Page 13 of Finding Basil
“I’ve been told that, yeah.”
“I used to be until I bought this house.”
“Well, you’ll be that again. I’ll help.”
His smile lit his face. He was a lovely person, giving, friendly, actually nice. He couldn’t remember the last actually nice person he’d met, and especially one he was attracted to.
Herb was…trite and cliché as it was, drawn to bad boys. His last boyfriend was a football player for a minor league. The reason he was in the minor leagues was his bad temper. He’dnever been physically violent with Herb, thankfully, but the guys on opposing teams, and sadly his own team, weren’t so lucky.
The hardware store was bustling, which surprised him. “Did everyone here just buy an old house?”
“No, it’s harvest time; it’s the end of the season, which is as much work as the beginning of it. People need things they have one choice in Foggy Basin.”
The hardware store was bigger than he’d anticipated too, with aisles and aisles of things he thought were alien. Not once in his life had he thought about the maintenance that went into a home.
Calling the super, seeing his butt crack as he worked under his mother’s kitchen sink, or the ultra-thin super in his last building, that showed no crack, but Herb was pretty sure smoked some crack, changing the lightbulbs in the hall.
Basil went through the aisles with the carts as they made their way to the back, where he gave the man behind the counter a list of the glass panes he’d need to repair the greenhouse.
Everything looked terribly interesting. The plumbing aisle alone showed Herb what the plumber had spoken about, copper, PVC, which was a thick plastic piping. Then, the lumber aisle had only samples, as to get the actual lumber, the customer would have to go outside in the yard to pick it up after paying for it and keeping a slip to give to the men who’d load it.
What a busy and active place it was, the most active of any establishment in town except for the diner.
Basil knew his way around, and he knew most of the people there as well, speaking to each with a smile and a handshake, introducing Herb to all of them too.
“I’ll never remember all these names.”
“You’ll learn pretty fast. You tend to see the same people over and over here.”
“I don’t know if I saw the same people in my own building more than once back in Denver.”
“This isn’t Denver,” he said, laughing. “This is small-town America, where everyone will know your business within ten minutes of the time you step into the town limits, and you’ll be stared at like a zoo animal for the first three years at least.”
“Three years?”
Basil nodded. “You are the outsider, and people in small towns don’t trust the outside. Until you become a fully integrated part of the town, you’ll be the outsider.”
“That’s incredibly insightful. Were you from…outside?”
“Nope. I’m one of the people judging you,” he whispered. “And I can spread the word whether or not you’re okay.”
His proximity and whisper made Herb’s neck sweat. “I’ll be sure to be on my best behavior around you.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know if you have to go that far.”
The forwardness took aback Herb, but he didn’t back down from it. “Okay, I’ll try to constrain my impulses of goody two shoe-ness.”
“That’s not a word.”
“It could be.”
He was having a great time, and his mind was perfectly taken off how much money the house was costing him.
When they got back to the house, however, Basil dropped him off so he could continue on to the back where he’d unload the purchases that were just for the greenhouse, Herb saw the porch. The hole wasn’t only repaired, the entire porch was finished. “What the hell?”
Cordelia pulled up just then, and she hollered, “Oh, good! They’re done!”
Herb waved to her as she got out of the car. “You did this?”
