"I'm only mentioning it in case it was a strategy. Some kind of handicap system."
"It's in the gutter," she said, "on its way to Narragansett Bay, and it's going to get there before I do, and I need this movie."
He looked at her for a moment. Up close, his eyes were brown and creased at the corners and very tired, the tiredness of a man who had been up since before the sun. Then he looked at the box, and then back at her, and some of the disbelief went out of his face and was replaced by a kind of rueful, conspiratorial interest.
"Okay," he said. "Me too. Need. Not want. I want a lot of things. I want the Patriots to win a game. I need this movie. So we've got a problem."
"Let go and we won't."
"Funny, I was going to say that."
"Kids," said Mrs. Teixeira.
She had come out from behind the counter without either of them hearing her, which should not have been possible, because Filomena Teixeira was not a small woman and the orange carpet crunched. She was sixty or so, with a helmet of black hair set fresh every Saturday at a salon on Ives Street, half-glasses on a beaded chain, and a cardigan the color of a fire engine. Her husband Amadeu had opened the store in 1981 with the money from his retirement from the Narragansett Electric Company, and he had expected to spend his days in the back room watching baseball while the store ran itself. The store, it turned out, was not interested in running itself, so Filomena ran it, with the air of a woman who had raised four sons and saw no great difference between them and the public.
"It's eight fifty-three," she said. "At nine o'clock I turn off the lights, and anybody still in here goes home with Amadeu, and nobody wants that, he snores. Who's renting the Capra?"
"I am," they said.
Filomena looked at the box held between them. She looked at Theda's foot. She looked at the man's hair. She sighed through her nose, a long, operatic sigh that had been passed down through generations of Azorean women, and held out her hand.
"Give it."
They gave it. It was the first thing they had agreed on.
She carried the box back to the counter and turned to the wall of black cases behind her, running a red-nailed finger along the numbers until she found 0117. She took it down and set it on the counter beside the empty box, and Theda saw a strip of masking tape across the top of the case on which someone had written in ballpoint: ONLY COPY. HANDLE LIKE A BABY.
"Only copy?" said the man.