“I believe you.” He rang her up and handed her the tape. Excalibur.
“You should go someplace, too, Jeremy,” she said.
“Well, and I might someday.”
“Seriously. You have to get out of Iowa.”
He wrinkled his brow, alone there in the store with Stephanie, trying not to feel stung but thinking she could probably see it on him.
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“You’re right,” she said, their eyes meeting. Not too long. “I hope I see you before I leave, anyway.” Then she smiled the smile that few outside the region will ever master, a no-problems look that paves over rough road without making any big deal about it. But he felt the needle land where she’d aimed it, as he did sometimes when people who didn’t understand his family weighed in about his life, telling him how it looked from the outside. Another nagging little question lodged like a bit of grapeshot in his chest. It was nothing major, but the place where he stored them all was running out of room.
*
He called Bill Veatch from work, muting the in-store TV before he did it. It’d been a slow day in the store; it seemed like it was all slow days now. Bill himself answered, but only to say he wasn’t much good at talking on the phone: could Jeremy come in tomorrow? Sure, he had tomorrow off, tomorrow morning would be fine.
The Veatch & Son offices in Des Moines took up a full city block just off I-35. Thom Veatch, with a government loan, had founded Veatch Basement & Foundation after coming home from the Second World War, where he’d served in the Pacific theater; over the next ten years industrial growth around town slowed to a trickle, but he’d already been able to open offices in Sioux City and Council Bluffs by then. His main line of work was waterproofing; one of his salesmen, a real carny barker type, had a line about how you needed to waterproof your basement on both sides of the boom-and-bust cycle. It was true. Applying sealant to baseboards and cinder blocks wasn’t the kind of work people aspired to, but there’d always be the work to do, and if on top of that you were the man who sold the cinder blocks, so much the better.
By the time Thom Veatch died in 1987, he had five locations throughout the state, and had expanded his home office’s operations to include building materials—wood, concrete—and machine rental. He left the whole business to his son William, who’d graduated from the College of Business and Public Administration at Drake. There were actually two Veatch sons, but Bill’s brother, Gary, had driven a VW van out to Oregon immediately after high school and didn’t want anything to do with construction. So it was just Veatch & Son.
Bill was in his late forties now; it seemed like there was a new Home Depot going up somewhere in Polk County every week. Young men ran into the Home Depot recruiter at the job fair and ended up replacing PVC under residential sinks all day, but Bill wasn’t going down without a fight. He liked the Iowa he’d grown up in and wanted to leave something of it to his own kids if he could.
It was the third job interview Jeremy’d ever done; he’d gotten a harvest help job at the co-op when he was sixteen without even filling out an application first. With Sarah Jane it’d been more of a conversation than an interview; she talked about starting Video Hut after her divorce, figuring out the mechanics of the business all by herself, learning how to stand on her own two feet. But Bill Veatch spoke in broad terms, and his outlook grew more appealing as he went, taking on softly cinematic properties in Jeremy’s imagination. A reliable day’s work; a few bills in his pocket; money in the bank. Making the drive out daily from Nevada until maybe he met someone. A family? Move closer to work, then, probably. Or possibly not; there was nothing wrong with commuting to work. All kinds of people did it. He’d seen a bunch of them behind the wheels of their cars on the highway just this morning, cups of coffee in one hand and the other on the wheel. It was something of a perk, according to Bill: “House fills up with kids, you love ’em, but half an hour on the highway, it’s like a little vacation,” he said when they’d reached the far fence, from which you could see the cars up on I-35. “Sometimes I listen to those Books on Tape. Y’ever read Raise the Titanic?”
“Saw the movie,” offered Jeremy.