Universal Harvester(22)

“Well, to talk first, but sure.” Jeremy couldn’t put into words what he meant when he said he had to talk to Sarah Jane: it was something about holding patterns and the itching persistence of loose ends, the relative ease of knowing where they’re located. The nearness of everything in his life to the house where they’d all once been a family. Fixed points in space and time.

“Well, all right,” said Steve, and then: “I think your mom would be proud, too.”

It always sat a little funny with Jeremy: Dad speaking on Mom’s behalf in her absence. These past few years of sitting around waiting for something to solidify: wouldn’t Mom have also understood that? You wait for signs, but there aren’t any signs; you wait a while longer, just in case.

“You think so?” said Jeremy.

“I do think so,” his father said. “You’ll be making a life for yourself. That’s what any mother wants for her children.”

Jeremy did not have a name for the feeling in his chest when he heard his father say this; it registered as a physical sensation, hard and solid, like a stone lodged in his sternum underneath the skin, something that had been there long enough for him to stop thinking about it most of the time but whose weight registered now, coolly radiating through his chest. He nodded, grunted, made sure to look his father in the eyes. Soon all of this will be gone.

*

He stopped past Sarah Jane’s place first, on his way in to work. He wanted to tell her in person he was sorry to leave, and that he was grateful for the chance she’d taken on him back when he was just a junior at Nevada High. Of course anybody could work the counter at Video Hut, but that wasn’t the point. In his dream of the person he hoped to become, you always thanked the people who’d helped you along. It was important.

But of course there was no car in the driveway, nobody home. Stopping by was only paying courtesy to a shared fiction, a head-nod to the silence around Sarah Jane’s increasingly long absences from the store. The place felt abandoned. Somebody’d been keeping up appearances—mowing the lawn, sweeping the porch, emptying the mailbox—but it wasn’t enough. The windows looked lifeless.

For a while he let the engine idle at the curb, watching the door of the house and measuring his options. She still made occasional appearances at the store; at least once a week she’d turn up, usually around closing time on weeknights. He could just wait until their paths crossed, but he didn’t want to. The momentum he felt was real. It was time.

So he kept in mind what mothers want for their sons as he dialed Sarah Jane from the work phone. He felt guilty; leaving Video Hut now felt a little like jumping ship. He and Ezra held down the fort these days, but the whole operation was in disrepair. There was no action, no forward motion. In February, they’d come in one morning to find a new sheet taped to the counter next to the A.M. OPEN page: it said EMERGENCY CONTACTS, but there was only one number on it, SARAH JANE (cell), with a redundant only contact in case of extreme emergency! underneath. When did she get a cell phone? He didn’t want to call it.

You’ve reached the voice mail of Sarah Jane Shepherd. I’m unable to take your call at this time, ran the message. This was followed by a man’s voice, distorted, too cheerful, announcing: The mailbox belonging to—and here Sarah Jane jumped back in: Sarah Jane Shepherd, blunt, declamatory—is full. Please try again later.

He set the phone back in its cradle. After a while the door jingled; it was Joan from Mary Greeley. “Late night?” she said.

Jeremy realized he’d been staring off into space. “Not lately,” he said, finding the surface quickly, glad of it.

They talked awhile about how many nice days might be left in the year before it got too humid. He kept pace, but it took some effort. The whole conversation felt like it belonged to another era, a time of reliable coefficients, and his mind was on Collins now: on trying, before he moved on, to get some glimpse of what had disturbed Video Hut’s once-inviolate stillness, its perennial motionless static present, a thing already passing into legend.

*

“You sleeping all right up there? Gets pretty hot, if I remember.”

“I’m fine. It’s not humid enough yet to stay hot all night.”

“Well, if you want one of the other rooms—”

“I’ve always wanted an attic room, is the thing, so it’s nice to spend a few nights in one,” Sarah Jane said. “When I was a little girl—”

“We had a basement,” Lisa interrupted. “Nobody else on our street had one. It stayed cool in summer.”

“Right. My grandfather had one, too. He kept the freezer down there, had whole sides of beef in it. We weren’t allowed to play around in the basement.”

“Well,” Lisa said, “if it gets too hot, these old farmhouses are huge. Two of the other rooms I’m just using for storage, I could clear them out.”

The breakfast table was in the kitchen; it was a two-seater with a Formica top in turquoise riddled with looping white squiggles all over. It looked like it had enjoyed a quiet life at a diner; it was an antique, but not a showpiece. People pay a lot of money now for reproductions of tables like these, but plenty of them are gathering dust at auction houses if you know where to look. Raise up the two leaves that hang down on either side of it and it’ll seat four.

Centered on the wall above it was an old black-and-white photograph in an oval frame: a carhop at a drive-in, somewhere in the Midwest in a bygone era, her uniform crisp, square hat set neatly atop her hair worn in a bun. The picture had been personalized in gloriously legible cursive script: You’re always welcome back at Henry’s! Love, Irene.