The widow called on a Friday afternoon while Sheila and I were in the kitchen sharing some of her butter rolls and grind-your-own coffee.
"Is your offer still good?" she asked over a bad connection.
"Yes ma'am," I said. "As far as I know."
"Two fifty?"
"Is that what I offered?"
I looked at Sheila and shrugged my shoulders and she smiled at me with her round cheeks as she took up a quarter and started scratching at the five dollars worth of lottery tickets she'd picked up at the Stop 'N Go.
"Yes. That was your bid," said the woman on the phone, and I could tell by her voice that it was a disappointment to her to have to take so little and that she was trying hard to sound firm so I wouldn't put a move on to gyp her down even more, as she was in a bind. And she sounded a little anxious too, as anyone might. So she said again, "You offered two hundred and fifty dollars for everything in my shed."
"Well ma'am," I said, "if that's what I offered then that's what it'll be."
"Two fifty?"
"Two fifty."
"It's agreed?"
"On this end it is."
"Good," she said and let out a sigh. Then she gave me a little laugh full of relief. "I've been so worried about this," she said. "It's been almost three months, you know."
"Well you can quit worrying now," I said. "Don't worry about anything. We'll come tomorrow and clear everything out."
"But when?" she wanted to know.
"When do you get up?"
"Oh I'll be up," she said.
"Well ma'am. . . ." I said, but then I caught myself. "Ma'am," I said, "what was your name again? I'm sorry but I'm not very good with names."
She gave another laugh and apologized two or three times saying how rude it was of her that she hadn't given me her name and to please excuse her but she wasn't her old self these days. I said not to worry, I understood, and I laughed some myself.
So the first tension was gone then.
"Mulhollen's my name," she said. "Mrs. John H. Mulhollen. Margaret, if you'd like."
"Mulhollen," I said and wrote it down on my pad.
"That's right."
"Margaret," I said and wrote that down too.
"That's right."
"I'm not very good with names, you see."
"I understand."
"And what was the address again?"
"Two-sixty-two First Archer Lane," she said, and it was then for the first time that I fully remembered the widow and her shed and the bid I had given her to buy the junk inside.
"Well ma'am, as I was saying, you get up in the morning and have yourself a nice breakfast and read the newspaper and by the time you're finished we'll be there with the truck and a check."
"Two fifty, right?"
"That's right."
"Doesn't hardly seem enough," she said. "It was everything he cherished, you know. His tools and his hobbies and . . . .and just everything. His whole life, you could say, at least toward the end. It was all left behind in that shed out there. It just doesn't seem enough, but no one else would offer even what you offered. I've been advertising off and on for three months."
"Yes ma'am."
I looked at Sheila again while the widow was talking, and she grinned and shrugged, holding up the lottery tickets, shaking them as if they were some worthless dead thing that now had a smell and then I watched as she threw them in the trash can. She tried to make me laugh by mouthing talk, talk, talk and pointing at the phone, so I turned away and went back to business.
"I just don't understand it," the widow was saying. "You would think it was worth more than two hundred and fifty dollars. A man's whole life, I mean. You know."
"Yes ma'am," I said. "I can see your point, I sure can. But times are bad just now. Not much money to spread around."
"I guess you're right, Mr. Wells," she said. "Texas is suffering, I know."
"Yes ma'am."
"Well. . . . " she said but she didn't go on.
"Like I said now, don't worry. Get up, take it easy, we'll be there early. We'll take care of everything."
"All right, Mr. Wells."
"Goodbye now."
There was a silence on the line that said more was coming.
"Mr. Wells?"
"Yes ma'am?"
"Will it take you long?"
"We'll be in and out by lunchtime," I said optimistically. "Two, maybe three trips, I figure."
"That's fine."
"Okay?"
"Yes that's fine."
"Goodbye now, Mrs. Mulhollen."
"Mr. Wells?" the widow asked again.
"Yes ma'am?"
She hesitated for a moment and sighed heavily and then she said, "Mr. Wells, would you mind calling me Margaret?"
Now I hesitated because it sounded important to her for some reason, and I imagined her blushing over it. But this was business after all, so I said, "I'd be glad to, Margaret."
"It's just something I'd appreciate."
"Margaret," I said to seal the pact.
"That's right," she said and sort of laughed again.
"I've always liked the name Margaret," I said and winked at Sheila sitting at our table. "Margaret's a lovely name."
"Well I doubt that," said the lady on the phone, still laughing a bit. "But it's my name at least."
The silence this time said for sure the thing was over, though I can't say that I was glad of it because I was enjoying making her laugh and sigh and telling her not to worry. But I had rolls and coffee getting cold on the table and other things to do.
