“It’s fine,” said Joan again, nodding encouragingly; Jeremy’s face was flushed. “I’m forty-six, I’ve seen it all before.”
“No, I know, I just—wasn’t thinking,” he said. He grabbed the two new exercise tapes from the shelf, brow still furrowed.
“You OK?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, shaking his head like a cat waking up. “I don’t think I slept well. Fell asleep on the couch.”
“Happens to me all the time!” said Joan, signing the rental slip with its crossed-through zero in the “amount” column and sliding her new tapes into her puffy oversized purse.
“Yeah,” said Jeremy, “me, too,” which wasn’t true. Neither was the part about falling asleep on the couch; he didn’t know why he’d said it. He was off his rhythm.
“See you next week,” said Joan.
“All right,” said Jeremy, and that sounded wrong, too.
*
The rest of the day was a winter day at a video store in the late 1990s: long stretches without any customers, a big rush between 5:30 and 7:00 as people were getting off work and heading home, and then the slowdown. Lindsey Redinius brought back a copy of She’s All That during the rush and said there was something wrong with it, that the movie cut out at some point, turned into something different and came back later. Jeremy set it aside. This was the second complaint about a tape in two days. Maybe they were making tapes from cheaper materials now? DVD players were supposed to be the next thing.
He looked around the store as he was shutting down. It was a heated Morton building, same materials they used for barns now: the same building exactly, just with different stuff in it. In the dark you could see how temporary it was. He rifled through the returns bin and grabbed another tape in case he couldn’t sleep, and he stopped at Taco John’s up the street for a family value pack. Then he got onto old Highway 30 and headed for home.
They’d plowed the road earlier that morning and several times throughout the afternoon. Everyone was driving a little slower, to be careful. This was the feel of the season for Jeremy. Slow cars moving over icy roads in the dark. Heavy branches on trees. Headlights. Mute and palpable, the melancholy would last at least through March. There was a melody to it you could catch if you weren’t trying too hard.
Dad was already home when he got there; they ate their tacos at the dinner table, like a family.
3
“Everything OK at work?”
“Sure. Big contract from a firm in Minnesota building a new motel over in Ames.”
“Yeah?”
“Just a Holiday Inn Express. They need everything at once, want to be up and running in time for Big 12.” Jeremy kept it to himself, but he was happy to hear his dad would be busy all winter, coordinating orders of resin from competing suppliers and ordering his team around, shipping pipe out on flatbeds. Dad seemed happiest when he was busy enough to be worn out by the end of the day.
“Downtown?”
“No, out by I-35. All kinds of new stuff going up over there,” he said; Steve Heldt didn’t think Ames really had any more room to expand, but they kept building stuff just in case. “Big contract, anyway.”
Jeremy cleared the table; there wasn’t much to it, just throwing away some trash. He leaned over his shoulder and said “Beast?” while opening the refrigerator; this was shorthand for beer in the Heldt house. Steve held himself to one beer after dinner; how he’d settled on Milwaukee’s Best was lost to history, but the alliance was permanent. Years ago, Mom had brought a six-pack of Stroh’s home once when it was all she saw on the shelf at Fareway. It sat in the refrigerator for a solid year.
He tossed the can to his dad underhand and they both headed to the living room: it was the pattern during winter. In summer, they had a lot of fun together grilling out back, but neither man had really ever taken to the kitchen. They didn’t feel at home in there. It still felt like it belonged to Mom.
They watched Proof of Life that night, the one Jeremy’d grabbed without looking. They both enjoyed it. There was comfort and ease in watching movies together; Jeremy considered himself a little more high-minded than his dad, but they both disappeared into the screen’s glow at about the same time, and they stayed lost once they got there. The room filled with light. It was a space they could share, something to be grateful for without having to think too much about it.