The Tarp in a Garage Out Past Pegram
Sunday I was out before six, because August in Tennessee gives you about three good hours and then it starts leaning on you. Ran the Heritage west on 70 with the fog still lying in the low spots, the river bottoms doing that thing where the whole world is white up to your knees and clear above it.Out past Pegram somebody had wired a cardboard sign to a fence post. ESTATE SALE, hand lettered, arrow pointing up a gravel drive. It was a quarter past seven and no sale starts at a quarter past seven, but the garage door was up and a light was on, so I turned in.A woman in her seventies was sorting her husband's tools onto folding tables, price stickers on a few of them and not on most. He had been gone four months. She said it plain, the way people do once they have had to say it enough times. ...