“Try one of those,” I said, pointing to some lemon bars.

“Is there dairy in it?” the woman asked suspiciously. “Because I’m raising Tyler lactose-free, as well.”

“Dairy-and gluten-free, I promise,” I said.

The woman slipped me a dollar, and I handed her the lemon bars. She passed one to Tyler, who inspected it, bit into it… then gave me a dazzling smile—his first of the day, no doubt—as his mother took his hand and led him away. Beside me, Shannon, my fellow bake sale attendant, looked appalled.

“There’s wheat and dairy in those lemon bars,” she said.

“I know.” I rocked my chair back again. “I felt bad for the little guy.”

“But—”

“She didn’t say he was allergic. She just said she was raising him without it. Poor kid.”

“Suu-uuze,” the eighth grader said, giving my name multiple syllables. “You are so cool. Your brother Dave said you were cool, but I didn’t believe him.”

“Oh, I’m cool, all right,” I assured her. It was weird to hear someone call David “Dave.” He was such a David to me.

“You so are,” Shannon said with perfect seriousness.

Whatever. It was so the story of my life to be stuck running a school bake sale while the rest of the world was enjoying such a perfect Saturday. The sky overhead was so blue and cloudless, it was almost painful to look at. The temperature was hovering at an extremely comfortable seventy degrees. A beautiful day for the beach or cappuccino at an outdoor café, or even just a walk.

And where was I? Yeah, that’d be manning the eighth grade bake sale booth at the Mission’s charity antique auction.

“I couldn’t believe it when Sister Ernestine told us you would be helping out at the booth,” Shannon was saying. Shannon, I’d discovered, was not shy. She likes to talk. A lot. “I mean, you being an eleventh grader and all. And, you know. So cool.”

Cool. Yeah, right.

I hadn’t expected so many people to show up at the auction. Oh, sure, a few parents, eager to look like they cared about their kids’ school. But not, you know, hordes of eager antique collectors.

But that’s exactly who was here. There were people everywhere, people I’d never seen before, all wandering around, peering at the items that would be auctioned off, and whispering conspiratorially to one another. Occasionally, some of them stopped by our booth and shelled out a buck for a Rice Krispies treat or whatever. But mostly they had their eyes on the prize…. In this case, ahideously ugly wicker birdcage, or some old Mickey Mouse watch, or a snow globe of the Golden Gate Bridge, or some other equally non-designer thing.

The bidding got started late because the monsignor was supposed to have been acting as auctioneer. Because he was still in a coma up in San Francisco, there appeared to have been some frantic phone calls on the part of Sister Ernestine, as she looked for someone worthy to fill in.

You can imagine my surprise when she got up onto the dais at the end of the courtyard and announced into the microphone, in front of all the many antique collectors gathered there, that in the monsignor’s absence, the auction would be called by none other than Andy Ackerman, well-known host of a home repair show on cable…

…and my stepdad.

I saw Andy climb the dais, waving modestly and looking abashed at all the applause he was getting. Not sure if there could possibly be anything more embarrassing than this, I started to slink down in my chair….

Oh but wait, there was something more embarrassing than my stepfather calling the school antique auction. There was also the fact that most of the applause he was getting was coming from a woman in the front row.

My mother.

“Hey,” Shannon said. “Isn’t that—”

“Yes,” I interrupted her. “Yes, it is.”

A few minutes later the auction began, with Andy doing a very good imitation of those auctioneers you see on TV, the ones who talk really fast. He was gesturing to an ugly orange plastic chair and declaring it “authentic Eames” and asking if anyone would be willing to bid a hundred dollars for it.

A hundred dollars? I wouldn’t have traded a Rice Krispies treat for it.

But wouldn’t you know it, people in the audience were lifting their paddles, and soon the chair went for 350 bucks! And nobody even complained about what a rip-off it was.

Clearly Sister Ernestine had impressed upon this audience just how badly the school needed its basketball court repaved, because people were just throwing their money away on the most worthless pieces of garbage ever. I saw CeeCee’s aunt Pru and my own homeroom teacher Mr. Walden both bidding against each other for an extremely hideous lamp. Aunt Pru finally won it—for 175 bucks— then walked over to Mr. Walden, apparently to gloat. Except that a few minutes later, I saw them having lemonade together and overheard them laughing about sharing custody of the lamp, like it was a kid in a divorce settlement. Shannon, observing this, went, “Aw, isn’t that cute?”

Except that it totally wasn’t. It totally isn’t cute when your best friend’s weird aunt and your homeroom teacher make a love connection, and you yourself can’t get the guy you like to call you, because, oh guess what, he’s a ghost and doesn’t have a phone.

Not that if Jesse’d call, I’d have had anything much to say to him. What was I going to do, be all “Oh, yeah, by the way, Paul wants to travel through time and make it so you never died. But I plan on stopping him. Because I want you to roam around in the netherworld for a hundred and fifty years so you and I can make out in my mom’s car. Okay? Buh-bye.”

Besides, it wasn’t like it was going to happen. Paul going back through time, I mean. Because he didn’t have that anchor thing his grandpa had been talking about. The thing to anchor him to the night Jesse died.

Or that’s what I was telling myself—reassuring myself—right up until Andy held up the silver belt buckle Brad had found while he’d been cleaning out the attic. When he’d found it—wedged between the floorboards beneath the attic window—it had been this tarnished, crusty old thing I’d barely glanced at twice. Andy had thrown it into the box marked MISSION AUCTION, and I hadn’t really thought about it again.

When he held it up now, I saw it winking in the afternoon sunlight. Someone had washed and polished it. And now Andy was going on about how it was an artifact from when our house had been the area’s only hotel—a fancy way of saying what it had really been a boardinghouse— and that the Carmel Historical Society had put its age at close to 150 years.