On the second Friday in June, at six o’clock in the evening, the Juneberry Drive-In sign lights up, and every letter comes on at once.

I’m standing on the gravel under it with a coffee in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, and I actually say “oh” out loud, like somebody gave me a present.

“You’re welcome,” Theo calls from the top of the ladder.

“You fixed the J.”

“I rewired the J. It had a bad transformer since 1994. Your grandmother taped it.” He climbs down, one easy step at a time. “Everybody in this town has been driving past a flickering J for thirty years and calling it charming.”

“It was charming.”

“It was a fire hazard.”

“It was a charming fire hazard,” I say, and he kisses me on the forehead on his way past, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Nine months, and it still does something to the back of my knees.

It was a long winter. I want that on the record too.

In September, I drove down to Chicago with Priya and a rented van and packed up my whole life in one day. My apartment. My spoiled fern, who did not enjoy the trip. The tool bag I’d been carrying to Lakeview for seven years. I said goodbye to Dev and Ruth and ate one last jar of Ruth’s pickles on the floor of the empty apartment, and Dev made a speech, and Sandra came, which I didn’t expect, and cried, which I expected even less.

In October, we ran the first fall festival. It rained for two of the four weekends. People came anyway, in rain boots, with umbrellas, and sat in their cars with the heater on and the windshield wipers going during a horror double feature. Mr. Petrakis rented us a pumpkin patch’s worth of hay bales. The Dunning sisters sold four hundred cups of cider. We didn’t make a lot of money. We didn’t lose any, either.

In November, the man in Ohio drove up with a projector in the back of his minivan, wrapped in moving blankets like a patient. His name is Walt. He’s seventy-four. He stayed for three days, and slept at Rosemary’s, and watched me take his machine apart and put it back together, and at the end of it he wrote me a check and told me he had friends. He does. By February there were five old projectors in the booth and two more in the snack bar, waiting their turn, from Ohio and Indiana and one from a tiny theater in Wisconsin that sent me a thank you card with a drawing of a cat on it.

In the winter, Theo built me a workbench along the back wall of the booth, under the window, out of old boards from the screen frame. On the cold nights we worked up there together, with a space heater and a thermos of his father’s dangerous coffee, me on the machines, him on whatever needed fixing in the snack bar below. Sometimes I’d look up from a gear housing and see him through the window, sanding a countertop by the light of the work lamp, and I’d have to put my tools down for a minute.

And at Christmas, Mr. Quintana brought me a pitcher of lemonade in the middle of a snowstorm. He’d made it himself. It had far too much sugar in it.

“To make up for something,” he said, and winked.

By seven-thirty, the lot is full.

Not Labor Day full, with cars along the road. But every speaker post has a car beside it, and there’s a line at the concession stand, and there are kids in pajamas on the roofs of minivans, and a family from Grand Rapids who drove an hour and a half because they read about us in the newspaper. The story ran in April. It had a photo of me in the booth with Walt’s projector, and the headline said DRIVE-IN RESCUED BY GRANDDAUGHTER, which I didn’t love, because nobody rescued anything alone.

Priya is in the concession stand, running the popcorn machine with the calm focus of a woman who has handled the breakfast rush in this town for nine years. She’s already told me three times that the new register is wrong and the old one was better. She has also hired two teenagers, and she’s teaching them how to make Rosemary’s butter, which was written on an index card we found taped to the inside of the freezer door in March.

Lucia is in the ticket booth, taking money and gossip in equal amounts. She’s wearing the Hollis Point Fire Department cap. It’s Eli’s. Nobody has asked her about it yet, because everybody is afraid of Lucia.

Bev Lindahl has already been by to tell me that the first classic movie Thursday, next week, will start with a short introductory talk about the history of film noir, delivered by her, and that it will be twenty minutes, which means forty.

Grant Whitford is here, too. He came up the drive at seven in a very clean sedan, and parked in the back row, and when I walked over to say hello, he held up a plaid blanket still in its store packaging.

“You told me to bring one,” he said. “I take instructions very seriously.”

“How are the condos?”

“Beautiful. Forty-two balconies. Nobody on any of them looks as happy as the people in this lot.” He looked around at the kids on the minivan roofs and the line at the concession stand, and shook his head, smiling. “Rosemary stories. I should have known I never had a chance.”

