"Four years," she said. "Two hundred and nine rentals. Never late. Always rewound." She looked at him with frank suspicion. "What's wrong with you?"
"I drive a bus," Nicky DeLuca said. "I have a very strong sense of schedule."
Filomena stamped his card. She picked up the black case marked ONLY COPY and held it out to him across the counter, and he took it, and Theda watched it go from the counter into his large wet hand the way she had watched her shoe go down Wickenden Street, and felt very much the same way about it.
"Due back tomorrow at six," said Filomena. "Rewound. Two dollars, I'll put it on your card. Good night. It's nine o'clock. Amadeu! Lights!"
The lights went out at the back of the store. In the half-dark, Nicky DeLuca stood with the tape in his hand and looked at Theda Duarte, who stood with one shoe on and her arms wrapped around herself and an expression of such complete defeat that she could feel it on her own face like a mud mask.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Wait a second."
"It's fine. You won. You had a trajectory."
"No, look. You need it tonight and I need it tonight. It's an hour and forty-five minutes long, it says so on the box. There's no reason in the world we both can't watch it. You've got a VCR?"
"I have a VCR. It's plugged into the wall of an apartment that has no electricity."
"Right. The extension cords."
"The extension cords go to a refrigerator and a lamp. If I plug in the VCR, the refrigerator goes off, and I have half a chicken in there."
"I respect that," he said. "I don't have a VCR."
"You've rented two hundred and nine tapes."
"At my sister's. Carmela's got the VCR. Carmela and Vito and the three boys and Vito's mother, who lives with them and has opinions about Clark Gable that I am not prepared to hear at ten o'clock at night. And the boys are on the pull-out in the living room this week because the hurricane put a tree through their bedroom window. We'd be watching it from the kitchen doorway over three sleeping kids and Nonna Rosaria saying what a beautiful man, what a beautiful man, they don't make them like that, every time he came on screen. I couldn't bring a stranger into that. You'd never recover."
"Can't we watch it here?" Theda turned toward the counter. "Mrs. Teixeira, you've got a TV, I can hear the Red Sox—"