He was quiet, though; he didn’t look up from the scanner while his hands worked, and he didn’t return James’s attempt at making eye contact. When he scanned the beer, he did say “See some ID?”
James offered his student card from St. John’s; the guy with the name tag reading EZRA squinted at it, handed it back, and said: “Need a driver’s license for beer.”
James still had his California license; he fished it out. “Sorry,” he said. Ezra’s quiet had the effect of making James want his approval.
“No, it’s fine,” Ezra said, bagging the groceries. “Lot of students here.”
“You go to ISU?” James said.
“No,” Ezra said, gently laughing, and then he finally looked up; James felt an intense relief. “I’m just a farmer’s kid.”
It was a remark with a soft finality to it: I’m just a farmer’s kid. You’re buying groceries from me at a cooperatively owned and operated store in a university town, but I’m just a farmer’s kid. If someone in West Covina at a Sprouts had said this to James, he would have come back with something really smart and cutting, but there was no guile in Ezra’s voice. Fluorescent light caught the scar on his arm: the suture marks gleamed. They had to be a few years old.
“Well, thanks,” James said. Some people acclimate faster than you think they will. It’s not the easiest rhythm in the world to catch, but its ability to roll wordlessly over the depths has a real appeal.
*
“He’s fine, they’re all fine,” James said from the worm-worn desk in front of the upstairs computer; Mom had bought it for twelve dollars at the monthly auction in Colo, where she’d also bought the antique office swivel chair he was sitting in (five dollars; the seat, back, and arms were solid oak, and the springs creaked loudly) and the lamp he was working by (three dollars, with a porcelain base bearing the image in relief of a bending willow, from Taiwan circa 1970).
“How can they be fine?” Abby said. “Did he specifically say everybody was fine?”
“It was his dad,” said James. There was a pop-up window open on the monitor in front of him; the cursor blinked awkwardly, anciently. “His dad said he’s fine, he lives in Des Moines now.”
“Did you ask him about the videos?”
James swiveled; the chair groaned. “I showed him the printout,” he said. “He got scared something had happened and I told him, no, this was on some movie we found in Collins. He asked me inside and I had a beer with him.”
“You did not.”
“It was a Milwaukee’s Best,” said Jeremy with great satisfaction. “‘Want a Beast?’ the guy said when he grabbed it from the fridge. Just like that: ‘Want a Beast?’ It was perfect.”
Abby felt a small, guilty pang of grief for the lurid tableaus she’d drawn up in her head: blood and death, a body buried in the field outside the house. She’d felt so sad for the boy on the tapes, the young man answering questions about his life and his family—specifically about his mother: that long sequence about how she died, and whether she’d lived long after the crash or been killed on impact, and what he and his father had done to make their lives bearable after she’d gone—and then being struck so hard in the face, once, then again, and then a third time, hardest of all, for no immediate reason Ed or Emily or Abby or James could imagine, no matter how many times they replayed the sequence that immediately preceded the attack:—Do you miss her?—Sometimes. Not all the time. At Christmas.
“Did you tell him what you saw?”
“Abs, no,” said James. “You gotta see this guy. He’s not old like Mom and Dad, but he’s at least in his fifties. When he saw the printout I could tell he thought I was going to tell him his son was dead or something, it was horrible. I told him we found some tapes where a lady was talking to his son, asking him questions, and he goes, oh, yeah, Jeremy used to work at a video store, it was a long time ago. He looked sad.”
Abby waited for something else, but James held his hands up on both sides, elbows bent, palms up.
“I just felt like if his son’s OK now he doesn’t need to hear that a long time ago some bad shit happened to him that he maybe doesn’t know about, you know?” he said. “So I go, yeah, we found these movies that used to belong to him, I guess, we thought he might want to have them back, and then he went to a corkboard in his kitchen and copied out his son’s e-mail address, which is why I’m up here.”
She looked at the screen: Gmail was doing its best to auto-save over the slow connection available to it. James had typed, “Dear Jeremy Heldt,” but that was all.
“What do you even say,” said Abby.
“I know,” said James. “And I was in there, for, like, an hour. It felt pretty empty. There’s pictures of the whole family on the walls in the living room but it definitely feels like the only guy who lives there now is the dad.”
“What do you talk about for an hour with some guy you don’t know alone in his house?”
“I know,” said James again. “Mainly his son, though. How good his son is at his job.”