Page 107 of Across His Line

“That’s not how time works.”

“It’s exactly how time works when you’re fifteen.”

I open my mouth. I close it.

“And you don’t look at what things are listed for,” she says, like I asked. “That’s the first thing everybody does wrong. Everybody goes on and looks at what people are asking. That doesn’t mean anything. Anybody can ask a hundred dollars for a sweater. You look at what sold. What somebody actually paid.”

“So you look at the sold ones.”

She nods.

“The jewelry box sold for fifty.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “I’m aware.”

“You had it at thirty-five.”

“Because the sold ones were thirty to forty.”

“And it sold for fifty.”

“Because I took better pictures than everybody else.”

“So the sold ones were wrong.”

“The sold ones weren’t wrong, Rafe, the sold ones had bad lighting—”

“So you price off the sold ones, and then you add something for good lighting.”

“That’s—” She stops. She looks at the ceiling. “You don’t get to be right about this. You’ve been a business major for two weeks.”

“I was right about the box.”

“That was luck.”

She tells me about shipping weight. How a pair of jeans is heavier than you think, so you lose money on them unless you charge for it, but if you charge for it, nobody buys them, because people would rather pay sixty with free shipping than fifty with ten on top. I say that’s stupid. She says that’s people. I say she should just build it into the price. She says she does. I say then why are we talking about it. She says because I asked.

She tells me she keeps most of it on the platform. She doesn’t move it all to her bank.

“That’s dumb,” I say. “You’re not earning anything on it there.”

“I’m not earning anything on it in checking, either.”

“You could put it somewhere.”

“It’s fine where it is.”

“It’s not doing anything.”

“It’s doing exactly what I want it to do,” she says. “Nobody can walk into a kitchen and ask for it.”

I don’t say anything to that.

She looks at the TV. I look at the TV. After a while, she starts talking again, about a Coach belt she found, and how the buckle was real but the leather wasn’t, and I listen to her.

She interrupts me twice. She corrects my math when I try to do it out loud. She calls me an asshole once, very matter-of-factly, when I tell her the musical she made me listen to in the car sounded like a man being chased by a choir, and she doesn’t look up to see how I take it.

I thought she was quiet.