Page 3 of Finding Basil
She was exasperated, and they didn’t care a bit.
When she saw him smile at her, however, she smiled back, even as she sighed. The trip, no matter how long and tedious, must have been for good reasons.
As he grew closer to his new home, he slowed the car. His foot came off the peddle without him realizing it as he took in the scenery.
There were beautiful hills, the trees turning their autumn colors through the evergreens like a great painter had been set loose on the landscape.
The town itself could have been on a postcard, with a tall church steeple in the center, no one high-rise in the mix.
Once the car was rolling to a stop in the center of the road, he pulled to the side to get out and take in the fresh air and the beauty of the place.
There was fog in the basin, hanging low and misty over the city, but not so thick as to hide the place completely. Cars rolled through the streets of the town without hurry, and there was a park filled with people picnicking on the cool, beautiful day.
After he got back into the Jag, he made sure the address was in the GPS on the dash and set out on the way home again.
Home. What a beautiful word. It evoked good memories and happy thoughts of Christmas mornings, hot breakfasts and a yard with green grass and a tire swing.
Of course, he’d had none of those. His home had been an apartment in New York City and a trip to Central Park to see green grass. Still, he’d had a good life when he was young, his parents were upwardly mobile professionals, and his nannies that helped raise him made sure he did his homework and ate his vegetables.
Still, he couldn’t help longing for the homes he saw on television and in movies. Those lovely scenes of people loving one another, drinking coffee on a porch to watch the sunrise. He hadn’t seen a sunrise since camp when he was eleven.
That was much too long.
The road to his home bypassed the town by a mile. He drove out on a road where only one other vehicle was also driving, and that was a tractor. Once the driver of the tractor waved him around the thing, Herb cheerily waved as he passed.
That was the life. He had dreamed of it — that kind of community, where people didn’t ignore everything from muggings to bank robberies, but gathered around car wrecks, hoping to see some blood.
Pulling up to the house, he saw a car there in the driveway. His realtor had promised to come to give him the keys and show him around when he got to town. She waved to him as he parked and walked over to the car as he exited.
“Mr. Buffet?”
“Yes, and you must be Cordelia Meadows. By the way, that’s a great name for a realtor.”
She was an older woman with short white hair and a smile he figured she wore most of the day. He wondered how much her cheeks hurt at night when she finally got home. “I’ve been told that, but I assure you, I didn’t know that was what I would be when I got married thirty years ago.”
“Luck, then.”
“It was, if you don’t count his underwear on the floor every morning and his never learning how to use the coffeemaker,” she said, laughing. “Shall we do a tour and then you can settle in? Are you movers on the way?”
“Yes, I only had boxes and garment bags, so it’s a small truck.”
“Wonderful. Like the ad said, it’s furnished, so very turnkey.”
The house was more beautiful in person than he’d imagined looking at the photos.
The stairs creaked as he stepped on them, and the boards of the porch looked a little bowed, but he figured there were a few things that would need fixing now that he was a homeowner. She unlocked the door for him before handing him the keys with a smile. “Welcome home, Mr. Buffet.”
The entry led directly to the staircase in the center, the dining room on the left and the living room on the right.
They took the right and went into the living room, which was dark with the curtains drawn, terrible yellow curtains with a strange white swirl through them that was almost as yellow as the rest.
Once Cordelia opened them with a billowing of dust, the sun lightened the room considerably, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
The furniture looked much better in the photos, mostly because they were avoided.
The worst of it was an ugly orange velour sofa with swirly embroidery on the bottom by the mismatched legs.
“That’s…what décor period would that be?”
