The cars start lining up on the county road at five o’clock, three hours before the sun goes down.

I see them from half a mile away, coming back from Traverse City with my tools rattling in the truck bed. A long, slow line of taillights along the shoulder, all the way past the Hendersons’ cornfield. Minivans with bikes on the back. Pickups with lawn chairs in the bed. An old convertible with the top down and three teenagers sitting on the back seat, holding a sign made out of a pizza box that says THANK YOU ROSEMARY.

I took the barn job up north two weeks ago, the one I’d turned down twice this summer. Two weeks of pulling rotten siding in someone else’s county, sleeping in a motel with a broken ice machine, and answering nobody’s texts. Lucia called it running away. I called it work.

Now I’m back, because I made a promise to Rosemary Albrecht in March, and that promise said through the last show.

I get in line like everybody else.

The lot is full by seven-thirty. Every speaker post has a car beside it, and then they start parking in the grass along the fence, and then along the road, and then Eli and two of his friends from the fire department put on orange vests and start waving people into the back field.

I park at post fifty-one. I don’t plan it. It’s just where the truck goes.

The Juneberry looks like a postcard. The string lights are on along the path. The concession stand is yellow and bright, with a line out the door, and I can see Priya behind the counter with her hair up and a scoop in each hand. Somebody has hung a big hand-painted banner across the front of the ticket booth: 41 YEARS. THANK YOU, ROSEMARY. The Dunning sisters are walking the rows handing out free popcorn from a wagon.

And the sign is on. J, no J, J.

I don’t see Hattie anywhere. Her car is by the office. The booth light is on.

Lucia finds me before I can decide whether to go up there. She’s wearing a volunteer T-shirt and carrying a roll of raffle tickets she clearly isn’t selling.

“You came,” she says.

“I told Rosemary I would.”

“You didn’t text me back for two weeks.”

“I was working.”

“You were hiding in a motel in Traverse City.” She doesn’t say it like she’s mad. She says it like she’s tired of being right. “Theo. Do you even know?”

“Know what?”

Lucia opens her mouth. Then she closes it again, and a strange look crosses her face, like she’s biting down on something very hard.

“Nothing,” she says. “Priya made me swear on her father’s calculator. Enjoy the movie.”

She walks off before I can ask.

At eight-fifteen, the sun goes down behind the trees, and Bev Lindahl climbs up on the roof of the snack bar with a microphone.

The sound comes out of every car radio in the lot at once, a little crackly, from the low station. You can hear it echo from row to row, Bev’s voice bouncing off three hundred windshields.

“Good evening, Hollis Point,” she says. “For forty-one years, Rosemary Albrecht gave this town one free night at the movies at the end of every summer. She never missed a year. Not for ice storms. Not for the flu. Not for the year the raccoons got into the snack bar.” A ripple of laughter goes through the lot. “So tonight we’re going to do what she would want. We’re going to eat too much popcorn, and we’re going to watch her favorite movie, and we’re going to be quiet during the good parts. That means you, Jim Dunning.”

Car horns honk all over the lot, short and cheerful.

“The show will start in five minutes,” Bev says. “Hattie’s up in the booth. Everybody wave.”

Three hundred cars flash their headlights at the little window over the snack bar. Up in the booth, a shadow lifts one hand and waves back.

My chest hurts. I stay in the truck.

The first reel runs perfectly.

The gear I cut holds steady. I can hear it, even out here, a faint, even hum under the music coming out of my radio. The black and white picture fills the new white screen, sharp and bright, and the crowd goes quiet in the way only a crowd at a drive-in can go quiet, with the crickets still going and somebody’s baby fussing a few rows back and the lake breathing somewhere behind all of it.

Forty-one minutes into the movie, just after the changeover to the second reel, right in the middle of the scene everybody in Hollis Point loves best, the picture shivers, and jumps, and then the screen goes blank white.

A groan runs through the lot.

Up in the booth window, I see the light swing wild. A second later Hattie’s voice comes over every radio at once. She sounds completely calm, which is how I know it’s bad.

“Hey, everybody. We’ve had a small film break. Old print. It happens. Please stand by. We’ll have you back in Rome in just a few minutes.”

I’m out of the truck before she finishes the sentence.

I take the booth stairs two at a time.

She’s on her knees next to the projector with a flashlight in her teeth and about fifteen feet of film tangled around her like ribbon. The break is bad. The print tore right across a splice from years ago, and the old tape let go, and a whole section of the film is chewed up where it caught in the gate.

She looks up when I come in. The flashlight falls out of her mouth and rolls away across the floor.

“Theo,” she says.

“Tell me what you need.”

For one second she just stares at me. Then she’s all business. “Light. Right here. Hold it steady. I have to cut out the damaged frames and splice it back together, and I have to do it clean, or it’ll just break again in the gate.”

I pick up the flashlight and hold it where she points. She pulls a splicing block out of the cabinet, a little metal thing with pins, older than both of us put together. Her hands move fast and sure. She finds the torn edge. She lines the film up on the pins. She cuts.

Outside, a horn honks. Then another. Then, somewhere in the third row, someone starts honking in a slow, steady rhythm, beep, beep, beep, and the rest of the lot picks it up, until three hundred cars are honking together like a heartbeat.

“They’re mad,” Hattie says, not looking up.

“They’re not mad.” I lean toward the window. The Dunning sisters are standing on the hood of their station wagon, conducting. “That’s encouragement.”

