Why George Mason decided to take a look into the garage sale he couldn't say, although it might have had something to do with the weather, with the pleasant Saturday morning and the promise of the empty day ahead. He often took walks in his neighborhood, invariably watching the ground for a lucky find. Lost dollar bills were more common than a person would think, and if he went walking early it was a rare day that he didn't at least spot the odd nickel or dime.

The garage sale sign was tacked to the post of a curb-side mailbox. The name on the box was "Fortunato" and an arrow on the sign pointed toward the open garage door, a looming rectangle of darkness imbued with shadowy promise. Inside it took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but then he saw quickly that it wasn't his kind of sale despite the propitious name on the mailbox. It was all junk, knick-knacks from Pic 'n' Save and the worst kind of book club books and a rack of worn-out old clothes. He had the abrupt inclination to leave—a feeling strangely close to dread—and as he began to turn back toward the street he saw, with a shock that took his breath away, the disembodied head of an old woman hovering in the air in the corner of the garage.

He stared at it, his mouth open, taking in the bare light bulb in the rafters overhead, and the way the rafter itself cast a shadow across her shoulders, creating the illusion that had so unnerved him. She nodded at him now and smiled obscurely, but her smile and nod seemed to him to be false, the irritating private gesture of someone who had just confirmed a secret knowledge. Next to her sat a TV tray with an open cigar box on it. There were a few coins in the box, no paper money at all.

Leave, he told himself, but instead he examined the scattering of odds and ends on a rickety card table: a glass tumbler, a Pet Rock with the paint chipped away, a filthy old hair brush, a souvenir letter opener with a wooden handle that had apparently been chewed by a dog, and a few other objects equally depressing. The only object that wasn't sadly pathetic was a coin purse sewn up out of thin leather and with a palm tree painted on it, the purse small enough to fit into his hand. It was the kind of thing a child would buy at a tourist shop at the seashore, and he felt an odd nostalgic attraction to it. The brass clasp clicked apart easily when he tried it, the purse expanding like an open mouth. Inside lay a single penny.

"How much for the coin purse?" he asked, breaking the silence. But as soon as he said it he realized that he had left home without any money. He hadn't even brought a pocket comb. He started to put the purse down.

She shrugged. "Tell me what it's worth to you"

He took another look at it, suddenly picturing himself owning it, carrying his coins in it, maybe a spare house key. The painted palm tree had an enticing desert island look, with a reddish sunset behind it and a streak of blue water. After the space of a few seconds he said, "All I've got is a penny," and he secretly and shamefully let the contents of the purse slide out onto his hand. His face was hot, and he realized that he was blushing because of the lie: he didn't have a penny. The purse had a penny.

"I'll take a penny," she said flatly.

He heard a creaking noise just then that sounded like a door opening, and a breath of wind found its way into the garage and kicked up a little dust devil that stirred the clothes on the metal rack before dying out in a ghostly whisper. He had the uncanny feeling that someone had leaned close to him and said something into his ear, but there was no one else in the garage except the woman, Mrs. Fortunato, who watched him frowningly from her chair.

"I left home without any money," he said in sudden confusion, reaching into his pocket, still hesitating. He drew out his hand and looked at the penny that had already been in it. "You can't take just a penny for this.…" He smiled crookedly at her. The few coins in her cigar box couldn't possibly amount to more than a couple of bucks. At this rate she wouldn't make enough to keep the light bulb burning. Still, garage sale money was usually pin money anyway, and a penny earned is a penny earned, according to the ancient wisdom.

He realized that the woman was saying something to him: "It's worth what someone gives for it, just like anything else."

"Well, it's just that a penny is all I've got," he said weakly.

"I don't despise a penny. There's better things been sold cheaper. And worse things too."

