Sunday at the flea, early-bird hour, the pickers at my table with their penlights and magnifiers. So much shit, mostly smalls. Sludge-fogged medicine bottles, tin jello molds, nightclub matchbooks, china trinket dishes shaped like upturned lady hands. Everything marked lower than the rock bottom my dead wife paid for it. I don’t care that I’m taking a hit—I want it gone. My daughter Alice shares her Taylor Ham and egg sandwich with the dealer one over, a grandma in a Mondale-Ferraro ‘84 cap setting up patchy Steiff bears and brass flower frogs that look like torture devices. Eve, if she were here, would definitely ask the lady how much she’s asking for that cap, for kicks. Or not just kicks. Eve always had a thing for one-offs, strays, mismatches. I figured it was because she found them more funny than sad, but now I think it was just the opposite.

I never really understood Eve’s Sunday hunts, honestly. I wouldn’t have called her a hoarder. She wasn’t into nostalgia, all wishy for childhood again or one she never had. She didn’t obsess over misty past-times like they were a better place than now. It was random, what she’d pick up, stroke or tap or sniff, then put down with a gentleness that made my throat feel thick to watch. For hours, pulling Alice along in a Radio Flyer, letting her pick through skeleton keys and doll parts to prevent meltdowns. Me, I always wanted to hurry through. She’d say You miss too much when you skim. I tried, really tried to get into hood ornaments and box cameras and Hot Wheels, mainly so she wouldn’t feel bad about dragging me along, especially after she got sick, but it all just gave me headaches.

A picker inspects a bent hotel-silver ladle, spits on the maker’s mark, rubs it with a tarnish cloth. “For that, you bought it,” I tell him. “Fifteen.” He talks me down to ten, flings me two fives, his cheekful of Skoal dropping onto a stack of starched doilies. “Whoa!” I yell, raising my arms. Alice runs over, grossed out, laughing as the guy flicks the cockroach-y wad to the ground and skulks away. I suppose I should be telling Alice not to laugh, it’s rude. Like Eve would have. Or wouldn’t have. I don’t know, honestly. I didn’t take notes when Eve was doing the disciplining, so I’m pretty lost.

I rub a Clorox wipe on the Skoal smudge, the ladle. Doilies and silverplate were one of Eve’s phases. For when we’re pretentious enough for a soup course, she said about the ladle. The doilies, she said, made her think of homes where everything’s stiff and unwrinkled and set apart. She wondered if we could have used a little bit of that ourselves. I didn’t get what she meant, but I didn’t think it was for me to get, anyway, because a lot of what she said was for herself alone, even if it was said in my direction.

Sometimes she made Sundays into a contest. Who was the better spotter? The better haggler? She looked so happy watching the dealers wrap up her purchases in the limp pages of local newspapers, slip them into handled bags from bankrupt department stores. At home, she displayed it all without much thought. In the breezeway, bedrooms, garage. On the toilet tank, TV cabinet, windowsills. I had a hunch she didn’t care quite as much about things once they were in the house. As if the act of finding was a smidge better than the reality of having.

We had only one flea market fight. It was big. I called her materialistic. Said that accumulating was just a hamster-wheel, a lot of nowhere. She said I was shallow, that I didn’t understand the idea of a flea market as a place of last meaning. How things can be at their most beautiful when they’re the most useless. How we give a thing meaning again just by finding it, giving it time, blah blah. And anyway, we don’t choose what we hunt for—it chooses us. The more woo-woo she got, the less I listened, which pissed her off so bad she took Alice and the Pack-N-Play and stayed with her sister a few days.

Maybe I should have just asked her what it was she was really looking for.

A couple of decorator-types scan my table, looking over some mismatched Vaseline-glass tumblers, some saucer-less teacups. “No complete sets?” one asks. I look over at Alice. She’s dancing around an overflowing garbage drum, making cyclones with the yellowjackets. Having her felt so easy. No hunt in it, no haggle. Just a gift, and we weren’t used to them. A gift that made us three. Complete.

“Everything’s as is,” I say. “Sorry.”

By 3 o’clock, I tape a FREE sheet to the table and snap wide some 45-gallon trash bags. I tell Alice she can keep one thing. I tell her to think on it hard and carefully but not take forever. She grabs a lady-hand dish so fast I know she must’ve planned on keeping it no matter. I remember it from Eve’s bedside table. For her floss picks, wedding ring, pink methotrexate pills. Alice sticks the dish in her jacket sleeve and uses it to wave goodbye to everybody she sees, like a royal.

On the ride home, Alice sets the dish on the dashboard and naps. I go slow, feeling how much lighter the truck drives, its emptiness. Eve’s sister didn’t get why I wouldn’t just rent a dumpster and chuck it all. Why I’d waste even one more day at the flea. I keep glancing at the turned-up hand, so delicate, wondering if its last meaning is sitting there in the palm, light as spirit, ready to release itself. Or if it’s coming home with us, to find again every time we forget it’s there.