And in row three, next to post fifty-one, Mr. and Mrs. Quintana are sitting in lawn chairs in front of their car with a cooler between them. Mr. Quintana is telling the family next to them a joke. He’s getting to the punch line slowly. Nobody minds.

I stand on the concession steps with my hands in my apron pockets and look at all of it.

It isn’t a postcard anymore. It’s a place that’s alive, with a leaking ice machine and a sign that works and a roof over the ticket booth that Theo swears will hold for fifty years.

“She’d love this,” Priya says, next to me, wiping her hands on a towel. “You know that, right?”

I do know that. I nod, because I can’t say it.

The feature is a summer comedy, a new one, digital, on the projector we installed in the fall for regular nights. The old gray machine in the middle of the booth is for Thursdays and Labor Day now. We keep it covered and oiled, like a racehorse that only runs on special occasions.

I come down from the booth during the previews to help Priya with a popcorn emergency, and that’s why I’m standing on the path under the string lights when the marquee changes.

The marquee is the tall white board out by the road, under the big sign. Black letters on white, in rows, that tell people driving by what’s playing. Tonight it’s supposed to say NOW OPEN and the title of the comedy and FRI SAT SUN 9:30.

Somebody is up on the marquee ladder with a box of letters.

It’s getting dark, and it’s far, and it takes me a minute. Then I see who it is.

“Priya,” I say slowly. “Why is Theo changing the marquee?”

Priya doesn’t answer. When I turn to look at her, she’s got both hands pressed over her mouth.

All around the lot, people are starting to notice. A few heads turn toward the road. Then more. Somebody in the fourth row honks once, and gets shushed by everyone around them.

Theo climbs down from the ladder, and moves it aside, and steps back so the lights from the sign fall across the board.

The top row still says NOW OPEN.

The second row says HATTIE ALBRECHT.

The third row says WILL YOU MARRY ME.

For a second, the lot is completely silent. There’s just the crickets, and the lake, and the soundtrack from the previews still playing out of three hundred car radios.

Then I’m walking. And then I’m running, all the way down the gravel drive in my apron, past the ticket booth, where Lucia is standing up and yelling something I can’t hear, all the way to the road.

He’s waiting for me under the sign, with every letter lit up over his head.

He has a small box in one hand. He has a folded piece of yellow legal paper in the other.

“I know I’m supposed to get down on one knee,” he says, and his voice isn’t steady at all. “I will in a second. I just wanted to do this part first.”

He hands me the paper.

I unfold it. It’s his handwriting. Tall capitals, leaning right. Four words.

I’m asking this time.

I look up at him. I’m crying already, which is getting to be a real problem in my life.

“You could have left this in the can,” I say.

“I thought about it. I didn’t want to risk anybody else holding on to it for eleven years.” He goes down on one knee on the gravel, right under the sign, and opens the box. It’s a small ring. Old gold, with one little stone. “It was my grandmother’s. Mom gave it to me at Christmas. She said she’d been waiting a long time too.”

Behind me, back up the drive, I can hear it start. First one horn. Then another. Then Priya’s voice, very loud, telling everyone to shut up.

“Hattie,” Theo says. “Will you.”

“Yes,” I say, before he can finish. “Yes. Obviously yes. Get up, the gravel is terrible for your knees. Pastor Dana will worry.”

He laughs, and stands up, and puts the ring on my finger with hands that are shaking even worse than mine, and then he kisses me under the Juneberry sign, with every single letter lit.

The horns come all at once. Three hundred cars, and the Dunning sisters, and a cowbell. I still don’t know where anyone in Hollis Point keeps getting a cowbell.

Later, after the second feature, after the last car has pulled out and Priya has hugged me four times and Lucia has hugged Theo once and pretended it didn’t happen, we sit in the bed of his truck in the third row, next to post fifty-one, under a blanket.

The lot is dark. The lake is breathing behind the trees. The sign went dark on its timer hours ago, and there’s nothing over our heads but stars.

I turn the ring on my finger, and it catches the starlight.

“Rosemary was right,” I say.

“About what?”

“About the movie. It isn’t sad.” I put my head on his shoulder. “It’s about the day that makes the rest of your life worth it.”

Theo doesn’t say anything. He just takes my hand, the one with the ring on it, and holds on.

Up in the booth window, the little work light I always forget to switch off is still glowing, gold and steady. Tomorrow I’ll climb the stairs and turn it off, and open the booth, and start on Walt’s friend’s projector from Indiana, and thread the film for another night.

Tomorrow, there’s another show.