I’m sanding a brass gear I don’t need at five in the morning, and my sister wants to know why.

“You look like somebody ran you over with a riding mower,” Lucia says from the workshop door. She’s wearing Dad’s old flannel over her pajamas and holding two mugs of coffee, which is the only reason I don’t tell her to go back to bed.

“Good morning to you too.”

“It’s not morning. It’s night with ambition.” She hands me a mug and hops up onto the workbench, right on top of my drawings, because she is twenty-three and has never once respected a drawing. “So. Hattie Albrecht is back.”

I keep sanding. “Who told you?”

“Priya told Mrs. Lindahl. Mrs. Lindahl told the entire checkout line at the market. Tommy at the register told me when I bought eggs last night.” She blows across her coffee. “Also, you came home and reorganized every drawer in the kitchen.”

“They needed it.”

“Theo. The spoons were already in order by size.”

I set the gear down. It isn’t a gear for anything. It’s a spare I cut last winter for Dad’s old lathe, and it was fine before I started sanding it, and now it’s a little less fine. That’s the problem with busy hands. Sooner or later they run out of real work.

“She’s selling the Juneberry,” I say.

Lucia goes quiet. She was twelve the summer we left. She remembers the Juneberry the way kids remember things, all popcorn and headlights and falling asleep in the back of the truck during the second feature. “To who?”

“Some company. Condos.”

“Rosemary would hate that.”

“Rosemary’s not here.” It comes out harder than I mean it to. I pick up the coffee so I have something to do with my face.

Lucia watches me over the rim of her mug. She has Mom’s eyes, which means she notices too much, and Dad’s mouth, which means she says most of it.

“Did you talk to her?”

“About the screen.”

“About anything else?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

I finish the coffee in three swallows. It burns the whole way down, and I’m grateful for something simple to pay attention to.

“I’m going to fix the frame,” I say.

The house is still dark when I load the truck. Dad’s cane leans against the back door where he left it last night, next to Mom’s garden clogs. Eleven years ago a doctor in Grand Rapids told us he might not walk again. Now he walks to the end of the dock every evening and tells the same three jokes to anyone who fishes there, and he takes a little longer to find the punch lines than he used to, and nobody minds.

We moved back to Hollis Point three years ago, when he was strong enough to say he wanted to die looking at this lake. Mom told him he wasn’t allowed to die at all, and he said fine, then he wanted to live looking at it. I found an old barn behind the house that needed a roof, and then a porch on Maple Street that needed railings, and then a church steeple that needed everything. Now I have a sign on the truck door and more work than I can finish. Mateo’s at school in Ann Arbor. Lucia runs the office at the marina and runs the rest of us from the kitchen table.

I’m lifting the last sawhorse into the truck bed when the back door creaks. Dad stands in the doorway in his bathrobe, one hand on the frame, the other finding the cane without looking. He does everything that way now, slow and sure.

“You’re up early,” he says. His words still come out a little rounded at the edges.

“Big job.”

“The drive-in.” He isn’t asking. Dad hears everything in this house, even through walls, even when we think he’s asleep. “Rosemary’s granddaughter is home.”

“Yeah.”

He nods for a while. “She used to bring me lemonade when I fixed the speaker wires out there. You remember? You followed me around with the toolbox, and she followed you.”

“I remember.”

“Sweet kid. Terrible lemonade.” He smiles the lopsided smile the stroke left him, which Mom calls the most honest smile in Michigan. “Too much sugar. Like she was trying to make up for something.”

I close the tailgate. “I should go.”

“Go on. Don’t keep the lady waiting.” He lifts the cane an inch off the step, which is how he waves now. “And Theo. Take the thermos. You look like something the cat dragged in.”

It’s a good life. I tell myself that on the drive out to the county road, with the window down and the lake air coming in cool and wet. It’s a good life, and I built it with my own two hands, one board at a time. I don’t need anything from the Juneberry except a straight frame and a finished job.

The sky over the trees is going from black to gray when the phone call comes back to me. It always does, when I’m tired. Eleven at night. Mom’s voice, very calm, which was how I knew. Dad on the kitchen floor. The ambulance lights going around and around on the ceiling. The paramedic saying Grand Rapids, and Mom saying we’ll follow you, and me standing in the hallway with my truck keys in one hand and my packed duffel bag at my feet, the one that was supposed to go to Chicago in six hours.

I had forty minutes before we had to leave. I spent them at the Juneberry.

Rosemary kept a spare key under the loose brick behind the ticket booth, for emergencies and good causes. I let myself in with a flashlight and climbed the stairs to the projection booth. Hattie and I had been leaving each other notes up there since we were sixteen. There was an old empty reel can on the shelf by the window with the word HOLD painted on the lid in red. That was our mailbox. She’d leave me terrible drawings of Rosemary’s cat. I’d leave her the movie times for theaters in Chicago, cut out of the paper.

That night I sat on the floor of the booth with a yellow legal pad from my truck and wrote her a letter. Three pages. My hands were shaking so badly I had to press the pen hard to make the words come out straight. I told her about Dad. I told her I couldn’t come with her, not now and maybe not for a long time. I asked her to go anyway, because she had been planning Chicago since she was nine years old, and if I asked her to stay, she would, and I would spend the rest of my life being the reason she didn’t go.

