Back at the office, which was a mobile home past the end of the lumberyard, Bill said: “This is a growing company.” He gestured at a little window above and behind Jeremy’s head, which looked out on the lot. “This isn’t that seasonal position I was telling your dad about a few months back. There’s guys been here ten, twenty years. I try to hire people who can see themselves retiring from Veatch & Son.”
You can kind of see it coming, the life you begin assembling in these awkward moments when somebody’s getting ready to offer you a job. In Hollywood, these moments sometimes present themselves as a crossroads in a cautionary tale, where the hero comes to think of himself as having been rescued, in that one moment, from the grinding boredom of an unvarying daily regimen of unglamorous tasks. Fate steps in, or chance, or providence, and reveals his purpose, his calling, the shining vistas and curious byroads of his destiny. When the spectre of the monotony he’s escaped sometimes rises in memory, it’s like childhood: another time entirely, a planet to which you can never return after leaving, a womb that nourished you until you were ready to breathe on your own.
But this isn’t Hollywood. It’s Des Moines. Jeremy didn’t feel fear when he thought about life at Veatch & Son. He felt—what was the word?—inspired. “I’ll be honest, I haven’t thought about retirement much,” he said. Both men smiled. “But this is the kind of job I feel like I’d retire from. When I was retiring. Down the road. You know, when it gets to that point.”
“When it gets to that point,” Veatch agreed. “Listen, let me show you the warehouse. There’s a whole picking system you’ll want to learn.”
*
On the way home to Nevada his thoughts began to organize themselves very quickly; there were only two open courses of action. He could take the job with Bill and quit Video Hut, or he could turn down the job and stay where he was. Beyond these lay only variations. None of the variations had any meat on their bones.
He overshot his turn at sixty-five miles an hour. At first he put it down to distraction, but as he made his way back along old Highway 30 from Colo, he realized where he was going: to Sarah Jane’s, to talk. He didn’t have the specific shape of their talk outlined clearly; in earlier days, this would have stayed his hand. He didn’t like to start talking before he knew what he meant to say. But there was a need to act in this moment before it passed. The defining characteristic of moments, he knew, is that they pass. The whole detour took him a solid hour, all told; there was an accident backing up traffic in the no-man’s-land between towns, two fire engines and an ambulance and an officer in the middle of the highway directing traffic. Jeremy always felt wrong just driving past a pileup; he felt like men of an earlier age would have gotten out to help. But the flashing lights and the burning flares seemed to send the specific message stay out of the way.
Sarah Jane wasn’t home, of course. She was in Collins affixing lengths of masking tape to empty canning jars that would be filled with jam as the year progressed. She sat in a wooden chair next to a tall shelf in the basement, a crate full of jars at her feet and a red Sharpie in one hand. Her lettering hand repeated one of four movements with each pass, and that movement told the shelving hand what to do next. S for strawberry. B for the blueberries that would come in summer. P for autumn pears and PP for pumpkin butter. The reduplicated P didn’t offend her eye like PB did; she’d made an executive decision.
Once a jar’d been labeled, she slid it back as far on a shelf as it would go: nimbly, then, her hand would dart back into the crate. The whole process took less than a minute. It was quiet work and it went quickly. All lined up, label sides facing out, the empty jars waited for someone to come along and give meaning to their name tags. Prior to the actual canning their red letters might have meant anything, who knows what. Of course, no one who didn’t already know what they stood for was ever going to see them, so it didn’t really matter, but it gets easy to let your mind wander, doing simple busywork in a basement. The gentle scraping sound of the jar bottom on the wooden shelf. The simple solitude.