Best Laid Plans (Garnet Run 2)

Politeness, thy name is Rye!

The man chuckled. “No, son. I know where everything is.”

He patted Rye on the shoulder.

An hour later, the screws were sorted and Rye had developed a cramp in his neck from whipping his head around every time someone walked past him.

“Do they all know who I am?” he muttered.

Marie raised an innocent eyebrow, but he was pretty sure she was amused.

“Glad to provide the entertainment,” he grumbled.

She grinned.

* * *

After his lunch break, during which Rye dropped off the loan paperwork to Mike at the bank, there were even more people.

“Damn, is it always this busy?” Rye asked Charlie. He didn’t remember much of a crowd when he’d been in himself.

“Nope.”

“You having a sale?”

“Nope.”

“What’s the deal then? A hammer convention in town or something?”

“They’re curious. About you. Word will’ve gotten out.”

Rye blinked.

“Word will have gotten out? Word of what? That a human being not from the state of Wyoming is working in a hardware store? Is that news?”

Charlie raised an eyebrow, but unlike when Marie did it, Rye didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant.

“Charlie. Charlie?”

But Charlie had gone out back to cut wood for a customer.

Rye sighed and went to sort bolts.

Two white girls, one tall and one short, who looked about college age, turned down the aisle, engaged in an intense discussion.

“Help you find anything?” Rye asked them.

“Yeah, a roommate who doesn’t suck, please,” the taller of the two muttered.

“Cohabitation grief? I’m familiar,” Rye said. He decided that if he couldn’t help with hardware, maybe he could at least help with this. “What’s the problem?”

“You’re not from here, huh?” the other girl said.

“Nope. Seattle.”

They both nodded as if that explained things.

“We have a new housemate. And she’s cool, mostly. But she has all these weird habits. Like, she talks to herself constantly to hype herself up. And she only drinks out of teacups. Like, even her water, out of teacups. Orange juice? Freaking teacups!”

“Oh,” the other girl added. “She also sings opera while she does yoga. Like, aren’t you supposed to breathe during yoga? And she keeps food in her bedroom like she thinks we’re gonna steal it or something.”

She rolled her eyes.

Rye smiled. They had it easy.

“I once had a roommate who slept with a Tupperware of meatballs next to his bed and rolls on his face,” Rye said. “He was worried he’d get hungry during the night and if he did he’d just make a meatball sandwich.”

“Um. What?” the taller girl said.

“Yup. I could tell you roommate stories all day, but there’s only one thing to do.”

“What?”

“As long as they’re not hurting you or doing something really shady, you just have to accept that people are all different and that whatever shit your roommate does that you think is weird, you probably do things that are totally normal to you that they think are just as weird.”

The girls looked at each other doubtfully, all shiny hair and nondescript outfits, as if they couldn’t imagine a single thing about themselves that might strike someone else as weird.

“It’s true,” he went on. “I promise. I’ve lived with probably a hundred people over the years. It’s a waste of energy to be annoyed by that stuff and trying to get people to change stuff that’s about them is pointless. All you can do is have clear boundaries about stuff that’s actually a problem for you. Like that she can’t eat food if you mark it with your name or something. Or asking her not to sing before eight a.m. That kind of thing. Other than that, she’s just being herself.”

Rye shrugged.

“You’ve had a hundred roommates,” the shorter girl said with an awed expression.

“Maybe more, I never counted. So learn from my many, many roommate situations. Annoyance: waste of energy. Trying to change shit that has nothing to do with you: waste of time. You: just as annoying as everyone else.”

The girls looked at the floor.

“You’re not here to buy materials to wall her into her room or anything, are you?” Rye joked.

“Can you do that?” the shorter girl said. “No. No, right?”

“Uh, yeah, probably not the best idea,” Rye confirmed. “But you could try a whiteboard where you write roommate agreements?”

Rye realized he didn’t know if they sold whiteboards, but before it could matter the girls wandered off, their conversation muted.

Congratulating himself on both being polite and passing wisdom to the next generation, Rye turned around and almost ran into a man and woman standing in the aisle, holding a pitchfork like a real-life American Gothic. Rye reminded himself that since they were in a place that sold pitchforks it wasn’t as eerie as it would otherwise have been.

“Help you find anything? Else?” he said, taking a step away from the pitchfork.

“Busy in here today,” the woman said.

“Yeah, I think that might be my fault,” Rye said. “In a come-gawk-at-the-new-guy way.”