"I guess that's true," he replied, not bothering to make sense out of this. Wanting merely to leave now—leave and take the purse with him—he gave her the penny, thanked her, and walked out into the morning, which now had most of the promise drained out of it. A memory of childhood flitted into his mind, making him feel even more shameful. Once when he was about ten he had shoplifted some marbles from a dime store and had gotten caught. He felt like that now, except this was worse: this was an old lady and not Woolworth's, and he wasn't a child anymore, and he hadn't gotten caught.

Perhaps he could find some excuse to go back into the garage sale and put the purse back onto the table without her knowing it, and with another penny in it, too. That's just what he would do—go home, find a penny to put into the purse, and then haul it back down here, good as new. It wouldn't take ten minutes, and it would satisfy his conscience. If he put a quarter into it, it would satisfy his conscience twenty-five times. The idea of it picked his spirits up.

But of course he could simply turn around right now and take the purse back. That would be the honest thing. He wouldn't even have to come clean, just put the purse back onto the table. Except that the old woman hadn't really liked the look of him; he had seen that much in her face. She would almost certainly think he was up to something, which of course he was. And he had to admit, she had obviously been happy enough to get the penny. She thought she had made a sale.

So there was nothing wrong with the result of the transaction, he told himself as he continued up the sidewalk. The whole thing was a means and ends puzzle, really, although in this case the means and the ends seemed to be the same thing. Maybe they were always the same thing. Abruptly he wondered what Peggy would say. Probably she would tell him to quit worrying so damned much. You could twist anything around if you worked at it hard enough. For God's sake, he thought, most people don't even pick up a penny when they drop one. It's not worth the effort.

And right when that thought came to him he spotted a penny on the sidewalk, which perfectly illustrated his point as he walked past it, letting it lie, although on any other morning he would have picked it up. It occurred to him that if he did bend over to pick it up, it could become the penny in the purse, and he could turn around right now and head back down to the garage sale. But he didn't turn back: he took the purse out of his pocket and had another look at it. Out here in the sunlight it looked brighter and newer than it had in the old woman's garage, and he realized how at odds it had been on that table with the rest of the junk, almost as if it had been put there on purpose—a silk purse among a bunch of sows' ears.

Had he been set up? Was this some sort of penny-ante sting operation? The idea was ludicrous. No one would go to the trouble to set a man up over a penny.…

He found that he was home again, and he climbed the front steps, crossed the porch, and entered the living room, feeling a grateful relief in the cozy familiarity of the place, a safe haven from his teapot tempest. But now he was at loose ends. Peggy still wasn't home, and he had nothing planned for the day. A half hour ago that had seemed like a good thing. He found his pocket change where he had left it on the kitchen counter, and he put it into the purse, which slid neatly into his pocket, barely making a bulge. He had been making a mountain out of a damned mole hill, he told himself. It wasn't worth another thought, even if someone offered him a penny for it. He laughed out loud at the joke, but his laughter had a hollow echo in the empty house, and he fell silent, wandering back into the living room where he sat down in an easy chair and tried to read a book. But it wasn't any kind of day to be reading—better to get some work done while the sun shone. He went out into the garage and looked around at his tools and at the half-finished wooden lamp that he had been building in his spare time over the last couple of weeks. The lamp's boxy walnut frame looked ugly to him today, and the idea of working on it was infinitely tedious. He went out again, closing the door and aimlessly heading down the driveway just as Peggy turned in off the street.

"I've had the worst damn morning," he admitted to her, helping her pull grocery bags out of the car, and following her into the house. As Peggy rearranged the refrigerator, finding room for lettuce and broccoli, Mason talked about the purse and the penny.

"I forgot eggs," she said, interrupting him. "I'll have to go back down to the market." She shut the refrigerator door and leaned back against the counter.

He stared at her. "Never mind the eggs," he said. "I'll pick them up later. I'm telling you about my morning."

"Sorry," she said, "but I don't see the big problem."

"Well, it was that damn penny."

"You're that worried about a penny?" She grinned at him, pulling a lock of hair away from her face. It fell in front of her eyes again, and she looked up at it, her eyes crossing, and blew at it, letting it fall again.

