Universal Harvester(13)

“Been all holed up in the house, haven’t really seen anybody for a while,” she said when she came back in. “Do I look awful?”

“You look about the same to me,” said Jeremy, which wasn’t true at all.

“Well, it’s sweet of you to say that,” she said, reaching into her jeans for some Chap Stick, applying it to her lips like it was the most normal thing in the world, her lips in fact dry and cracked and peeling, her eyes weirdly awake to the fluorescent hum of the almost-empty store.

*

“Which ones did she take?” Stephanie asked on the phone.

“Miss Parsons, I don’t get into anybody’s business,” Jeremy said. Why had he called her, then?

“Why did you call me, then?” she said.

“Well, you asked how she was last time you were in.”

“It could have waited if that was all there was to it.”

“Well, I’m sorry, then,” said Jeremy.

“Don’t get mad,” she said. “I just don’t know why you won’t admit to being a little curious.”

“You already made me admit that,” he said.

Stephanie smiled. Jeremy’s shyness was the true vintage.

“Go see which tapes,” she said.

He didn’t feel like arguing; it’s easier to follow directions. He got up from the stool behind the counter and went back into the racks. The store was already locked; Sarah Jane had said she’d be back after lunch, but an hour later the phone rang. The doctor wanted her to get more rest. She was going home. “You want somebody to bring you some dinner?” he’d asked her.

“No, no,” she’d said.

“Looks like those two we saw, you and me,” Jeremy said now to Stephanie, “plus Iron Will, and one called Primal Fear. And a Star Trek movie.”

“Which Star Trek?”

He laughed. “I don’t know.” He walked with the mobile phone to his ear from the racks out into the store again and headed for the Sci-Fi section. He grabbed four of the Star Trek titles and headed back to the racks again.

“OK, we still have Generations,” he said. “Still have Insurrection. We’re missing First Contact, it looks like.”

“The case is in the store and the tape’s gone?” said Stephanie.

“Yeah.” He imagined her scribbling in her notebook full of lists and heavily underlined phrases in capital letters.

“We should get that one from Hollywood Video and watch it,” she said.

“I’m not doing this with you,” he said. “I’m just telling you because I knew you’d want to know.”

There was a pause. “Do you have a crush on me?” she said.

“Sure,” he said. “A little. I don’t know.”

She didn’t want to push him, in part because she sensed that pushing would be of no use, but she’d outgrown the patience for these slow, shy passes.

“Well, I’m going into Ames, and I’m going to Hollywood Video,” she said.

“All right,” he said. “Let me know if you find anything, I guess.” She wasn’t going to find anything. Sarah Jane had the only copy on which anybody might have found something. If Stephanie didn’t already know this, then she was just playing games.

“I’ll call you after I watch,” she said, and she did, that night, around 11:30; they talked for about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, about Star Trek: First Contact, and also about recent trends in the weather.

*

Hanging from a nail at the end of the front porch was a hollowed-out gourd with a hole in it for birds. House wrens will set up shop in a gourd inside of half a day if you hang one up; they nest in winter and their young fledge in spring, and then the nest sits ready for another bird to come clear it out and start again.

“Wasps,” Lisa Sample said from her chair near the door when she saw Sarah Jane approaching the gourd. “They’ll come at you if you hang out over there too much.”

“Sorry?”

“Wasps. There used to be birds, but between nests some wasps set up in there. We had them when I lived in Madison. Look.” She pointed at the hole; it was partially obscured by a pale tan resin, leaving a half-moon-shaped opening. “Brood cells.”

Sarah Jane jutted her neck forward a little and narrowed her eyes, trying to get better focus without having to draw nearer; she noticed a few small yellow bodies lazily drifting in and out of the hole. It made the gourd feel heavier in her sight than it had when she’d been imagining robins or nuthatches. Birds nest lightly. She thought about so many wasps crowded into one place, a great throng displacing some small family of two or three birds. She saw the muddy netting of the nest half-blocking the hole, dusty runover from all the activity inside. And she noted, finally, a wet spot at the bottom, a darkening patch about as big as her hand. Honey? There is no wasp honey. But the gourd had been put there for birds.

“Madison?” she said.

“Just for a short while. It was nice, though,” said Lisa, behind her now, craning in, voice low. “I think they got one of the babies before the mama left. Gourd’ll rot through when it gets a little warmer now.”

“They eat birds?” said Sarah Jane. Her stomach heaved a little.

“They eat mosquitoes. They’ll sting anything, though. I guess if something happened to a little bird in there the mama wouldn’t really be able to pull it back out through the little hole.”