Free Thoroughly 10 - What Are You Wearing to Die? by Patricia Sprinkle Page B

a second look.
    “The world treatin’ you all right?” he asked me, still beaming.
    “World’s treating me fine.” I eyed him warily. I couldn’t think of a single reason for him to leave his store and come see us at work. Although we had been good neighbors for thirty-five years—Joe Riddley had harvested Hubert’s watermelons and fed his cows while he was laid up with his heart attack several years back, and Hubert and his son, Maynard, had been real helpful to me in the weeks after Joe Riddley got shot 4 —we had never been drop-in friends. The men had serious differences that were only partially due to the fact that Joe Riddley went to Georgia and Hubert to Georgia Tech. They had yet to agree on football, religion, or politics.
    Hubert started toward the wing chair, then aimed a suspicious look at the curtain rod, which was directly over the chair.
    “Back off! Give me space!” Bo taunted him.
    “Come,” Joe Riddley commanded, holding out his arm. Bo flew down to perch on it, then sidestepped up to Joe Riddley’s shoulder and sat bobbing his head, waiting to be entertained.
    Hubert sat down on the front edge of the chair, a man with something important to say. If he’d smiled any wider he’d have split his jaw.
    “You want a Coke?” Joe Riddley offered.
    “No, thanks, I’m fine.” He rubbed his palms together. “You all likin’ your new house and all? Don’t miss the old place?”
    He was talking about the small brick house we’d bought in town when we’d deeded the old place to Ridd. Moving after all those years takes a while to get used to, so Joe Riddley ignored the questions. “Why don’t you let us in on the secret of what brings you to our office on this fine day?”
    Hubert crossed one stubby calf over the other thigh and beamed from one of us to the other. “I have made a momentous decision, and I wanted you folks to be the first to know.”
    Joe Riddley and I both swiveled our chairs around so we could see him more easily.
    “You gonna marry Gusta?” Joe Riddley hazarded.
    Since Gusta was nearly twenty years older than Hubert, I figured that wasn’t likely. “You gonna sell your store and retire?” I guessed.
    Spence’s Appliances had been hit even harder than we had by the opening of the big-box superstore on the edge of town. Folks in small towns don’t need a lot of major appliances, so most of Hubert’s business had come from selling radios, televisions, razors, blenders, and the like. He didn’t have the volume to be able to compete with big-box prices.
    “Nope and nope.” He wore the smug smile of somebody who knows the right answer. His voice dropped a notch, into the realm of his normal grumble. “I’d rather marry a mosquito than Gusta. They have a lot in common, now that I think about it. Both drive you crazy and go straight for the jugular. And who’d want to buy my store? So I’m not getting married and I’m not retiring—not exactly. I’ve decided to go into another line of business.” He looked from one of us to the other, priming our pumps for the revelation. “I am going to run for mayor. And since you now live inside the city limits, you can vote for me.”
    He sat back in the wing chair and waited for applause—or maybe a campaign contribution.
    It took all the self-discipline I possessed not to shriek, “You are what? Of all the tomfool notions I ever heard, that’s the dumbest.”
    I don’t want to distress those who might belong to Hubert’s party, but Hubert’s politics were 90 percent rant and 10 percent rave. No government ever did anything right as far as he was concerned, and his solutions were generally predicated not on what was best for the majority of citizens but entirely on what was best for Hubert.
    “What led you to this momentous decision?” Joe Riddley spoke in a milder voice than I could have managed.
    Hubert scrunched up his eyes, a sign he was about to get serious and hateful—which, with Hubert, was often the same