She laughs, one short breath through her nose, and puts the tape down over the splice and presses it flat with her thumb. She runs the film through her fingers, checking it, feeling for bumps.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Help me thread it. You hold the loop there. No, lower. There.”

My hands and her hands in six inches of space again. Down, around, under, loop, loop. She pulls the gate closed.

She reaches for the switch, and stops, and looks at me.

“Together,” I say, and put my hand over hers.

We flip it.

The motor hums. The lamp comes up. Through the booth window, the picture comes back onto the screen, clean and steady, right where it left off.

The whole lot explodes. Horns, headlights, people cheering out of open car windows. Down in the third row, somebody is ringing a cowbell. I have no idea where anyone in Hollis Point found a cowbell.

Hattie sits back on her heels on the booth floor, breathing hard, film scraps all around her.

“Thank you,” she says.

“Anytime.”

It comes out wrong. It sounds like the kind of thing you say when you’re leaving. I see her hear it.

I go back down to my truck before I can say something worse.

The movie ends the way it always ends, with a man standing alone in a big empty hall, and then walking out by himself, slowly, down a long room. I’ve seen it now more times than I can count, and I finally think I understand why Rosemary said it wasn’t sad.

The credits roll. People start their engines. The first cars start to turn on their headlights.

Then every radio in the lot crackles.

“Hi, everybody. Could you hold on for one more minute before you go?” Hattie’s voice. It’s shaking a little. “I’m not very good at speeches. Bev is the one who’s good at speeches. But I have something to say, and I want to say it here, to all of you, at the same time. So nobody has to hear it at the diner.”

Engines go quiet, one after another, all over the lot.

“Three weeks ago,” Hattie says, “I was offered a lot of money to sell the Juneberry. And I was offered a big job in Denver. And I thought about it very hard. And I also found my grandmother’s account book, where she wrote down every idea she ever had for this place and never got to try.”

A pause. I can hear her breathe.

“So I said no,” she says. “To both. The Juneberry isn’t closing.”

For a second the lot is completely silent.

“We’re going to close for the winter, like always. And then next June, we’re opening again. Thursdays will be classic movie night. We’re going to do a fall festival in October. And if anybody out there has an old projector sitting in their barn, bring it by. I fix those now.” Her voice cracks, and she laughs through it. “So, this wasn’t the last show. I’m sorry. I know the banner says so. Bev, I’ll pay for a new banner.”

The noise that comes up out of that lot is louder than the horns during the film break. It’s louder than anything I’ve ever heard in Hollis Point. It’s every horn and every voice and the cowbell and the Dunning sisters screaming from the roof of their station wagon, and the headlights flashing over and over at the little booth window, like the whole town is trying to signal a ship.

I’m sitting in my truck with both hands on the wheel. I don’t think I’m breathing.

She didn’t sell it. She didn’t go.

And the thing I said on the sidewalk on Maple Street is still sitting in my mouth, where it has been for two and a half weeks.

She finds me at post fifty-one.

The lot is emptying slowly around us, cars crawling out toward the county road with their windows down, people yelling congratulations at her as they pass. She’s still wearing her booth apron with a roll of splicing tape hanging off the pocket. There’s film dust on her cheek.

“You were gone for two weeks,” she says.

“I know.”

“Lucia said Traverse City.”

“I took a barn job.” I make myself look at her. “Hattie, I told you to go. I stood there on Maple Street and I told you to go, and I didn’t ask you one single thing. And I’m sorry. I did it again. I decided for you.”

“I know you did. I was there.” She stops in front of me with her hands in her apron pockets. “I want you to understand something. I didn’t stay because of you. I decided on that Friday, sitting in the diner with Priya’s dad’s calculator. I took you all the way out of it. I’m staying because this is the life I want. The booth and the machines and this ridiculous town. That’s mine. Nobody gets to take credit for it.”

“Okay,” I say. “Good. That’s good.”

“And now that I’ve done that,” she says, “I’m asking. Because nobody ever asked either of us anything, and look where it got us.” She takes a breath. “Are you staying, Theo? Not for me. For you. Do you want to stay?”

I look at her in the light of the string bulbs, with the film dust on her face and the whole Juneberry lit up behind her, and I realize I have an answer, and I’ve had it the whole time.

But I’ve said enough things out loud to Hattie Albrecht that came out wrong. I want to do this one the way we used to.

“Wait here,” I say. “Two minutes.”

I take the booth stairs two at a time again. The projector is ticking as it cools. On the shelf by the window, the can with HOLD on the lid is sitting right where she put it back.

There’s a pad of paper on the counter, next to her splicing block. I tear off a page. My hand isn’t shaking this time. I write two words, and I fold the page once, and I put it in the can, and I put the lid back on.

Then I lean out the window and call down into the dark.

“Check the mail.”

I hear her laugh, all the way from the third row.

She climbs the stairs slowly. She stands in the doorway and looks at me, and then at the can. She takes it down. She sits on the step stool, and she takes off the lid, and she unfolds the note.

Stay. Please.

She reads it for a long time.

“That’s not an answer,” she says finally, and her voice is wobbling all over the place. “That’s another question.”

“I’m staying,” I tell her. “I was always going to stay. That part was easy. I’m asking you to stay with me.”

Hattie folds the note up very small and puts it in her apron pocket, right next to the splicing tape. Then she stands up, and crosses the tiny booth in two steps, and takes my face in both her hands, and kisses me.

Outside, somebody who has not left yet sees us through the window, and honks. And then somebody else does. And then the Dunning sisters.

Neither of us moves away from the window.