He found himself smiling. Peggy had some goofy mannerisms, and he loved her for it. But her thinking wasn't usually goofy, and right now he wanted counsel. "I guess there's no good reason to be worried about it," he said. "It's just been bugging me, like a song in your head that you can't get rid of."

"Great. If there's no reason to worry, then quit worrying. Case closed."

"Well … Okay, I am worried. I took the woman's penny. That's the … case."

"But you say you left the penny with her. You didn't really take the penny?"

"No, but that means I took the purse."

"Exactly. But the purse, according to its owner, is only worth a penny. So one way or another the whole issue is over a penny."

"Yeah, now that you put it that way."

"Then you've got an Abraham Lincoln complex."

"I guess so. What the hell are you talking about?"

"Abraham Lincoln walked ten miles through the snow to return a penny that he borrowed."

"Why would Abraham Lincoln borrow a penny in the first place? I mean … a penny?"

"Maybe he needed to buy a coin purse." She smiled at him. "Let me have a look at it."

He took the purse out of his pocket and handed it to her.

She gazed at the painting, still grinning. "Wow," she said. "This is really … something. I think she saw you coming."

"For a penny it's a bargain."

"Well, for the kind of penny you paid, it's a bargain."

"That's where you're wrong. That's the hardest penny I ever spent. It's been eating me up for the last hour."

"Okay. I can settle this. Ask yourself a question: of the various choices open to you, which one's the hardest?"

"Going back down there and confessing."

"Then that's what you should do. When it comes to moral issues, the hard choice is always the right one. In this case it's easy. Just bring the woman another penny. Then your conscience can take a rest."

What he would do was finish his walk in peace. Mrs. Fortunato could wait. As for his conscience, it could wait with her. She owned it right now anyway.

The afternoon was empty and quiet, and it seemed to him that there was a strangely suggestive quality on the wind, although what it suggested he couldn't quite say. He cut across toward the deserted baseball diamond to get a drink out of the fountain before heading uphill again, in among a stand of sycamores. There was a pile of fallen leaves twenty feet ahead of him, as if someone had made a half-hearted attempt to rake up, and on impulse he jogged toward it, giving the pile a tremendous kick so that dry leaves flew into the air, the wind carrying them away across the grass. He watched the flying leaves, caught up in the lonesome atmosphere of the deserted park, and when he turned to walk back downhill, his eye was drawn to an immense leaf, dry and curled and looking uncannily like a severed human hand.

He bent over and picked it up; beneath it lay a twenty-dollar bill, crisp and flat as if newly printed—very like a leaf itself.

He stood for a moment, filled with both wonder and fear. The bill was utterly incongruous, lying there on the grass, and the idea came into his head that it belonged to Mrs. Fortunato, and that this was some kind of trick or test. He picked it up gingerly—a garden variety twenty and nothing more. "Finders keepers," he muttered, turning it over in his hand. Almost immediately the glow of the found money began to cast the morning in a new light, and he was struck with a new way of seeing things.…

Perhaps he had been dead wrong about the coin purse incident. Perhaps finding the purse and being given the means to buy it were nothing less than the launching of his lucky day. And this twenty-dollar bill, he saw now, was karma paying him back for a morning's worth of rough usage, balancing the scales, realigning his universe by lining his wallet. Happy with this fresh insight, he hurried toward the car, folding the twenty and slipping it into the coin purse, which, despite its tiny size, had begun to feel like the golden goose.

But then he stopped himself. Talk about unspeakable idiots, he was apparently turning into one, reacting to every damned thing as if he had learned nothing at the park. He headed straight for the checkout counter now, where he set the book down, paying for it with the new-found twenty-dollar bill, which covered the price with money to spare. He put the change into the purse and went out into the sunlight, superficially satisfied, but all the time, in the back of his mind, wondering if the book had in fact spoken to him. The idea was preposterous: a message from what?—the good angel? He stopped where he stood and let the book fall open in his hand, giving it a chance to speak to him a second time if it wanted to.

