The Mall

Dennis Reinholt drove south on Virginia Street on a Saturday morning in March with a box of new inventory on the passenger seat and the windows down because the day was warm for the season, and somewhere past the Peppermill the land opened up into that flat valley floor that had been nothing but sagebrush and cattle five years back, and there it was, the thing everyone had been talking about for two years: Meadowood Mall, new and enormous and already drawing cars from every direction like a magnet laid on a table of iron filings.

He was thirty-two. He had run his record store downtown since 1968, eleven years now, a narrow deep space on a side street off Virginia where he kept the bins organized by a system only he and his regulars understood, and where on a good Saturday afternoon the store filled with high school kids flipping through the new releases and college students from the university hunting for used jazz, and where on a bad Saturday the door did not open between noon and three. He had survived the lean years. He had survived the shift from singles to albums and the shift from albums to whatever was coming next. He had not survived, or not yet, the shift of gravity southward, the thing happening right now in front of him as he pulled into the parking lot and counted the cars.

There were hundreds of them. It was opening week and the lot was full, or near to it, at ten in the morning on a Saturday, which was a thing that had not happened on Virginia Street downtown in years. Dennis parked far out in the lot, near the road, and walked in carrying nothing, just his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at it.

The building was long and low and anchored at the ends by the big stores: JCPenney on the south, Liberty House on the north, Macy\u2019s on the east. Between them ran the indoor corridor, wide and bright, with a terrazzo floor and skylights and potted trees in the common areas, everything clean and new and climate-controlled, and the people moving through it had the look of people who had discovered something, which was the look of shoppers in a place designed entirely for them.

Dennis walked the length of it. He was not shopping. He was reading it, the way you read a competitor\u2019s set list. There was a record store. Of course there was a record store. It was bright and carpeted and twice the size of his place downtown, with the new releases displayed face-out on the walls and a sound system playing something safe, and the bins were alphabetical, A to Z, no argument, no personality, no hand-lettered divider cards. Dennis stood in the doorway and looked at it for a long minute and then moved on.

His grandmother Clara had opened her dress shop on Virginia Street in 1920. Fifty-nine years. The Reinholts had been Virginia Street people that whole time, through the divorce colony and Prohibition and the casino boom and the slow bleed of the sixties and seventies. The street had changed around them a dozen times but it had always been the street, the spine, the place the town happened. His mother Agnes had married a rancher and moved south to the valley, but the store was downtown, the work was downtown, and Dennis had chosen downtown over the valley when he opened his place in sixty-eight because that was where the life was.

He found a bench near the center of the mall, near a fountain that made a sound like a creek, and he sat and watched the people. Families. Teenagers. Women with strollers. They were not tourists. They were not gamblers. They were Reno people, locals, the people who actually lived here and spent money here, and they were spending it in a building three miles south of Virginia Street in a place that had been rangeland when Dennis signed his lease.

A man sat down on the other end of the bench, older, maybe fifty, in a western-cut sport coat, and after a moment said to no one in particular, \u201cSomething, isn\u2019t it.\u201d

\u201cIt is,\u201d Dennis said.

\u201cI got a shoe store on Second Street,\u201d the man said. \u201cTwenty-two years. My landlord called me last week, said my lease is up in September and he wants to know if I want to renew.\u201d He looked out at the corridor, at the families passing, at the bright storefronts. \u201cI don\u2019t know what I told him. I said I\u2019d think about it. You think about a thing like that, it gets away from you.\u201d

Dennis nodded. He understood. The downtown landlords had been raising rents through the casino boom and offering nothing for it, no parking, no foot traffic, nothing but the address, and now the address was worth less than it had been in twenty years because the people were here, in this building, on this flat ground at the south end of town where a developer from Michigan had seen the future before anyone local had seen it.

The man in the sport coat stood up and straightened his jacket. \u201cWell,\u201d he said. \u201cComes a time you\u2019re either where the people are or you\u2019re not.\u201d He walked on toward the Macy\u2019s end, and Dennis sat.

He thought about his store. He thought about the bin of used jazz records near the back wall and the hand-lettered signs and the Saturday regulars and the sound the door made when it opened. He thought about what his grandmother would say, Clara, who had stayed on Virginia Street her whole life because that was where her people came, the divorce women stepping off the train with nothing but a suitcase and a need. Clara had served a clientele that came to her. Dennis served a clientele that had to choose him, every Saturday, over the ease of this, the parking and the bright lights and the everything-under-one-roof of it.

He stood up from the bench and walked back toward the entrance, against the flow of people still coming in, and found his car in the far lot, and drove north on Virginia Street, back toward downtown, back toward the narrow deep space where his bins waited and his door might or might not open that afternoon. The road north took him through the stretch of South Virginia that had been motor courts and gas stations when he was a boy, past the signs that said VACANCY in neon that no longer lit up, past the corridor that was already fading before this mall had even opened, and he drove through it into downtown where the casino lights were on in the middle of the day, as always, as ever, the neon that never turned off, and he pulled up to his store and sat in the car a moment with the engine off.

His lease was up in November.

He got out and unlocked the door and turned on the lights and put the new inventory in the bin and stood behind the counter and waited for the door to open.

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