Page 161 of Coach
My jaw dropped.
Mike’s funnel cake hit the ground.
It took a minute for our laughter to subside enough for us to carry on.
Yes, we’d reverted to teenage boys—and it was beautiful.
We wandered past rows of painters hawking landscapes, portrait artists sketching people with wildly inaccurate noses, and booths full of pottery that looked like it had been thrown together by blindfolded toddlers during an earthquake. Mike pointed at a particularly terrifying ceramic vase shaped like . . . I didn’t even know. It might’ve been a swan. Or a deformed bagel.
“You should buy that for your living room,” he said, grinning.
“And put it right next to the cardboard box entertainment center? It would tie the room together.”
He cackled and downed half his vodka lemonade of death.
We were halfway through our second lap around the food tents, arguing about whether or not macrame counted as “real art,” when Mike elbowed me in the ribs.
“Hey,” he said, pointing toward the far row of tents, where a massive banner that read, “Antiques,”billowed in the breeze. “That way.”
I followed his finger.
Sure enough, a whole section stretched out under a massive white canopy where tables were crammed between old tools, worn dressers, and weird bronze statues. As we drew closer, I discovered the furniture smelled like a grandma’s attic.
I dragged my feet a little.
Mike noticed.
“Oh, c’mon,” he said, clapping me on the back. “Don’t get scared, city boy. I promise you won’t catch a case of ‘refined taste’ just by walking through.”
“I am Italian. I was born with refined taste, an impeccable fashion sense, and—as you Americans keep reminding me—an accent that could coax the clothing off any woman who hears it,” I said, lifting my chin to new heights. “But this . . . feels dangerous. Like next thing you know I’m spending four hundred dollars on a distressed end table that smells like my deepest regret.”
He smirked. “You spent three grand on a flat screen and still prop it up on a moving box. Trust me—you’ll be fine.”
That was fair.
Brutal.
Butfair.
I sighed, wiping powdered sugar off my face, not realizing I’d just left a streak of white across my cheek. “Fine. Lead the way, Mr. Antiques Roadshow.”
The antique section stretched like a treasure hunt designed by someone with a hoarding problem and a very loose grip on reality. I felt like we were walking into an IKEA, and the little old man or woman who handed out the maps at the entrance had taken the day off.
Mike and I weaved through the narrow aisles, dodging old spinning wheels, tarnished lamps, and enough old furniture to furnish a haunted house.
What I hadn’t realized when we’d entered the section was that the antique section might’ve been the most popular—and largest—of all the areas of the fair. The ancient pieces weren’t simply housed beneath one large tent, but a series of large tents, each with their own particular theme.
The first tent housed a mountain of chairs, none of which matched each other, or basic human dignity. The second was filled with pottery, including one table where a man in a glued-on Dudley Do-Right mustache sold “authentic Civil War-era pottery” that looked like it had been microwaved yesterday. The presence of his Tupperware-contained lunch made our peevish jokes flow.
Mike pointed at a cracked wooden stool with a sticker on it reading, “MAY HAVE BEEN USED BY LINCOLN HIMSELF!”
“Think I could flip it on eBay?” he whispered, dead serious.
“Only if you throw in a lock of your hair and a certificate of delusion,” I muttered.
We shuffled onward, our arms still sticky from funnel cake sugar and powdered with what I was starting to suspect was actual dust from the Great Depression.
“What’s that?” Mike asked, stopping at a table displaying what looked like a cross between a butter churn and an alien torture device.