"You've got my whole attention," he said under his breath, although when he said it he knew it wasn't true. He didn't give a damn, really, for what the book had to say, because no book had anything to say that was half as useful as a twenty-dollar bill. But he pointed with his finger anyway and read the indicated line: "Architecturally and in the point of 'furnishing' the Snakery had a severe simplicity befitting the humble circumstances of its occupants..." and so forth. Nothing. Nonsense. The Snakery!

He shut the book. What luck demanded was vigilance and a willing mind. Doubt would kill it. He turned his attention instead to the parking lot pavement, watching for something more. The twenty-dollar bill, he told himself, was nothing but a precursor. If there was twenty dollars to be found, then there was forty. It stood to reason. But there was nothing on the ground except the usual litter, and so he got into his car and started for the grocery store two blocks away. He would buy Peggy's eggs, do his good deed for the day, which would take care of any restless angels.

It was at the edge of the lot, while turning onto the street, that he saw a Coke bottle half hidden by overgrown ivy in a flowerbed. Struck with a sudden compelling hunch, he pulled over and cut the engine, climbing out to take a closer look. It was one of the traditional ten-ounce bottles, the glass laced with the rainbow discoloration of years of sunlight and weather. When he picked it out from among the ivy vines he saw that it was full of silver dimes.

He stared at it in disbelief, then shook one of the dimes out into his hand. It was an old Liberty dime. Yes, he thought. Real silver! How many in the bottle? A couple of hundred? This wasn't luck; it was something else, something that … something that he couldn't put into words. But he realized one thing for certain: that for the first time since early morning he felt sure of himself; he believed in himself. He was his own man at last, calling his own shots, with faith in his own, his own …

But his thought evaporated when he spotted a Taco Bell wrapper in the gutter. He hurried to it, unwadding it carefully and looking inside—nothing but cheese shreds and taco sauce. He got into the car and drove toward the grocery store, stopping a half dozen more times to investigate cast away trash, but with no result, and by the time he parked outside Albertson's it seemed to him that every single object that he saw must hide some valuable thing. Project, he told himself, trying to think a treasure into existence. Concentrate, damn it. Nothing happened: there were no hundred dollar bills within the pages of the advertising pamphlet lying in the shopping cart, no gold nuggets rattling around in the empty Dr. Pepper can that he drop-kicked toward the wall of the market.

But when the can stopped spinning he saw that it lay next to what looked like a small round fishbowl sitting beneath the downspout that drained the roof, and he knew at once, with the certainty of an epiphany, that he had once again struck pay dirt. Breathless with anticipation he hurried toward it, looking around to make sure that no one else had seen it, and he actually got down onto his knees to peer at the bowl: a quart-sized globe with a fluted rim, the glass encrusted with tiny barnacle-like calcifications, as if it had sat for years on the ocean bottom. It was rim-full of water, and within the water, magnified by the curve of the glass, were scores of pearls, nearly invisible against the white-painted concrete of the wall behind them.

It dawned on him that in his excitement he had never gone into Albertson's after the eggs. "Let them eat cake," he said, laughing out loud, then remembering immediately that Marie Antoinette's head had been cut off for expressing that same sentiment.

When he turned up his own street, he realized that Mrs. Fortunato's house was drawing near on his starboard side, and for a moment he was awash with indecision. The light still shone behind her curtains, and he took his foot off the accelerator and let it hover above the brake for the few seconds that it took him roll past her property and on toward home.

Of course the idea of stopping was ludicrous now. He saw quite clearly that it had always been ludicrous—more than ludicrous, unwise. And right then all thoughts of Mrs. Fortunato were swept away by something even more worrisome: that the pearls might easily be paste. What he knew about pearls he could put in his hat.

