Serendipity Green by Rob Levandoski Page B

bonehead?”
    â€œMy girlfriend had it made for me. I’m majoring in forensic anthropology, with a minor in archeology. I study bones and stuff.”
    â€œNo kidding.”
    The Bittinger boy drums on the chest like a National Geographic gorilla. “Eventually I’d love to work with somebody like Donald Johanson. You know, from the Institute of Human Origins? The guy who discovered Lucy? Australopithecus afarensis ? In Ethiopia? The little three-million-year-old hominid babe? Did you know Johanson used to work at the Natural History Museum in Cleveland? Working with a heavy hitter like Johanson is a long shot. Believe me, a reeeeaaaal long shot. I’ll probably end up in a crime lab solving murders. But that’s OK. More fun than selling hardware.”
    Bonehead, all right, Howie Dornick thinks.
    The garden tool aisle empties into the heating and plumbing supply department. Between the air conditioners and the sump pumps stands the door to the back room. The Bittinger boy leads his customer through it. He knees in front of a stack of paint cans and twists them so he can read the labels. “I’ve got to warn you, some of these colors are reeeeaaaally something.”
    Howie Dornick squats next to him. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
    â€œWell, I’ve got four gallons of this yellow. The guy who took over the Klean Kar car wash on Route 3 wanted something that would really catch people’s eye. Two days after he took it over, somebody shot him while he was emptying the quarter boxes. So we got stuck with this really bright yellow.”
    â€œHow bright is it?”
    â€œI can give you a real good price. I can give you a real good price on all this stuff.”
    And so Howie Dornick leaves Bittinger’s Hardware with not only the four cans of car-wash yellow, but also with three cans of video-store blue (the electrician hired to rewire the old empty store burned it to the ground, the Bittinger boy told him), two cans of beauty-shop blue (the three women partners had a falling-out over what their shop should be called, Hairway to Heaven, Shear Magic, or Cheap Cuts), one can of gold (The Bittinger boy had mixed that one for a Wooster College fraternity house, but the brothers spent the entire fix-it budget on a propane grill, leaving repainting of the big peeling Greek letters above the front porch for another year), and one can of darkroom black (ordered by a freelance photographer who fell off a barn roof trying to take a panoramic shot of Holsteins coming in for milking, for the July cover of Ohio Cow magazine). Despite the misfortunes of these various Woosterites, Howie Dornick leaves Wooster a happy man. He’s gotten all these cans for the price of one can of sale-price white.
    As soon as his customer drives away, the Bittinger boy calls home. “Dad,” he says, “you’ll never guess what some guy from Tuttwyler just bought. All that paint in the back.”
    â€œHope you gave him a good deal. You don’t make your money on what people buy from you today, but on what they buy from you tomorrow.”
    â€œGave him a real good deal.”
    â€œGood. You’re not wearing that goddamn tee-shirt, are you?”
    Bittingers never lie, not to each other, not to anybody. Still, they are skilled in the art of evasion. “Tee-shirt?”
    â€œA hardware man can’t be thought of as a bonehead,” his father says. “People have to believe hardware men know everything. You sell him any brushes?”
    â€œOne of the cheap ones with the plastic bristles.”
    â€œDidn’t you explain that a good brush is more important than the paint?”
    â€œTwice. He said the cheap one was good enough.”
    â€œHe’ll be sorry.”
    â€œThat’s what I told him.”
    â€œAnd he still bought the cheap one?”
    â€œWe’ve got to keep our DC trip a secret,” D. William Aitchbone says, after the