I told her I wouldn’t call, because hearing her voice would make me ask. But if she wanted me to call, she could write back and leave it in the can, and I would check the second I came home.

I folded the pages, put them in an envelope, wrote her name on the front, and closed the lid of the can. Then I drove to Grand Rapids behind an ambulance.

Five weeks later I came back for one afternoon to get more clothes. The first place I went was the booth.

The can was empty.

Her car is already in the lot when I pull in at ten to six. She’s sitting on the hood with a travel mug, wearing a gray hoodie with the name of a Chicago cinema across the front. Her hair is twisted up in a knot with a pencil through it. She looks like she didn’t sleep either, and like she would rather drive into the lake than admit it.

I park by the tower and take my time getting out. It doesn’t help.

“You’re early,” she says.

“So are you.”

“I wanted to catch you before you started.” She slides off the hood and stands with her feet planted, the way she used to stand at the free throw line in gym class right before she missed. “I have terms.”

“Terms.”

“Three weeks.” She holds up three fingers, as if I might have trouble with the number. “You said the frame needs fixing. Fine. You get three weeks to finish it. You stay on the scaffolding, I stay in the office, and we stay out of each other’s way.”

“Okay.”

“And we don’t do the past.”

I set my toolbox on the tailgate. “The past.”

“Any of it. No catching up. No how have you been. No remember when.” Her voice is very even. She has practiced this. I can tell because she’s looking at a point just over my left shoulder. “I’m here to sell a property. You’re here to fix a frame. That’s all this is.”

For eleven years I have wondered what I would say to her if I ever got the chance. I had whole speeches. Some of them were angry. Some of them were so tender I was embarrassed to have thought them, alone in a truck at a red light. I never once imagined she would stand in front of me with three fingers in the air and ask me to say nothing.

The strange thing is how easy it is to agree. She read the letter. She knows everything I had to say, and she decided eleven years ago what her answer was. Talking about it now would only make her say it to my face.

“Okay,” I say.

Her eyebrows go up. “Okay?”

“Three weeks. The frame. No past.” I pull my gloves out of my back pocket. “You want to shake on it?”

She looks at my hand for a second too long. Then she nods once, sharp, instead. “I have breakfast with Priya at seven.”

“Tell her I said hi.”

“No,” Hattie says, and walks back to her car.

It’s almost a joke. It’s almost the way she used to talk to me, back when every no was really a dare. I stand there holding my gloves like an idiot until her taillights disappear down the drive.

The scaffolding is cold and wet with dew in the morning. I climb to the second level, clip my harness to the rail, and look at the job.

Four boards to go on this section of the frame. Then the upper braces, where the old wood has gone soft enough to push a thumb into. Then new bolts, new flashing, and a coat of primer on everything before the rain comes in September. Three weeks is tight. Three weeks is fine. I have finished bigger jobs in less time with worse coffee and nobody to prove anything to.

I get the first board seated and drive the first screw, and the sun comes up over the trees behind me and hits the back of the snack bar.

That’s the thing about this spot on the scaffold. You can see straight across the lot to the small square window of the projection booth. I knew that in March. I’ve been working up here for four months, and I have spent four months not looking at that window.

In March, Rosemary used to sit in a folding lawn chair at the bottom of the tower, wrapped in two blankets and that gray cardigan, with a thermos of cocoa she said was for me and mostly drank herself. She was thinner than I remembered. She told me she’d had a cold all winter. I believed her, because I wanted to.

She talked the whole time I worked. About the price of popcorn oil. About the county’s new rules for signs. About Hattie. Mostly about Hattie. Hattie’s crew kept the projectors running at one of the biggest theaters in Chicago. Hattie had fixed a machine nobody else could fix, on New Year’s Eve, with a paper clip. Hattie was very busy. Hattie was coming up in October.

She never once asked me why I left, and she never once said she was sorry about how it ended. I figured she knew the whole story. I figured Hattie had told her years ago, and that the kindest thing Rosemary could do was talk about the price of popcorn oil.

On the last day of March, when I climbed down to go home, she caught my sleeve.

“She’ll come back for this place, Theo,” she said. “Maybe not for me. But for this place. Make sure it’s still standing when she does.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Promise me.”

I promised. Three weeks later she was gone, and I kept coming out every morning anyway, because a promise to Rosemary Albrecht doesn’t care whether she’s around to check on it.

This morning the sun catches the glass and turns it gold, and I look.

It’s just a window. Dusty, with a crack in one corner. Behind it is the old projector, and the shelf, and the can with HOLD on the lid, and nothing inside it.

I think about her sitting on the hood of her car with three fingers in the air. I think about how she couldn’t look at me. I used to believe that people only avoid your eyes when they’re lying, or when they’re sorry. Maybe there’s a third reason. Maybe you avoid someone’s eyes when you gave them your answer a long time ago, and you just don’t want to watch them hear it again.

She read it. She sat in that booth eleven years ago and read every word I wrote, and she took the letter with her, and she got in her car and drove to Chicago and never once picked up the phone.

I pick up the drill. Three weeks.

I can do anything for three weeks.