Priya Raman hugs me like she’s trying to get back something I borrowed.

“You,” she says into my hair, “are a terrible correspondent and I love you and I’m so mad at you.”

“I know.”

“You came to the funeral for four hours.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t even eat the ham.” She lets go and holds me at arm’s length, looking me over the way her mother used to check produce. “Okay. You look tired and expensive. Sit down before Bev gets here.”

Raman’s on Main hasn’t changed since we were kids, except that Priya’s name is on the business license now and her parents are in Tampa, calling every Sunday to ask if she’s changed the pie crust. The booths are red vinyl patched with red tape. The coffee is strong enough to strip furniture. There’s a bell over the door that rings a half second late, so you always look up after someone has already walked in.

I slide into the booth by the window, and Priya pours my coffee without asking and sits across from me instead of working, which is how I know this is serious.

“So,” she says. “Condos.”

“How do you know about the condos?”

“Hattie. A man in a suit sat at my counter for three days this summer drinking decaf. Nobody in this town drinks decaf. We all knew something was going on.” She wraps both hands around her own mug. “Are you really going to sell it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Say okay like it means something else.” I rub my eyes. “Theo said okay last night. Everyone keeps saying okay.”

Priya’s eyebrows climb all the way up. “You saw Theo?”

“He was on the scaffolding. With a hammer. Like a guy in a truck commercial.” I drink half my coffee in one go. “Did you know? That Grandma hired him?”

“Everyone knew.” She says it gently. “He’s been out there almost every day since March. He came in here after the funeral, Hat. He sat right where you’re sitting and didn’t say a word for an hour, and then he tipped me twenty dollars on a grilled cheese.”

I look down at the table. Somebody carved PR + a question mark into the wood years ago. I think it was Priya, the summer she couldn’t decide between two boys and went out with neither.

“We made rules,” I say. “Three weeks. He fixes the frame. We don’t talk about the past.”

“Oh, honey.”

“It’s a good plan.”

“It’s a plan for a fourth grader.”

The bell over the door rings, half a second late. Priya glances up and makes a face that is half apology and half pure delight. “Brace yourself,” she says. “It’s the historical society.”

Bev Lindahl is seventy-two years old and five feet tall, and she walks into a room like she owns the building and is thinking about raising the rent. She taught ninth grade English at Hollis Point High for thirty-eight years, including mine. She has never once forgotten a late assignment.

Behind her come Mr. Petrakis from the hardware store, the two Dunning sisters in matching sun visors, and a young guy in a fire department T-shirt I don’t recognize, carrying a box of donuts like a peace offering.

“Harriet Albrecht,” Bev says. Nobody has called me Harriet since my high school diploma.

“Hi, Mrs. Lindahl.”

“Scoot.”

I scoot. She sits down next to me in the booth, and the rest of them pull chairs over from the counter until I am completely surrounded by people who knew me when I had braces.

“We’ll keep this brief,” Bev says, which in my experience has never been true. “We understand you intend to sell the Juneberry.”

“Word travels.”

“Word lives here. Word pays property taxes.” She folds her hands on the table. “We aren’t here to tell you what to do with your own inheritance. You’re a grown woman and it’s none of our business.”

“Thank you.”

“However.”

Priya coughs into her coffee to hide a laugh.

“Your grandmother ran a free show on Labor Day for forty-one years,” Bev says. “Every single year since 1985. Free admission, free popcorn, and her own print of Roman Holiday on that old projector. The whole town came. Babies. Grandparents. The year of the ice storm, she ran it in a wool coat with a space heater in the booth.”

“The year Jim Dunning proposed at intermission,” says one of the Dunning sisters.

“He didn’t propose, he dropped the ring in the nachos,” says the other.

“He proposed after he found it.”

“We aren’t asking you to keep the place,” Bev goes on, over them, the same way she used to go on over the kids in the back row. “We’re asking for one more night. One last show. So this town can say goodbye to her properly, in the only place any of us really knew her.”

The firefighter sets the donuts in front of me. “They’re from the good bakery,” he says. “Not the gas station.”

I look around the table. At Mr. Petrakis, who sold me my first flashlight. At the Dunning sisters, who used to bring my grandmother a pie every August and pretend it was for the whole staff. At Priya, who isn’t saying anything, which for Priya is a kind of shouting.

The honest answer is no. The honest answer is that a last show means five more weeks of the snack bar and the cardigan on the hook and the booth I’m not going to climb up to, and every day of it will cost me something I don’t have extra of.

But the other honest answer is that I left this town once without saying goodbye to anyone, and I know exactly how that feels from the other side.

“Grandma wanted the frame fixed for one more season,” I hear myself say. “So I guess there’s one more season.”

Bev Lindahl smiles. It changes her whole face. “That’s my girl,” she says, and takes a donut.

It takes another forty minutes for the historical society to finish their coffee, argue about whether the 1998 show was Roman Holiday or Sabrina (it was Roman Holiday, it has always been Roman Holiday), and leave. When the bell finally rings behind the last Dunning sister, Priya slides back into the booth and puts her chin in her hand.

“One more season,” she says. “Look at you.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying. Yesterday you were a woman with a folder.”