But then the dimes certainly weren't paste, he thought, as he cut the engine. Or whatever it was they made fake dimes out of—if in fact anyone would go to the trouble of counterfeiting dimes, which would be lunacy. And why, on a fortunate day like this, on the day of all days, would he chance upon paste pearls? He looked at the luminous little orbs in their fishbowl, glowing in the sunshine through the windshield, and his mood brightened again.

Getting out and easing the car door shut, he slipped the Coke bottle into his pocket, cinching up his belt when the weight of the silver threatened to haul his pants down. He headed silently up the driveway and into the garage, carrying the fish bowl so that it was hidden from sight, just in case Peggy spotted him through the window. Without bothering to turn on the light, he hid the bottle and bowl in a drawer in the bench and then hurried back out, down the driveway again and in through the front door, where he stood listening to the sound of Peggy's sewing machine whirring away upstairs. In the study he shelved Ambrose Bierce and then stood for another minute looking at a history of ancient Egypt, which he opened to the index in order to find the chapter on the life of Cleopatra, who, legend had it, had been famous for dissolving a pearl in red wine and then drinking it in order to make a show of despising riches.

He found the passage and read it as he walked into the kitchen, where he took a bottle of cabernet from the cupboard, setting it on the counter and then retrieving the corkscrew from its drawer. Excited with the apparently failsafe test, he hastily shoved the corkscrew into the cork, screwing it down hard and fast....

"It's early for that, isn't it?" Peggy's voice nearly struck him dead, and he jammed the cork down into the bottle so that wine geysered a foot into the air, splashing back down onto the countertop.

"It's Saturday," he said lamely, glancing at the clock on the wall. "And it's after four, for God's sake. I just thought I'd call it a day early and relax with a nice glass of wine."

"Okay. Sure. Why not?"

"Something's wrong?" He tried to stare her down. "If you're going to start breaking up the bar with an ax, I'll relax with a cup of tea instead." He put the bottle back into the cupboard and shut the door.

"What a grouch," she said. "Have your glass of wine. I really don't care. But don't be so defensive about it."

"Now I'm defensive. I hate that ploy. It's one of the five unanswerable allegations."

"For God's sake, no one's alleging anything! What's wrong with you?

"With me?"

For a moment she simply looked at him, but then she grinned, her mood changing on a whim like a storm passing. "This is so goofy," she said. "Listen to us."

He frowned at her, not willing to be mollified that easily. Peggy's way of instantly getting over things always made him a little angry, because it seemed to him to be another way of winning. But now his mood changed, when into his mind came a small epiphany: that he, in fact, was the big winner—silver, pearls, God knew what else out there waiting for him—and that she had no notion of it. It was his goddamn lucky day, not hers. That thought was followed by a question: whether in the case of a divorce the wife got half of the loot that the husband had stashed in the garage, or whether she got damn-all because she didn't know there was any loot stashed in the garage.

But he banished the thought from his mind as unworthy, vaguely ashamed of himself for having let it enter in the first place.

"Are you okay?" she asked. She appeared to be troubled now, her mood having shifted again. "You look kind of wrecked or something."

"Wrecked?" He glanced into the mirror over the kitchen sink, and what he saw made him blanch. His hair had apparently lost its mind, and looked bushy and standuppish, as did his eyebrows, as if he had been working hard to turn himself into a Halloween devil. His face was pasty, too, his skin grainy and old-looking, his mouth set in a rictus of unidentifiable emotion. He tried to push his hair flat and to compose himself, to relax his face.

"I guess I am a little tense," he said. Sorry to lose my temper like that."

"Wait a minute," Peggy said, a look of comprehension coming over her face. "You didn't take that penny back, did you? That's it. You're still suffering from guilt. It's been eating you up all day long."

"Sure I took it back," he lied, "purse and all. Nothing's eating me up. I feel fine."

"Okay," she said, giving up. "I'm going back to my sewing. What are the other four, by the way?"

"The other four what?"

"The other four unanswerable allegations?"

