Page 6 of Finding Basil
“Thank you. One more thing, I thought the appraiser said the house was sound. Am I going to keep finding problems?”
“It was listed as is, Mr. Buffet, but the foundation isn’t bad, and that is the biggest worry in these old houses. I can also email the findings to you again, but I sent that along.”
She had. Herb remembered that, but he glanced at it and promptly deleted the email. “Right. Thank you, Ms. Meadows. I appreciate you sending it again, for my records, of course.”
Pulling up to his house, he laughed as he remembered how happy he was to have bought the place. Well, it was too late for buyer’s remorse. He owned it, and now he had to also own his mistakes.
After the coffee was long gone, he had unpacked most of the kitchen boxes and the books, setting them on the wooden shelves in the living room. He contemplated where to mount the television but didn’t have time to decide as the plumber knocked on the door.
Herb jogged to the door and opened it to the big-gutted man with the gray chest hair sticking out of his open collar. “You Buffet?”
“I am.”
He was standing off to the side of the hole in the porch, staring down at it. “I’m Rob Gentry. You know you got a hole here?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Might wanna fix that.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” he joked, then, as he laughed, Rob Gentry moved his eyes to Herb’s face.
“Ain’t no joke if someone falls in it.”
“Right. I’ll call the contractor later.”
He let Rob into the house and showed him the bathroom upstairs, then left him to it so he could continue to unpack.
He was halfway down the stairs, however, when he heard it. A loud hissing, then he saw the water flowing down the worn wooden stairs under his sneakers.
“Line broke clean in half,” Rob Gentry hollered from the bathroom.
“Did it?” he whispered. “Well, I’ll be.”
He went back up to see Rob staring at it instead of jumping into action to get it to stop spraying all over the room.
“Can’t you do something?”
He was scratching his chin as he said slowly, “Well, sir, I can if you know where the main shutoff is.”
He wouldn’t know that if someone offered him a million dollars to tell them. “I have no idea.”
“Prob’ly in the basement. I’ll go down there and check.”
“Please!”
The door to the basement was in the kitchen behind the round metal kitchen table, and as Rob went there, Herb got into a box to pull out every towel he owned to try to drink up some of the water before he had water damage. Not that he knew what water damage was, but he heard that on the news during floods. It didn’t sound like a good thing.
He was about to pull out his wavy dark blond hair when he found the towels and headed up the stairs that looked more likea waterfall at the moment. Finally, though, once he got to the top, the water went off, and he sighed in deep relief.
Rob sauntered back up the stairs as Herb was laying out towels. “There’s a hand pump out back that goes directly into one of the wells. You can pump ya some water for now for drinkin’ and such.”
“What? You mean the water in the house must stay off?”
“Well, sir, I can get it back on quick enough, but I don’t think you want that water spraying all over. Water damage ain’t good for a house, no, sir.”
“Can’t you just fix the faucet in the shower?”
“Well, sir, I’ll tell ya. Once I got down there in that basement, I got me a good look at the pipes. Not a one of them worth the metal that’s rusting out.”
