The young cashier at Hastings stalled with this comment. She was fumbling with the change, with the security devices on the movies, and with her till. It was obvious she was trying to make her customer laugh, and her situation waxed ridiculous as the roll of quarters she was opening sprayed all over the floor. The man she was serving supplied a smile. It was sort of an absent smile, the kind you give when someone makes an inconsequential observation that takes up time you'd rather be spending someplace else. But the young lady was nice-looking and pleasant, so he made every attempt at cordiality.
His smile concealed something else besides mild annoyance and growing impatience: embarrassment. How does one build up credit at Hastings? By renting movies and returning them in a timely manner. A $3.00 rental will yield $2.01 in credit if returned the following day. A person would have to rent and punctually return many movies in order to build up a substantial amount of credit--enough to surprise the red-lipsticked, voluptuous cashier who dedicated 20 hours per week providing and redeeming credit for movie-watching clients. Twenty five dollars was a lot of credit. Twenty five dollars meant a lot of movies. Twenty five dollars meant many 1.5-hour chunks of loneliness. It also meant 10 rentals for only $2.31.
"Thank you, Mr. Guirer-would you sign here please?"
The young lady presented him with the receipt and a pen that had seen better days. Mr. Guirer attempted to sign the receipt, accepted the customer copy, and took his plastic bag of new rentals. He glanced about the corridor as he walked out to his car. Anyone standing in line near the checkout would find it odd that a middle-aged man would break the cashier's personal record for the highest amount of credit. Shouldn't that be done by those preteens that rent the entire anime section every weekend, and never realize that they'd save money if they just went ahead and bought the DVDs online?
A man like Mr. Guirer was an unlikely record-breaker. He was rather tall, easily over six feet, with love handles that were appropriate for a man his age--about 50 years. He had gray hair that kept a bit of its original blonde tone, and all of its thickness. He certainly wasn't going bald in the near future. Anyone passing him in the street would think he was someone's father, or someone's teacher, or someone's doctor. But not someone who spent his time watching films all evening. Every evening. Doctors, fathers, and teachers have better tasks to occupy their spare time, when they found spare time. Oddly enough, Mr. Guirer had been all these things before--father, doctor, teacher. But he wasn't now.
