“How much for this book?” the woman asked me, eyeing me suspiciously, holding up East, West.

“Three dollars,” I said.

“Three dollars?” she practically hollered. “For a paperback?” And she dropped it back into the box.

I breathe deeply and hope that somehow raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society justifies this soul crushing garage sale I am taking part in. This garage sale in which three dollars is seen as an obscene and predatory price for a mere book, never mind that it is by Salman Rushdie, winner of the Booker Prize, winner of the Booker of Bookers prize. Never mind that it is Rushdie’s only collection of short stories, a moving and brilliant compilation of vignettes that will transport you around the world. Never mind that the book would cost fourteen dollars new and that the three dollars I am futilely trying to collect would go entirely towards fighting cancer.

No, all that matters here in the Big Lots parking lot is that this book is a paperback, and a paperback should cost a quarter, fifty cents if it’s thick. Deep, deep breaths.

I guess I am exactly the wrong combination of naïve and snobby to be good at a garage sale. Early in the day I have not yet learned that asking for “a couple dollars” in exchange for some valuable item like a coffee maker will trigger either a look of disdain (what do you take me for?) or a bitter, reluctant production of a wallet, and a slow, careful extraction and smoothing of two single bills.

Early in the day I do not yet expect people to haggle over Banana Republic shirts that are priced, out of equal parts hope and surrender, at a dollar. Early in the day I am still surprised when the very same woman who sniggers at my three dollar book then wanders to Donna’s Mary Kay table and buys sixteen dollars of lotion, handing the money to Donna with a look of reverence and gratitude for this woman who, for just sixteen dollars, provides a skin-type appropriate vial containing the possibility of youth and happiness and beauty. Early in the day I am neither sunburned nor dehydrated nor angry at the world. But soon enough, it’s later.

I don’t have a lot of things to sell. My chilly relationship with possessions comes from seven years of moving semi-annually between closet-sized New York City apartments. I don’t like stuff. I don’t like buying stuff and I don’t like worrying about stuff and I don’t like packing and unpacking stuff and I don’t like when stuff breaks. I rent a single room in a house and it has my drafting table and my rocking chair and too many art supplies and too many books, and this is how I like it. This is a bad foundation for a garage sale.

So I scoured my already second-hand clothes and the bottom shelf of my bookcase and the box of knickknacks I feel guilty throwing away, and I packed up my truck. Arica and Adrienne and Melissa cleaned their closets for me too and filled things out.

There were high points like the mother and daughter who gleefully snatched up an ambitiously priced painting of zebras (thank you, Arica), and the Latina woman who skillfully bargained for an orange button-down with a small, mysterious witch-and-cauldron print, and the old Asian woman who told me that she usually makes her own clothes but she couldn’t resist the shirt with a rainforest pattern that concealed big colorful parrots. But mostly it was a mix of awful and bizarre, like the guy who picked up the glue-gun-looking device and said “What’s this for?” I rolled my eyes and laughed and explained what I myself had just learned - that it was for slicing your seatbelt and cracking open your window in the highly-unlikely-but-apparently-phobia-inducing event of becoming trapped in your car, possibly underwater. And then he said, “How much do you want for it?”

And that was my day. I made one hundred and fifty dollars for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. And all it took was eight hours and my faith in humanity.