"Goodbye now, Margaret."
"Oh . . . yes," she said as if I had interrupted her thoughts. "Thank you, Mr. Wells, and I'll see you in the morning."

I gave Sheila a quick skeptical glance which met the same kind of glance coming back at me, and we smiled in that faint way of people who know each other well enough to be still at times. Her face was full of questions the answers to which she assumed she already knew, or knew well enough, which meant they would wait, and so I sat down at the table again and finished my butter roll and drank my coffee while she got up to do the dishes. She was working four tens at that time which gave her a three-day weekend and time to help me out when I needed her. It was not a happy business I was in then, and I'm glad it didn't last long. Within a year I was called back to the refinery in Houston and quit with buying the left-behind belongings of dead people, quit with the sweltering flea market where I sold the stuff once a month to bring in a little. Sheila paid the bills, but it was good to have some extra coming our way in case one of the boys, pretty much on their own by then, needed our help or we wanted to get out with our camper to the lake for a few days. I didn't like the business but I was good at it.
Sheila was through with giving me time to think and she wanted to be through with the dishes too, so she came over and got mine and gave them a quick scrub.
"Margaret, eh?" she said, lowering herself into the chair across from me, and she grinned at me with her gapped teeth that we'd been planning for years even then to get fixed.
"She's an old gal that lost her husband and needs my services. It'll make us some money, I promise you."
"And she needs my services too?"
"It's a lot. You won't believe what all's in there. Every kind of tool you can imagine, cases of motor oil, model airplanes still in their boxes, eight or ten pairs of brand new leather work gloves, that sort of thing. And the guy bought at least two of each. That shed's crammed to the rafters. It'll probably mean a garage sale on our part too, to get rid of it all."
"Have we got the room out there?"
"I'll straighten up a bit this afternoon. Seems like all I ever do in my life is clean out garages."
"And sheds."
"And sheds."
"What was the darned Margaret stuff?"
Something in the way she said it, as if she were making fun of her perhaps, sullied the nice feeling I had had in doing what the lady had asked of me and calling her Margaret as if we were friends. Sheila made the widow seem for a moment like something pitiful and lonely and distant. Which is how we usually were about my "clients," as I liked to call them, distant and cold and clinical in the way a surgeon must be toward the human specimen lying open on the table before him. It was business after all.
"I don't know really," I said in a moment. "For some reason she wanted me to call her Margaret instead of Mrs. Mulhollen."
"A real chum huh? She must remember you pretty well."
"I was a name and a phone number on a piece of paper, that's all, with two fifty and a dollar sign written at the bottom."
"I can see her reason, I think."
"You can, eh? Let's hear it."
She put on her wise look and shifted in her seat as she lit up a cigarette and then took a deep, heart-thumping drag.
"Wants her own identity back, now he's gone. It's only natural. You read about it all the time in the magazines." Then she smiled in a teasing way and said, "I'll probably do the same thing when you kick off. I'll say, ‘Call me Sheila please.'"
"And I guess they'll all do it too, won't they?"
"Sure they will."
"Out of respect for Old Miss Sheila?"
"That's right. Out of respect for Miss Sheila."
"But me? I won't, will I? You wouldn't catch me doing it."
"You speak the truth there, my friend. In fact I can't recall the last time you called me by my name. It's always, 'Hey, Honey,' or 'Hey, Darling,' or 'Hey, you,' or something like it."
"And I have no plans to change either. Even when I'm croaked I'll still just call you My Old Lady from wherever I wind up. And when I'm dead and the guy like me comes to buy all my old tools and junk and what-have-you out there in the garage, I'm gonna whisper down and tell him don't do it. Don't call her Sheila." I was grinning at her now. "Just call her The Old Hag."
"Hah!" she said and slapped the table once lightly.
It was meant as a joke, and she took it as a joke, and we laughed a bit then and glanced at each other from under our eyebrows. Sheila picked at a crumb on the tabletop and shifted her sizable hips in her seat until it was clear the light moment had passed and we had nothing else worth saying to each other. Still we sat there a few minutes, sat there imagining the thing, smiling over it occasionally, postponing whatever else we had to do that day and enjoying the cool of the kitchen, enjoying the warmth of each other's quiet company, which at that time we'd been enjoying more or less regularly for twenty-four years. But Friday, then as now, is a workday all day long. Finally I lifted my long body from the chair I'd been sitting in, and she looked up and followed me with her eyes until at the door to the garage I mumbled, "Guess I better get back to it." She nodded her head then and gazed at me in a simple direct way that said quite matter-of-factly: I love you, Ralph Wells, and I already miss you, and you just better not die on me any time soon.