Page 5 of Rules to Love By

“You have to say that. You’re dating her. Not that she heard you.”

“Houses have ears around here, Marcus. You know that.”

Didn’t he just? He glanced sidelong at the building that housed the hardware store. “Most small towns are creepy because the people are creepy.”

Mr. Benson chuckled.

“Back in the city, the buildings just let you live your life without interfering.”

“That so?” he asked, like he had no idea what that might be like.

“Yes.” He thought about his aunt’s diner, the way the sun bounced off the stainless-steel surfaces into Johnathan’s eyes all day long, but not into his. “Maybe.” How many times had Johnathan tripped over a chair, mysteriously sticking out after Marcus had just pushed it under its table? “I don’t know.”

Mr. Benson made a non-committal noise as he pulled open the door to his barbershop and motioned Marcus in ahead of him.

Marcus huffed. How annoying to have these thoughts now, right when he’d almost convinced himself he should stay in Griffon’s Elbow. What if the diner had been trying to tell him something and he’d been too dense to understand? And now he’d gone and left it in Johnathan’s hands.

Did buildings hold grudges? Not long ago, the thought would have struck him as absurd. Since moving to Griffon’s Elbow, his awareness had certainly shifted. He shivered and wondered what a vindictive building might do to a guy who’d abandoned it to an asshole like Johnathan.

“You all right?” Mr. Benson asked, forcing Marcus’s attention back to the building he was standing in.

“Yeah. Sorry. I’m good. Show me what you need.”

The barbershop had the feel of a guy’s club, with dark wood walls and a once-shiny black floor now worn around the barbers’ chairs that were fixed in place in front of three floor-to-ceiling mirrors. There was a corrugated-tin-faced counter halfway down, situated between two pillars, and two long, low black leather couches against the wall opposite the mirrors. Those, too, showed signs of heavy use.

The rinse sinks at the back had rickety-looking shelves overhanging them, and all the walls could use a new coat of paint.

“He’s not much,” Mr. Benson said, “but he’s all ours.”

“He?”

Mr. Benson turned to face him. “The shop. Son, you didn’t think all the buildings in town were she, did you?”

“I… um.” Until very recently. he hadn’t thought about it at all, but the nice people of Griffon’s Elbow loved their old buildings an awful lot.

Mr. Benson chuckled. “You’ll see.” He waved a hand over his shoulder as he headed for the back of the long, narrow room. “Come have a look.”

Marcus examined the shelves Mr. Benson indicated over the sinks.

“Start here, I think. Before these come down on some poor soul’s head.”

“Yeah.” He gave one of the shelves an experimental poke.

The shelf shuddered, slipping on the protruding screws until the shampoo bottles knocked together. He had to wonder if the house itself was defying gravity and keeping the shelves in place despite the poor mounting job and basic physics.

“You didn’t use anchors,” he observed.

“Anchors?”

“They’re little plastic—never mind.” He stopped at the blank look on Mr. Benson’s face. “They are going to have to come down before someone gets hurt. You’re right about that.”

“Maybe while you have them down, you can paint the wall.”

“Makes sense.”

“What colour, do you think?” Mr. Benson asked.

“Colour?” Iris had never asked his opinion when he was working on the diner, just told him to paint things the same colour they had been. She had never been big on change.

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