Mr. Movies is a magical place that brings the rent down on the north side of town. It’s theChristopher Walken of video stores, which is to say, if you walk down Knowles Ave. and see Mr. Movies’ half-lit sign tweaking, you might cross the street. To the left of the store: a chain-link fence surrounding important-looking electrical equipment. To the right: Warner’s Doc with its lot full of tarped-over pontoons.
Mom and I make the five-minute drive to Mr. Movies on Friday nights—before Netflix, before Sadie and I spend every weekend prank-calling boys in her basement, unaware of technological advancements in caller ID. Mom drives the tangy blue SUV that makes her feel hot, and I ride shotgun since Big Sis isn’t here to sit on me until I limp, defeated, to the backseat.
We pull up to the tan and pine building, Mom wearing the $200 shades Dad bought her, me wearing my $5 aviator knockoffs from Walmart. I’m ten and can do the monkey bars frontwards and backwards. On our way inside, I practice my balance-beam walk on the concrete wheel stops, also known as parking chocks and bumper blocks, which I will develop a pesky habit of scraping my car on due to lack of special awareness when operating vehicles. Though, wheel stops won’t cause as much harm to my bumper as our basketball hoop.
It smells like damp popcorn inside and a chunky TV tilts off the left wall. It plays Disney before 7:00 p.m., Tarantino after the sun sets. I want to run through the isles and climb on the kiddy corner’s plastic slide, too narrow for my big-kid butt, but Mom raised me Lutheran. Which is to say, I won’t learn how to take up space for another eight years.
I shoot to the back right corner, which harbors new releases (an odd marketing tactic, I know), while Mom takes her time, reading synopses and rifling through westerns for Dad. He prefers snoring on the couch to Twins games, but Mom and I will ask him to join us. We know what it’s like to keep driving up a dead end.
Mom pays $2.99 for the 2-day rental—never less, never more. She hosts a scavenger hunt in her purse for exact change, even if people wait in line behind us (on rare occasions). I stand beside her, a pattern on the hip of her wild shirt, and blink at the teenage cashier who probably can’t wait to Tracey-Chapman it out of this town with a girlfriend, a guitar, a tank of gas. Mom won’t buy me the junior mints, but we grab a baggie of free popcorn, which she manages to finish before we pull in the driveway. Salt and butter clot under her nails and I don’t remember what movie we watch, but I know it gets returned.
When I land my license, it will become a battle of who has to sacrifice five minutes to drop off the DVD: Mom, who runs St. Luke’s Sunday school program, scrubs the kitchen floor biweekly, cooks a poultry dish nightly, balances the checkbooks, and weeds her gardens; or me, who plays Sims for three hours and pounds Mountain Dews. So, Mom always returns the DVDs.
I’m sixteen and I can rap all the lyrics to Hollywood Undead songs. It’s a Friday night and I feel the endless possibilities as my fingertips trail across the rentals. Sadie tugs the sleeve of my leather jacket and points to a DVD on a shelf stocked with horror flicks. We snicker as we snap a photo of the cover and send it to Jade. The cover: an unborn child, clawing itself from a womb. Jade: missed a period, may be pregnant. Thankfully, God will spare the world and Jade won’t have Blake’s baby, which likely would have exited her womb (without clawing itself out) as a baby James Dean who smoked too many dime bags and hung out in graveyards. In six years, Jade will be an alcoholic and Sadie will have her prom date’s kid. By then, Greg and Gemma Miller will have morphed Mr. Movie’s into a part-time mattress retailer. Then they’ll close its doors.
I’m twenty-three and I can take up space. I drive past Mr. Movies, stripped of its half-unlit sign, windows dark. The town has nothing left to offer, except a high tolerance of flat cornfields and flat-earthers. But a few Fridays a month I hop on the phone with Mom. We battle over who has to sacrifice the 43-mile drive: Me, who works two $12/hour jobs, volunteers for a prison, scrapes my roommates’ onion skin off the bottom crisper, and writes novels; or Mom, who reads the gospel and feeds koi fish all day. So, I always return home.
Jamie Hudalla is from a one-tractor town in Wisconsin. She works for Button Poetry and is getting her MFA in Roanoke, VA. Her work has appeared in Poetica Publishing’s Mizmor Anthology, The Under Review, and Capstone Press.
