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Marcus had been back then. The truth was, Arthur plain hated the guy and would have decked him for no reason at all. But the Twinkie was a nice gesture, and somehow they were best friends from that point on. Arthur taught Marcus how to fight, and Marcus taught Arthur how to pass second grade. And third grade. And junior high and high school. When Logan High School merged with Pine Valley, Marcus and Arthur met Paul, who started warming Arthur’s bed during sleepovers. Life had been pretty damn good.
    For a little while, they’d all three worked together at the timber company, but truth was, Marcus was a lot happier as a lawyer in a small town than he’d been as a lawyer in a big city or a logger in the woods. Though probably mostly he was happy because he was with Frankie.
    Arthur stuck his head into the salon first. When Frankie saw him, he beamed over the top of Nancy Schneider’s hair full of those weird aluminum foil papers. “Hi, Arthur. Didn’t I cut your hair last week?”
    “Wanted to talk to your hubby. He around?”
    It was cute the way Frankie blushed and got flustered when Arthur pretended he and Marcus were already married. Why they weren’t now that marriage equality was the law was anybody’s guess. “He’s at a meeting at city hall. Why don’t you come over for dinner tonight? I have a white bean rosemary stew in the Crock-Pot.”
    “Sure.” Arthur bleeped over the white bean and rosemary parts and focused on stew . Had to be meat in a stew, right? “It’ll keep, I guess. Had an idea I wanted to run by him is all, while I had the bee in my bonnet.” He scratched his beard, considering Frankie. “You might be able to help too. Do you know anything about them grant things? Where you apply to get money from…I don’t know. The grant people?”
    “My mom’s applied for a few of the government ones for colleges, but she says the private foundation ones are a lot less hassle, quicker with payout most of the time. Not as much bureaucratic red tape.”
    A private foundation one it was, then. “How does somebody go about finding one? Who do you ask?”
    Frankie looked ready to laugh. “What in the world is this about, Arthur?”
    Arthur did a check in the chair, and sure enough, Nancy was all ears. Might as well take an ad out in the Logan Gazette . “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it later. What time you want me for dinner?”
    “I don’t know. How about I text you? I never know how long Marcus will be half the time.”
    “Text’s good,” Arthur said.
    He went to his mom’s place and fussed with the sleigh a little more, and as he worked he thought about the library and its librarian. He couldn’t get over how different Gabriel was when he was with kids. The guy needed to move to the city and find himself an executive gay and adopt a pile of babies from Rwanda or wherever people adopted from these days. That would mean the Logan kids wouldn’t have story time, so maybe the executive gay would have to move up here.
    God, he really was something, Gabriel. Still not Arthur’s type, but cute when he smiled. Kind of got Arthur in the belly when he was good to the kids. He understood why his mom was trying to set him up.
    Not that it was going to happen. But the guy wasn’t as bad as Arthur had thought.
    Maybe Arthur should introduce Gabe to Frankie—as friends. They seemed like the same type of guy, except Gabe was more geek where Frankie was pretty much full-on fairy. Probably Gabe would get all excited about white beans and rosemary. The guy never went out as far as Arthur could tell, and nobody seemed to know him, even after he’d been in town for almost eighteen months. Arthur hadn’t thought about it much until now, but it was kind of a disgrace nobody had bothered to befriend the guy except Arthur’s crazy mother. It had damn well better not be the gay thing.
    Fuck, it really might be the hair.
    Arthur swung by the library on his way home from work, and then on a whim