The Juneberry Drive-In sign still lights up, and I take it personally.

It’s a quarter past eight on the last Thursday in July. The sky over Lake Michigan is turning the color of canned peaches, and the sign my grandmother had rewired in 1994 is humming along like nothing in the world has changed. Green letters on a white board. A neon arrow pointing down the gravel drive. The J flickers every few seconds, the way it always has, as if it keeps forgetting its own name and then remembering.

I pull in beside the ticket booth and leave the engine running. The radio is playing a Tigers game I don’t care about. I let it play anyway, because if I turn it off it will be quiet, and if it’s quiet, I’ll be here.

Eleven years. Eleven years of birthday cards and Sunday phone calls that got shorter every winter, and “I’ll come up in October, Grandma, I promise.” I drove up for the funeral in April and left the same afternoon. I told myself it was work. Then a lawyer with a soft voice mailed me a stack of paperwork, and now I own a movie theater with no roof, three hundred and eighty speaker posts, and a snack bar that still smells like butter from across the parking lot.

I turn the key. The engine ticks as it cools.

The lot is empty except for a silver sedan by the concession stand and an old blue pickup parked at the foot of the screen tower. The screen is bigger than I remember. I forget that, living in Chicago, where my whole job is keeping twelve digital projectors alive in a building with carpet that grabs your shoes. Out here the screen is a wall against the sky. The paint is coming off it in long white curls, and someone has built scaffolding up the left side, three stories of steel pipe and wooden planks.

A man in a gray suit gets out of the sedan before I reach the booth. He has the look of someone who has been waiting a while and is too polite to mention it.

“Ms. Albrecht? Grant Whitford. We spoke on the phone.” He offers a hand and a blue folder at the same time. “I’m sorry about your grandmother. Every person I’ve met in this town has a Rosemary story.”

“Most of them are true,” I say. “You didn’t have to drive out tonight.”

“I wanted to hand you this myself.” He taps the folder. “Lakeshore Partners put the offer in writing. It’s a good offer. I’ll be honest with you, it’s a good offer because of that view.” He nods past the screen, where the lake is a long silver line under the trees. “It stands until Labor Day. After that, the board moves on to a property farther up the shore.”

Labor Day. I count without meaning to. Five weeks, give or take.

I open the folder. The number on the first page makes me read it twice, and then a third time, slower.

“That’s a lot of condos,” I say.

“Forty-two units. Every one with a balcony facing the water.” He smiles like a man who knows exactly how that sounds. “Take your time, Ms. Albrecht. Well. Take five weeks.”

He’s funny, which is inconvenient. I thank him, and he gives me a business card with raised letters. His sedan crunches carefully down the drive and turns onto the county road, and then it’s just me, the sign, and the blue pickup.

And a hammer.

The sound comes from the scaffolding. Three taps, a pause, three taps. Steady, like someone with all night to spend. I shade my eyes against the last of the sun. On the second level, a figure in a faded blue T-shirt is fitting a new board into the frame behind the screen.

“Hey,” I call. “We’re closed.”

The hammering stops.

“I know,” the figure calls back. “I have a key.”

I have not heard that voice in eleven years, and my body knows it anyway. My hand closes on the folder until the cardboard bends.

He climbs down the way he used to climb onto the snack bar roof to fix the speaker wires when we were teenagers, one easy step at a time, like gravity is a rule for other people. The last few feet he just drops. Gravel scatters. He straightens up, and for a second neither of us moves.

Theo Quintana is not taller than I remember, but he takes up more room. It’s as if somebody took the boy I knew and finished the drawing. His dark hair is shorter. There’s a pale scar across the base of his left thumb and sawdust on his forearms. He’s still holding the hammer, and he looks down at it as if he isn’t sure how it got there, then hooks it on his belt.

“Hattie,” he says.

“What are you doing here?”

“Fixing the screen.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s broken.” One corner of his mouth moves. It isn’t a smile. It’s the spot where a smile used to be. “Rosemary hired me in March. The frame on the left side rotted through. She wanted it safe for one more season.”

One more season. I look up at the scaffolding, at the new pale boards next to the old gray ones. My grandmother knew she was sick in March. She didn’t tell me. She told Theo Quintana and his hammer.

“She paid you,” I say.

“Through the last show.” He wipes his palms on his jeans. “Labor Day. That was the deal.”

“There isn’t going to be a last show. I’m selling it.”

His eyes go to the folder in my hand and come back to my face. They’re the same eyes. That’s the worst part. Brown with a darker ring around the edge, and so steady they used to make the ground feel solid under my feet.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?”

“It’s yours. You can sell it.” He lifts one shoulder. “The frame still has to be fixed or the screen comes down. Wind off the lake gets up past forty miles an hour in September. If you want to sell a lot with a three-story wall lying across it, that’s your call.”

He’s right, and he knows he’s right, and he has the decency not to look pleased about it. Somehow that’s the part I can’t forgive.

