it a cursory sort, pull out anything that seemed immediately valuable, and then move to the next. I’d mostly shifted the massive pile into four large ones, one of which was for further research, plus one jumbo tote of “immediately valuable.”

There was money to be made, for sure, especially in the research pile, which included six totes of vintage Halloween costumes in their original boxes, metal wind-up toys whose age I could only guess, a huge collection of PEZ dispensers, and other miscellaneous bits and bobs from dozens of franchises. I was right that the best stuff had been somewhere in the middle.

The most perplexing pile was the massive stack of apple boxes holding at least three hundred (probably more) jigsaw puzzles. Everything from fifty pieces to five thousand pieces, animals and scenery and paintings, and brand-named things like Barbie, Thomas Kincade, and 90s TV shows. Most of them were opened, which greatly diminished the resale value of any puzzle. It would take weeks, if not months, to check if all the pieces were there, and other than some of the vintage ones, I honestly didn’t care enough.

Could you recycle puzzles?

Jessie texted that she’d be by at noon with lunch and a clothing swap. A dozen single-stitch music tees for me, in exchange for a few more bins of purses and clothes for her. I was in the garage shoving the boxes of puzzles closer to the front when I heard her car engine outside.

She breezed in through the open bay door with a tray of drinks and food in her hands and a brand-new purse on her arm. Well, new-to-me, because I’d never seen it before, with its colorful stripes and brown leather handle. She put the food on the worktable with a flourish. “Hey, dude, the rest of it’s in the car, but mama couldn’t wait to eat. I’ve been going since seven a.m. on a protein bar and grande iced coffee.”

I laughed and reached for the Styrofoam drink cup with the cola tab pressed in. Jessie was on a clear-sodas only kick, even though she drank her coffees black. I learned a long time ago to let Jessie do her weird food phases and not argue.

Jessie nattered on about some of the clothing she’d added to her boutique yesterday. She loved what she did, just like me, and we’d bonded twenty years ago over two important things: our love of junking/thrifting, and us both being bisexual and (at the time) in straight-facing relationships. And while we’d both married our college sweethearts, Jessie and Todd were still going strong, while Elizabeth and I had been separated for nearly two years before our very bitter divorce was finalized.

You could say I’m relationship shy now. Thankfully, Jessie never hounds me to try dating her friends, or teases me when I go out to local bars to scratch the occasional itch. I might prefer single, but I wasn’t going to commit to celibacy.

Once we’d cleaned up from lunch, Jessie strolled around the garage and poked at my piles of boxes and totes. “I can’t believe how much stuff we pulled out of that unit,” she said as she lifted the lid of a green tote. “Dude, is that a Hungry Hippos from the eighties? I think we had one of those at my grandma’s house.”

“Yeah, I think it is. The most recent dates I can find on a lot of this stuff in from the late nineties, so either the owner stopped collecting toys at that time, or that’s how long all this has been in storage.”

“Wow. It kind of sucks that you never get to learn the history of the person who owned this stuff.”

I eyeballed the small black tote I’d shoved under my work table. “Well, I did find some personal papers and shit, but I haven’t looked at it. Doesn’t feel right to invade their privacy, you know?”

“I’ll invade it for you. I mean, whoever this toy collector was, they also had decent taste in women’s clothing and shoes. I’m talking vintage Balenciaga mixed with some pretty ugly plaid muumuus.”

“I’ll pay you tend bucks to take a picture on a muumuu and post it online.”

“Forget it.” She made her way to the puzzle pile. “Damn. Someone had a lot of time on their hands. Are all these used?”

“I haven’t put my hands on every single one, but so far, they are. I don’t want to dump a bunch of puzzles on a thrift store, but I’m also not sure I want to bother piecing them out, you know?”

She picked up the top box and studied the image of a colorful rainforest. “Don’t artists upcycle puzzles sometimes? Or make jewelry out of them?”

“I’m sure theydo, but there isn’t exactly a shortage of puzzles for them to choose from, not between thrift stores and Dollar Tree.”

“Good point. Can you recycle them?”

I chuckled. “Uncertain, but that’s where my mind was going, too.”

“Then let’s find out.” Jessie whipped out her phone and began typing. Scrolling. Her dark eyes reflected the light of the screen while she read. “Oh look, a whole article on what to do with old puzzles. Yes, you can recycle them, but you should take them directly to a recycling center. Don’t mix them in with other stuff.”

“Okay, noted.”

“Oooh, this is different. It says take them to a puzzle swap.”

“What’s a puzzle swap?”

“Hold, please.” She scrolled more. “It’s literally like how it sounds. A place where people gather and swap puzzles they’ve completed, in exchange for a new one. That’s actually super-cool. And….” She looked up, beaming. “There’s a local group meeting on Thursday night at the Edgewood Community Center, seven o’clock.”

I stared at her, not computing. “You think I should haul all these to a puzzle swap in the city?”

“Not all of them at once, dummy. Take a few and test the waters. I bet most of the people who go are retired Boomers who do puzzles while watching The Price is Right in their lift chairs.”

“That’s kind of rude, Jess.”

“I’m sorry, but do you ever see people our age or younger doing jigsaw puzzles?”

“Not really.” Heck, I probably hadn’t put one together since I was twelve, and I was nearly forty.

“Well, there are plenty of places you can probably donate puzzles,” Jessie said. “What about senior centers and nursing homes? Children’s hospitals?”

“Hospitals probably prefer new stuff.”

She huffed and threw up the hand not holding her phone. “I’m trying to give you suggestions here, okay? I think you should do the puzzle swap. I’ll even go with you so you aren’t entering new territory alone.”

Thank gods for friends like Jessie, who understood how going to new places still aggravated my anxiety, which had been a lifelong battle. Despite attending auctions and watching my dad haggle at yard sales for most of my life, I still got a rush of acid in my gut when I had to do it. Sometimes my hands still shook, too, but it’s gotten better.

“You really want to go to a puzzle swap on a random weeknight?” I asked.

“Sure?” She flipped her hair over one shoulder. “I might drum up some leads on old ladies looking to downsize their clothing and purse collections.”

“Thought so.” Couldn’t blame her for always thinking about business, though, since I did the same. And a neighborhood puzzle swap that was likely to be attended by a lot of elderly folks? Definitely a good place for leads. “Fine. Puzzle swap. Thursday.”

Jessie squealed. “It’s a date.”

I spent way too much time overthinking the puzzles I was taking to the swap, and by the time Jessie picked me up Thursday evening, I’d decided to hell with being strategic, and I’d randomly tossed a dozen puzzles into an empty box.

Edgewood Community Center was in a small neighborhood not far from the areas of Wilmington I preferred to haunt, which included the city’s best gay bar, Pot O Gold. I hadn’t visited in weeks, but I’d also been busy. As Jessie and I passed within blocks of its street, I gave serious consideration to checking it out on Saturday.

I’d been damned lonely recently, on top of being busy with work. Maybe I could find someone to keep me company for a few hours.