I meet Mr Geoffrey from Stanwell & Mendler Liquidators for the pre-sale walk-through, leaving my husband to wait in the car with the engine running. Her jade pendant with its gold-painted copper chain hangs from a velvet-lined jewellery stand, its seashell-shaped clasp weakened from wear. She received the necklace from Todd and thereafter never took it off – even to sleep – until my new dad didn’t show up around the house anymore, and she never touched it again. A paper tag is tied to the chain: two dollars.  

On a splintering shelf in the garage, there are rows of half-used paint cans with similar but not exactly the same but very nearly the same tints of her favourite colour. She was rolling purple over the hallway when I returned from school one day to find a new pigment on the second half of the wall from where she had started. She hadn’t got enough paint when she had committed to redoing the whole house, and each trial took a few swaths before she realised her mistake. The house is now champagne eggshell. All cans are free. 

The kitchen has our cooking utensils laid out along the linoleum counter, with a tub of assorted metal cookie cutters on the floor. She had filled the house with flour clouds and vanilla extract by the time I had come home from primary school, having bought triplets of every shape she saw at the dollar store and wanting to ‘make a memory’ for us. Whilst she took calls in the other room, I folded my arms over the counter and waited for the blobs in the oven to rise. The twelve dozen cookies were forgotten in the freezer when I graduated. One shape for 25 cents, five for one dollar.  

Against each wall of the living room, framed in gothic iconography of bronze, there are oil paintings wasting away from light exposure. She had passed by a man on Second Avenue selling artwork of parakeets in bowler hats and bought his whole collection. She told me, later that day, that she had a premonition in that moment of him being famous – really, really famous. Last week, Mr Geoffrey researched the artist; he’s now an auditor at a printing company in the city centre. The paintings are 15 dollars each, but the frames can be sold separately for ten dollars. 

In the master bedroom, laid out across a naked mattress from the 1980s (45 dollars) are scraps of taffeta and chiffon in lavender. She had seen all the prom gowns at Dillard’s and decided it was better to make something herself. She gathered the nicer fabrics from the store by the mall and unfolded the patterns, ripping the open scissors along the dotted lines. Every night, her bedroom’s light would be on as she spat curses at the snagging threads. The spring came, she had a sleeve to show for her effort, and I wore something I borrowed from a friend. The odds and ends are ten cents for three strips or a flat ten cents for anything bigger. 

The sale officially ends around 6pm, though Mr Geoffrey leaves us with the house half an hour prior. My husband and I go to dinner afterwards, and Mother pays the bill.