“Fine,” I say. “Finish the frame.”

“That’s the plan.”

I walk away before he can say anything else, because I don’t trust my face.

The lot looks smaller from the ground than it does in my head. The speaker posts stand in their long curved rows, gray metal on gray poles, each one with a little hook for the speaker box. Most of the boxes are gone now. Rosemary switched the sound to radio years ago, so people could tune their car stereos to a low station and hear the movie in stereo. She kept the posts anyway. She said they made the lot look like it was paying attention.

I walk the third row, where we always parked. Post number fifty-one still has a strip of silver tape wound around the top, where I tried to fix a loose wire at fifteen and made it much worse. Rosemary never took the tape off. I stand there and touch it with one finger, and it’s warm from the day.

The snack bar door sticks at the bottom, the way it always did. I put my shoulder into it and it gives, and the smell comes out to meet me. Popcorn oil and old pine and the lemon cleaner my grandmother bought by the gallon.

Everything is where she left it. The popcorn machine with its red roof. The pickle jar by the register. The chalkboard menu over the counter, in her tall slanted handwriting: Chili Dog, four dollars. Nachos, five. Rosemary’s Famous Butter, ask nicely. Someone drew a small star next to the last line. I think it was me, when I was twelve.

Her gray cardigan hangs on the hook by the office door. I don’t touch it. I stand in the middle of the room with my hands at my sides and let the hum of the old refrigerator fill the space where I’m supposed to be crying.

My phone buzzes. Priya.

You’re in town. Don’t lie. Mrs. Lindahl saw your car at the gas station.

Then, a second later: Diner. Tomorrow. 7 a.m. Not optional.

I type back, Hi. Yes. Okay. It’s the first thing all day that makes me want to laugh.

I am not going up to the booth. I decide that very clearly. It’s up the narrow stairs behind the office, a small square room with one window facing the screen, and the last time I stood in it I was eighteen and nothing in my life was broken yet. I go into the office instead and sit in her desk chair, which squeaks, and open the folder again.

Forty-two units. Balconies facing the water.

I try to picture it. A clean white building where the screen stands now. Gas grills on every balcony. Somebody from Detroit drinking wine right about where Rosemary used to lean out of the ticket booth in her cardigan and ask every single car, “Did you bring a blanket? It gets cool by the second feature.”

My throat does something unhelpful. I close the folder.

The truth is simple, and I’ve been saying it out loud for four hours on the interstate. I live in Chicago. My job is in Chicago. My apartment and my friends and my extremely spoiled fern are in Chicago. I don’t know how to run a drive-in theater, and I don’t want to learn in a town where everyone remembers exactly who I was at eighteen and exactly who I was waiting for.

That last part I don’t say out loud. It shows up anyway.

We were supposed to leave together.

That was the plan the summer after graduation. Theo had a job lined up with a contractor on the North Side, and I had a scholarship and a dorm room and a list taped inside my closet door of every old movie palace in Chicago we were going to visit. We would drive down in his truck on the first of September. He told me to meet him at the ticket booth at five in the morning, because he wanted to watch the sun come up behind the screen one last time before we left.

I was there at a quarter to five with my duffel bag and two coffees.

At six, I called him. His phone went straight to voicemail.

At seven, I drove to his house. It was dark, his truck was gone, and nobody came to the door.

At eight, I drove to Chicago by myself, with both coffees going cold in the cup holders.

My grandmother found out a few weeks later that Theo’s dad had a stroke that night, and the whole family went to be near the hospital in Grand Rapids. That part I understood, even at eighteen. People’s fathers get sick. People have to go.

It was the silence I couldn’t understand. No call. No text. Not one word, not that week and not that year. Eleven years of nothing, from a boy who used to leave me notes three times a week.

When I come back outside, the sun is down and the sky has gone navy over the lake. The sign has settled into its evening glow. Theo is loading a toolbox into the bed of his truck.

I shouldn’t walk over there. I walk over there.

“You don’t have to finish,” I say. “I’ll pay you for the rest of the job. We can call it done.”

“Rosemary already paid me.”

“Then call it a gift.”

He slides the toolbox in and closes the tailgate with both hands, gently, the way you’d close a door on a sleeping kid. “It’s not about the money.”

“What is it about?”

He looks at me for a long moment, and I watch him decide not to answer.

“The frame,” he says. “I’ll be here at six tomorrow.”

“Theo.”

He stops with his hand on the driver’s door. Above us the sign flickers. J. No J. J.

“I’m not going anywhere this time, Hattie.”

He gets in and drives off slow. His taillights go small and red down the drive, and then they’re gone. I stand in the empty lot while the crickets start up in the grass between the speaker posts. At ten o’clock the sign’s old timer clicks, and the neon goes dark all at once.

I still can’t tell if the sting behind my eyes is anger or the start of something worse. So I stay a little longer, alone in the dark, and let it be both.