"I just made that up."

"Then answer me this one: you didn't happen to stop by the grocery store did you?"

"No. I guess I forgot about the eggs. I'll get them, though. Don't even think about going yourself, or else I will be mad." He smiled at her to show he meant it, although he was abruptly conscious of the deception, of the lie within the smile, of the entire fraud, and in that instant he almost blurted it out—the money at the park, the dimes, the pearls, the weird notion that he hadn't returned Mrs. Fortunato's purse because it was …

… he couldn't say quite what it was. But that alone was troubling, troubling enough, certainly, to warrant against haste. Until he understood things, he told himself as Peggy started up the stairs, he would keep his own counsel. The phrase appealed to him immensely—his own counsel. There was wisdom in it, as there was in all those homely old phrases. Whose counsel would you keep if it weren't your own?

He realized that Peggy was speaking to him. "What?" he asked.

"I said give me till six."

"Sure," he said. "Take your time."

When she was gone he picked up his book, hauled the wine bottle out of the cupboard, and went out through the back door, closing it softly and ducking into the garage where he turned on the trouble light above the bench. There was no reason to light place up like a carnival; it would merely attract Peggy's attention. He took the bowl of pearls out of the drawer. They were big damned things, some of them the size of his thumbnail.

Three lucky strikes in one day, by God! Four if you counted the penny. What did they say about that? Once was a fluke, and twice was a hell of a coincidence. But the third time was something more: the third time was the charm—a plot, a pattern, a cold fact, hard and bright as a diamond. Diamonds! The idea transported him. A basket of cut stones would do the trick. He would be happy then. Not that he despised the pearls—not at all—but a handful of diamonds would be another matter entirely.

Carefully he poured a coffee mug full of wine, read hastily through the passage in the book, and then dropped one of the smaller pearls into the mug. The wine clouded almost at once, as if the pearl were emulsifying. He watched in fascination as the surface of the wine grew turbulent, eddying and roiling for a full thirty seconds before it calmed again and grew translucent, a faint afterimage of the pearl seeming to hover within the depths, like the moon in a night sky. Slowly the wine became transparent, like blood-red Kool-Aid, and he saw that the pearl and its image had vanished utterly.

"Over the river," he said out loud, and drank the wine in the spirit of Cleopatra. He gagged, nearly retching at the vinegar taste of the tainted wine, and then realized that he was already drunk as a lord, the pearl-enriched elixir having gone straight to his head. Rich as a lord, too, he reflected, steadying himself against the bench. He laughed hilariously at his own wit, muffling his mouth with his hand until he could contain himself. In the ensuing silence he heard an echo of the departed laughter, far removed, but coming so distinctly from behind him that he turned toward the window, where he saw what appeared to be a face peering in at him.

A hoarse cry strangled out of his throat as he lurched forward, nearly knocking over the pearls. Slowly he turned again to the window: it was apparently his own face that looked back at him—the face he had seen in the kitchen mirror, but even more misshapen and pale and bloated, the old glass no doubt distorting the image. The years of dust lent him a ghostly pallor in the feeble garage light.

On a whim he picked up the jar of pearls and held it up so that it, too, was reflected in the window pane alongside his own face, which smiled back at him with an unspeakable satisfaction as he nodded his head. "A king's ransom," he said out loud, the words tasting like the pearl-infused wine, and then, as with the laughter moments earlier, he heard the phrase re-uttered in a drawn-out sibilant whisper. His ears savored the sound, and the bowl full of pearls shone with an opalescent light.

He caught sight of his upraised wristwatch then—nearly five o'clock. In only an hour Peggy would have him in her grasp, and the day wouldn't be his any longer. "I don't mean to be impolite," he said, winking theatrically at the reflected image, "but I'm in something of a hurry."

"Hurry," the face in the window repeated back to him, and he returned the pearls to the drawer and turned toward the door with a renewed sense of urgency, heading straight out to the sidewalk.