Page 22 of Rules to Love By

Even as he was contemplating it, Eli turned a smile on him that melted the rest of the chill left over from his previous cold shoulder. “So.” He rubbed his hands together. “Where do we start?”

“Start?” Marcus tried hard not to let that smile distract him.

“I’m the padawan here, remember?”

Glancing around the shop, Marcus noted that Mr. Benson had Steven Barrow in the chair closest to the front windows, and Ambrose’s client had left her purse next to the second chair. The third one, opposite the couches and storeroom, remained vacant.

Currently, Ambrose had his customer at the back, where she sat in a chair in front of one of the sinks chatting a mile a minute while Ambrose fondled her hair.

“Well, we can’t work back there. I expect there will be a lot of action at those sinks while the place is open.”

“There usually is,” Eli agreed.

“So the shelves are out, at least until he closes.” His gaze drifted to the miniscule storage room. The door sagged open a little more, though no one had touched it. “Besides, I can take them down, do the electrical and paint the wall, but I won’t know what to build for display until I know what your dad wants to display.”

“So…” Eli sagged a little too. “Inventory, then?”

“We can’t spread this lot out here without being in the way.”

For a protracted moment of silence, Eli scrubbed at the back of his neck, occasionally scratching his nails through the tight curls at the base of his hairline.

“It’s really a lot,” Marcus said.

“So much.” He sighed and dropped his hand with a slap against a khaki-clad leg. “We can take it all upstairs.”

The memory of the narrow stairwell into the apartment loomed in Marcus’s mind. “That sounds awful,” he said at last, even as he moved to pick up the first of too many boxes.

“Doesn’t it just.” Eli opened the door between the couches for him, then grabbed two more boxes and followed him up.

There was surprisingly little furniture in the front room of the Benson apartment above the barbershop.

“He spends most of his time downstairs, even after closing time. It’s sort of his hang-out with his buddies. Always has been. And I have my own space in the attic. So when Mom called one day asking if we had anything extra for a new place, he let her take what she wanted.”

“They get along? Your parents?”

“Please. They get along better now than they ever did when they lived together. And she really likes Mrs. Stinson.”

“And she doesn’t mind your dad has a girlfriend?”

Eli snorted. “She’s relieved. She was never good at carrying her half of the relationship, according to Dad. Now she doesn’t have to. In Sandra, Dad gets someone who wants to be half of something, and Mom gets her no-strings free love when she feels like it.”

“And they’re all good with that.”

“I haven’t heard anyone complaining, and it’s been years.”

“So weird,” Marcus muttered.

“Why? Because they’re straight?”

“Because they’re old.”

Eli laughed. “It has been mentioned to me they weren’t always old.” He motioned to the top of the stairs. “After you.”

“Hey, do you think when Mr. Stinson was alive, they were swingers?” Marcus asked as he jogged down the stairs.

“You had to make it weird,” Eli countered.

They pushed through the door at the bottom. “You never wondered, though?”

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