HomePlus.

The store.

HomePlus is the big-box hardware on the west edge of Harmon, on the parcel of farmland the township rezoned in 2019 over the objection of about half the people now shopping there. The footprint is 117,000 square feet under one roof, plus a separately-fenced lumber yard at the back, plus a garden center under shadecloth that doubles in size every March. The parking lot holds four hundred and forty cars. The lot is full on Saturdays from nine to two.

The grand opening, in the spring of The Quiet Man, is the event the circular in Boyd Haskell’s mailbox names by date and the Seer names again the next morning at the Lamplighter. HomePlus does not kill Haskell Hardware on opening day. HomePlus kills Haskell Hardware over twenty-one months, slowly, the way a chain store kills a small one, not by being better but by being adequate at a lower price, in a building with parking, on a road most people are already driving.

What it sells.

The shape that matters: lumber and building materials in the back, hardware and fasteners in the center, paint and stain along the east wall (the only mixer in the county that can color-match an existing chip), plumbing and electrical down the far aisles. Tools, both hand and power, fill the front center. Doors, windows, kitchen cabinets, bath fixtures, the displays that pull a customer in for one item and out with three.

The garden center is larger than anything else in the county. Riding mowers in the spring; mulch by the pallet; live plants under shadecloth from April through September; Christmas trees in December; bagged salt and snowblowers as soon as the leaves turn. The appliance department carries washers, dryers, refrigerators, ranges, the fridge David Marsh, in The Good Father, walks the floor of in chapter nineteen, pricing one he already cannot afford.

The overlap.

The book is unsentimental about what HomePlus shares with the rest of Harmon’s retail. Light bulbs are at HomePlus, at the Supercenter, at ValueMart, and at Haskell Hardware. Batteries the same. Extension cords, snow shovels, basic cleaning supplies, all four. The difference is, in each case, about a dollar, and HomePlus has the parking.

What HomePlus has that no one else has: the paint mixer, the lumber yard, the contractor desk, the riding mowers, the live plants in volume, and the appliances. What it does not have: the staff who know which screw you mean, the credit account a contractor can run a job on, the bin of single fasteners sold by the piece, and the half-century of a man at the counter who can tell you he last saw the part you are looking for in 1987 and what it was attached to.

The orange aprons.

The store employs about a hundred and sixty people across two shifts. Most are part-time. Most are nineteen, or sixty-three. The aprons are orange, the badges are first-name, and the training, by the store’s own admission in its corporate literature, is a forty-minute video. The staff who know things, the retired plumber in plumbing, the retired electrician in electrical, the two women who run the paint counter and have been with the store since opening day, are the store’s genuine asset. The corporate flyer does not mention them. The customers know who they are by face.

What the store is in the books.

HomePlus is the antagonist of The Quiet Man, not as a villain, but as the thing the book’s protagonist has known about for a long time and the protagonist’s wife has known about longer. It is also, in the wider series, the store that supplies the small physical objects the books pay attention to: the gas-can spout in book seven, the snow shovel in book fourteen, the kind of generic white interior paint that, by book ten, three different protagonists have, in three different houses, used to paint over three different things.

The store is open Monday through Saturday 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday 8 to 8. The flag at the front of the lot has been replaced twice in five years. The flag is not the point. The parking is the point.