“I’m still a woman with a folder. I’m just signing on Labor Day instead of tomorrow.” I pull a donut out of the box and tear it in half, and don’t eat either half. “It’s one night. I can do one night.”

Priya watches me shred the donut into smaller and smaller pieces. “How’s work?”

It’s a normal question. It’s what you ask a friend you haven’t seen in a while. My hands stop anyway.

“Fine,” I say.

“Hat.”

“It’s fine. It’s just.” I put the pieces down. “They closed two of our auditoriums in June. Nobody said anything official. They locked the doors and put up a sign about renovations, and then nobody renovated anything. Dev thinks the whole building is on a list somewhere.”

“Is it?”

“Probably.” I shrug, and it comes out wrong, too high on one side. “Everybody’s closing screens, Pri. People watch movies on their phones on the train. I keep old machines alive for a living. It isn’t exactly a growth industry.”

Priya is quiet for a moment. Then she reaches across the table and takes one of my hands, donut sugar and all.

“So you’re selling the only screen in this county that people drive an hour to sit in front of,” she says, “so you can go back to a building that’s quietly locking its doors.”

“When you say it like that, it sounds bad.”

“I’m saying it like that because that’s how it is.” She squeezes once and lets go. “Eat your donut. It’s from the good bakery.”

It’s past noon by the time I get back to the Juneberry. The heat has settled over the lot like a lid. Theo’s truck is by the tower, and when I get out of my car the drill stops for a second, and then starts again. I do not look up. I have rules.

I make it three steps toward the snack bar.

“Heard you’re doing a last show,” Theo calls down.

I stop. I turn around. He’s on the second level, leaning on the rail with a drill in one hand, and he has the nerve to look completely innocent.

“How could you possibly have heard that? It’s been two hours.”

“Mr. Petrakis came by to sell me bolts.” He lifts the drill a little, like evidence. “He says you promised Bev Lindahl. He says nobody breaks a promise to Bev Lindahl and keeps all their teeth.”

“That’s not the past,” I tell him. “So I’ll allow it.”

“Generous.” He looks out over the lot, then back down at me. “If there’s a show, I need the frame done by the twentieth. The primer needs a week to cure before you put anything bright on that surface.”

“Can you do it by the twentieth?”

“I can do it by the twentieth.”

He says it the way he used to promise things when we were young, like they were already true. Once, that was my favorite thing about him. I nod and go inside before my face can decide what it thinks.

The stairs to the booth are behind a narrow door at the back of the office. I stand at the bottom of them for a while.

I know how to run a last show. I’ve run a thousand shows. I can thread a projector in my sleep, and I have, once, during a double shift over New Year’s. The problem isn’t the job. The problem is that the only way to do the job is to go up these stairs, into the one room in Hollis Point where I was happiest, and turn on the lights.

I climb.

The booth is small and close and much warmer than the office. Dust hangs in the stripe of sunlight from the window. The old projector stands in the middle of the floor like a steel animal asleep on its feet, painted gray, bolted down in 1961 and never moved since. Film cans line the shelves along the back wall, labeled in Rosemary’s handwriting. Casablanca. Rear Window. Roman Holiday, three reels, with a heart drawn on the tape.

And on the shelf by the window, the reel can with HOLD painted on the lid in red.

I don’t open it. I know what’s inside, which is nothing, because nothing is what I got. I turn my back on it and pull the dust cover off the projector.

For an hour, it’s almost nice. This part I understand. I check the lamp house and the belts and the sprockets. I clean the gate with a soft brush. I find an old test reel in the cabinet and thread it through the rollers the way Rosemary taught me when I was eleven and standing on a milk crate to reach. Down, around, under, loop, loop. My hands remember everything. It’s the rest of me that keeps flinching.

I flip the motor switch.

The projector hums, and then it clatters, and then it makes a sound like a garbage disposal eating a spoon. I slap the switch off. The smell of hot metal fills the booth.

It takes me twenty minutes and most of the skin on my knuckles to get the gear housing open. When I finally do, I sit back on my heels and stare.

The main drive gear is brass, about the size of a coffee coaster, and two of its teeth have sheared clean off. They’re sitting at the bottom of the housing like baby teeth under a pillow.

I call everyone I know. I call the parts supplier we use in Chicago, and the guy there laughs out loud, not unkindly. I call a collector in Ohio who restores old projectors and sells parts online, and he says he hasn’t seen that gear in fifteen years and I’d have better luck finding a unicorn. I call Dev, the other technician on my crew, who has an opinion about everything and is right about most of it.

“Nobody makes that,” Dev says. “Nobody’s made that since the seventies.”

“So I’m done.”

“No. You need a machinist. Somebody with a lathe, who can take the old gear and cut you a new one tooth by tooth. Somebody with way too much patience and nothing better to do.”

I hang up and sit on the floor of the booth with the broken gear in my palm.

Through the window, across the lot, Theo is up on the scaffolding with the sun on his back. He has his father’s lathe in his workshop. I know that because Priya told me, just this morning, in a sentence I was trying very hard not to hear. He has hands that can fix anything and more patience than any person I have ever met.

As I watch, he stops drilling and turns his head toward the booth window.

Then he turns back, fast, like he got caught.

There’s exactly one person in Hollis Point who can save Rosemary’s last show. And I made him promise not to talk to me.