“So... What exactly happened again?” Ron asked his brother as they walked into the large home improvement store.

“Mum had Cathy and her kids over and Alice managed to get trapped in Ginny’s old room when the door got stuck. Mum might've panicked a bit and decided that the best way to get her out was to break down the door with a hammer, so now they need a new door since the original one now has a bunch of holes in it." Percy replied, glancing around to see if he could get enough of an idea about the layout of the store from the entranceway.

“What was Alice doing in Ginny’s room in the first place?” Ron asked. He quickly snagged one of the last carts available since he didn’t feel like toting a door all over the place and was pretty sure that his brother felt the same way.

“That was not something I was ever told.” Percy said with a frown. Technically, it hadn’t been Ginny’s room since their parents had converted all their old bedrooms into guest bedrooms after they had all moved out and into their own homes, so it wasn’t as if Alice had been invading Ginny’s privacy or anything. But old habits - or in this case, thought patterns - were hard to break. The fourth room on the right on the second floor, just above the pantry part of the kitchen would always be Ginny’s (and also Ron’s back when they both had been too little for their being different genders to actually matter with these kinds of things).

“So did dad say what kind of door they were looking for as a replacement? Or why they wanted us to pick it up?” Ron asked as he began to steer them towards the left hand end of the store. 

“Because Ginny’s out of the country right now and it was either us or the twins?” Percy said, answering Ron’s second question as he looked up each aisle as they passed it, “He just said that they wanted a regular door.”

Ron just nodded at that. It might not narrow down the possibilities too much since there was such a wide range of styles available, but it did give them at least a little bit of an idea about what they were looking for (not that either of them actually knew the name of the type of door they were looking for; only what it wasn’t).

They had just reached the spot where the tool section transitioned into the lighting section when a frazzled looking older woman approached them. “Excuse me, I know you don’t work here, but would mind helping me? It’s just that I’ve been looking for an employee for so long and I can’t quite reach the bulb I need...” she asked with a note of desperation in her voice

“Of course.” Percy said agreeably. He honestly didn’t mind helping people like this (his mother had made sure to drum such courteousness into all of them - including Ginny since good manners were good manners no matter what your gender was). Besides it wasn’t like they were on so tight a schedule that taking a minute or two out of his day to help someone who needed it would be an onerous burden. (Not that grabbing a single pack of lightbulbs off a high shelf actually took a literal minute). The lady thanked both of them profusely before scurrying off in the direction of the cashier.

They’d barely made it to the next aisle when someone behind them cleared their throat and tapped Percy on his shoulder (or at least, they tried to since they were about a foot shorter and ended up just poking him in the back below his shoulder blade). Percy turned to face them, a politely neutral look on his face.

“Well, aren’t you going to help me.” the woman who’d poked Percy demanded.

“Why would he?” Ron asked in an honestly confused voice, as if the idea was a truly novel one (which it really wasn’t. While Ron couldn’t be one hundred percent certain what the rude woman was thinking seeing as he wasn’t a telepath, it was fairly obvious to him that she thought that Percy worked there despite that what he was wearing wasn’t anything close to the store’s uniform) before Percy could reply. 

The woman looked taken aback for a moment before her face clouded over. For a moment, it looked like she was going to scream at Ron about how rude he was being (maybe she thought that Ron was also an employee? Weirder things have happened after all, and it wasn’t like the woman seemed all that concerned with little details such as who worked - or didn’t work - where) but seemed to get a (brief) attack of sense and instead decided to completely ignore him. “I want a large chandelier; one of the ones with real crystals. I know you have them; they were on the website.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t work here.” Percy replied with a frown. This was apparently the wrong thing to say as the woman lost whatever pretense of composure and ‘politeness’ she had. She gasped loudly, like Percy had just verbally slapped by questioning her and her family’s romantic proclivities and ancestry in the crudest terms known to man (or even, that he had up and physically slapped her. You never really knew with people like this). 

“How rude!” she proclaimed, “If you refuse to do your job, then get me your manager!”

“Lady, like he said, he doesn’t work here.” Ron said, all pretense of his earlier obfusticating naivety dropped as his short temper fizzed to life. He turned his attention to Percy in an attempt to rein in his temper before he did something foolishly impulsive, “Come on. I think the doors are in the back.”

Percy tuned out the woman’s ranting (which was not as easy as it should seem since she was being rather loud and starting to cause a bit of a scene as she berated Percy and threatened to have him fired for his insubordination) as they turned up the aisle they were at. Much to the brother’s annoyance, the woman turned out to be rather persistent. She followed them all the way through the lamps and past the plumbing fixtures in the next couple of aisles over, loudly berating them and demanding a manager the whole while. Ron saw an employee quickly disappear from sight out of the corner of his eye as their impromptu procession passed by (not that he could blame her. He wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the ranting woman if he could help it either. He did hope that she was going to get a manager or - better yet - security rather than just running away before she was picked out as the woman’s next target since seeing as she did work there, she’d have to put up with the woman’s attitude with a smile. Ron was under no illusions that what the woman wanted wasn’t something that was possible for her to get and she clearly wasn’t good at being told no).

They (and their unwanted hanger on) eventually found their way to where the doors were and were in luck. There were only five styles of ‘regular’ doors: a solid unembellished wooden panel, two with six evenly placed inset panels, and two with only two inset panels. The solid panel door and one each of the other styles didn’t come with a pre-cut hole for a doorknob or handle while the other two did.

“So which one do you think?” Ron asked Percy (a bit louder than he normally would since the woman hadn’t taken the hint and gone away. Ignoring her wasn’t the easiest thing to do since she was making such a spectacle of herself that it was hard not to, but both Ron and Percy had decided that it was likely the best course of action that they could take). 

“I think the two panel with the pre-cut hole if they have it in oak. It’d be the best match to the rest of the doors in the house and the pre-cut hole will make installing it easier since we won’t have to worry about getting everything lined up properly to make the proper hole for a door knob.” Percy replied. He removed his glasses for a moment and began to massage his eyes and the bridge of his nose; the woman’s screeching was starting to give him a headache and make his temper flare (which anyone who knew him was not a good thing. It wasn’t that he was particularly loud when he finally lost his temper - growing up in a large family around siblings who seemed to think that shouting constituted normal volume and had no issues talking over anyone else meant that he did know how to be loud when the situation called for it - but rather how sharp his tongue got. He was practically an expert when it came to verbally flaying people who’d earned it; and this woman had more than earned to be on the receiving end of it).

“Speaking of door knobs...” Ron began as he started looking through the boxes of doors in the style they’d picked out. He figured that, even if he couldn’t find oak, so long as he got a light colored wood that looked close to oak it would be okay, “Should we stick with the standard round brass one? Aha!”

“It would probably be for the best.” Percy said as he helped Ron wrestle the door into their cart, “Mum and dad understand that they might not end up with a perfectly matched door, but they would like the new one to match as closely as possible - and that would include having a door knob that wouldn’t stick out too much from the others.”

Behind them store security had managed to catch up with the enraged woman.She made a futile move to yank Percy around to face her - if he wouldn’t pay attention to her, then she’d make him pay attention to her - as the beefier of the two security guards inserted himself between her and Percy. The guard warned her that she had one more chance to leave the store quietly or they would have no chance but to call the police and have them remove her (by force if necessary). Ron and Percy just made their way back to the tools and hardware section to pick out the door knob and hinges.