It had been raining on Providence for three days, in the patient, personal way that October rain has in Rhode Island, as if it had looked over the whole Eastern Seaboard and decided that this particular little city deserved its full attention.
Two weeks earlier the hurricane had come up the Bay and torn the leaves off half the trees on the East Side all in one night, so there was nothing left to slow the water down now.
It came straight through the bare branches and collected in the gutters of Wickenden Street, and it ran downhill toward the river carrying cigarette butts, maple seeds, a flyer for a Saturday night polka dance at the Portuguese social club, and, at eight fifty-one on a Thursday evening, one of Theda Duarte's shoes.
She did not stop for it. She looked back once, saw it sailing away under the yellow streetlight like a little brown boat with a buckle on it, said a word her grandmother would have crossed herself over, and kept running in one shoe and one wet stocking toward the lighted window of Fox Point Video, which closed at nine.
The window was the only bright thing on the block. Behind the glass, a cardboard Eddie Murphy in a Detroit Lions jacket grinned out at the rain, and someone had taped a hand-lettered sign to his chest that said WE HAVE IT — 2 COPIES — DON'T ASK FOR A 3RD. Above the door, a string of Christmas lights that had been left up since Christmas of 1983 blinked in no particular order. Theda hit the door with her shoulder, the bell jangled, and she came into the store the way water comes into a basement.
"Wipe your feet," said a voice from behind the counter. "Both of them. Or the one."
Fox Point Video had once been a shoe repair shop, and it still smelled faintly of leather and glue underneath the newer smells of popcorn, carpet shampoo, and the warm plastic breath of a dozen VCRs being rewound at once on a shelf behind the register. It was one long room with wood paneling and orange carpet chosen, Theda had always believed, by someone who hated feet. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with empty video boxes, their tapes kept safe behind the counter in black plastic cases with numbers on the spine, so that walking the aisles was like browsing a library of beautifully illustrated promises. NEW RELEASES took up the whole wall by the window. Then came ACTION, COMEDY, HORROR, a narrow column marked FAMILY with a crayon drawing of a cat taped to it, and, at the very back, by the curtained doorway to the room where Mrs. Teixeira's husband watched the Red Sox and pretended to do inventory, a single shelf, three feet long, with a strip of masking tape across it that said OLDIES BUT GOODIES in green marker.
Theda knew the store well. She had lived two blocks away for three years, in the second floor of a three-decker on Brook Street, and for at least two of those years she had come in every Friday night and rented the same kind of thing everybody rented, something with explosions or something with Goldie Hawn. She had never once walked to the back.
She walked to the back now, squelching.
"You're dripping on the Chuck Norris," Mrs. Teixeira said behind her.
"I'm sorry."
"He can take it."
The Oldies But Goodies shelf held perhaps forty boxes, most of them faded, many of them black and white even on the cover, all of them with a white index card tucked into the edge of the shelf below them. Theda had heard about the cards. Everybody on the East Side had heard about the cards. Mrs. Teixeira wrote them herself in a firm, slanted hand, and they were not so much reviews as verdicts. Under CASABLANCA it said: Everybody quotes it. Nobody has seen it. Be the one. — F.T. Under THE SEARCHERS it said: John Wayne is not nice in this. Good. — F.T.
She ran her finger along the spines. Bringing Up Baby. The Thin Man. His Girl Friday. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Her finger was shaking, partly from the cold and partly because it was eight fifty-two and in twelve hours and thirty-eight minutes she was going to be sitting in a conference room on Chestnut Street across from a woman named Monica Kimball, the senior accessories buyer for Jordan Marsh, and talking with passion and authority about a film she had never seen.