She comes to the foot of the scaffolding at six in the evening holding a sandwich bag with something heavy in it.

“I need a favor,” Hattie says. “And I want it on the record that I hate this.”

“Noted.” I climb down the last level and take the bag. Inside is a brass drive gear with two teeth snapped off, and the teeth themselves, wrapped in a paper napkin like they might want to be buried together. “This is from the projector.”

“The main drive gear. Nobody makes them anymore. I called five people. One of them laughed at me.” She crosses her arms. “Dev says I need somebody with a lathe and too much patience.”

“Who’s Dev?”

“That’s not the point.”

I turn the gear over. The break is clean. Metal fatigue, most likely, from sixty years of doing the same job every night. I know how it feels. “I can cut a new one,” I say. “I need to measure the old one and check how it meshes with the gears around it. Then two nights on the lathe, maybe three.”

She lets out a breath like she was holding it all the way from the booth. “Thank you.”

“It’ll have to be at night.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m on the frame all day. And because it’s a hundred degrees in that booth after noon.” I hand her back the bag. “Nine o’clock?”

She takes it, and her fingers don’t touch mine, and I notice that they don’t.

“Nine,” she says. “This doesn’t count as the past.”

“It’s a gear, Hattie. It’s the present.”

At nine the lot is blue and the crickets are loud. The booth has cooled off enough to breathe in. Hattie has turned on the work light over the projector and propped the window open with an old paint can, and the lake breeze comes in smelling like wet sand.

I bring my calipers, a notebook, and a thermos of coffee. She takes one sip of the coffee and hands it back.

“That’s not coffee,” she says. “That’s a threat.”

“It’s how Dad makes it.”

“Then your dad is a dangerous man.”

“He’d like you for saying that.”

It slips out before I can stop it, and it lands between us on the dusty floor. She looks away. I open my notebook.

For the first hour, we work like strangers who happen to be good at the same thing. She walks me through the drive train, pointing with a small screwdriver: this gear turns that one, which turns the shutter, which has to be timed perfectly with the film so the picture doesn’t smear. I measure. I write numbers down. I count the teeth twice. Forty-eight teeth, a pitch so fine I have to use a magnifier, and a hub with a keyway worn smooth on one side.

“Rosemary ran this projector every Labor Day,” Hattie says, somewhere in the second hour. She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor with the manual open on her knees, a thick binder with the cover held on by rubber bands. “Everything else went digital in 2013. She kept this one for one night a year.”

“Roman Holiday.”

She looks up. “How do you know that?”

“I’ve lived here three years. It’s the only thing this town talks about in August besides tomatoes.”

She almost smiles. I watch it start at the corner of her mouth and get stopped halfway, like a car at a crossing gate.

She turns a page in the binder without reading it.

“Did she talk about me?” Hattie asks. “In March. When you were working.”

I think about the rules. I decide this counts as the present, technically, if you squint.

“Constantly,” I say.

Her head comes up.

“She told me you run the projectors at one of the biggest theaters in Chicago,” I say. “She told me you fixed a machine on New Year’s Eve with a paper clip while four hundred people waited for midnight. She told me you still hum when you thread film. She told me you were very busy, and that you were coming up in October.”

Hattie looks down at the manual. Her thumb moves over the rubber band on the cover, back and forth.

“It was a binder clip,” she says finally. “Not a paper clip.”

“I’ll correct the record.”

“And I don’t hum.”

“Okay.”

She’s quiet for a long time. Then, so low I almost miss it under the buzz of the work light, she says, “I wasn’t coming up in October. I said that every year.”

“I know,” I say. “So did she.”

By midnight I have everything I need. I close the notebook, and she closes the binder, and neither of us makes any move to get up.

“How’s the frame?” she asks.

“Four more boards on the left side. Then the braces.”

“That’s not the past either,” she says, mostly to herself.

“No.”

The work light buzzes. Outside, the screen is a pale shape against the dark, and above it there are more stars than anyone could count. I wonder if she can see any from her apartment in Chicago. I don’t ask. I’m keeping my end of the deal.

The first gear takes me what is left of Friday night.

Dad’s lathe is older than I am and louder than a lawn mower, and I love it more than most people. I set the brass blank in the chuck at half past midnight and don’t look up again until the birds start. Lucia comes out once, around two, with a sandwich and a blanket she drops over my shoulders without a word. I cut the forty-eight teeth one at a time, checking each against the old gear under the magnifier, and when I finally hold the finished piece up to the light, it’s the most beautiful thing I have ever made with my hands.

On Saturday night, in the booth, Hattie installs it, and she turns on the motor, and the projector runs for eleven seconds and then starts to chatter like it’s cold.

She shuts it off. We both stare at the housing.

“The pitch is off,” I say. “Not much. Less than the width of a hair.”

“Less than a hair is a lot, to a projector.”

“I know.” I rub my face with both hands. My eyes feel like they’ve been rolled in sand. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It’s close. It’s really close, Theo.” It’s the first time she’s said my name since the night she got here, and she doesn’t seem to notice. She’s already pulling the gear back out with careful fingers. “Most people couldn’t get it within a mile.”

We sit on the booth floor for a while with the failed gear between us on a rag. It’s past one. Out on the county road, a truck goes by with its windows down and the radio up, and then the night closes back over the sound.

Hattie gets up and goes downstairs. Ten minutes later she comes back with two paper sacks of popcorn from the old machine and a coffee mug of melted butter.

“Rosemary’s butter,” she says, handing me a sack. “I found a jar in the back of the freezer with June written on the lid. It’s either incredible or it’s going to kill us both.”

It’s incredible. I tell her so.

“Dev would call this a morale intervention,” she says, sitting back down.

“You keep bringing up Dev.”

“Dev keeps being right about things.” She eats a single kernel, very carefully. “He’s married. To a woman named Ruth who makes her own pickles. In case you were building a story in your head.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were. You make a face when you build stories. Your left eyebrow goes up about a quarter of an inch.”

I put my eyebrow back where it belongs. She laughs into the popcorn, and for one minute we are just two tired people on a dusty floor at one in the morning, and it’s the easiest minute I’ve had in eleven years.

Then she remembers. I watch it happen. The laugh folds up and goes away, and she stands and brushes off her jeans and puts the gear back in its bag.

“Tomorrow,” she says.

I drive home and cut it again.

This time I don’t stop at all. I skip the sandwich. I tell Lucia to go back to bed, and she tells me to go look in a mirror, and then she sits on the workshop steps and reads a paperback by the porch light until the second gear is done, because she’s stubborn and she’s mine.

At four in the morning I drive back to the Juneberry. I don’t call first. I figure she’ll be asleep at Rosemary’s little house on Shore Road, and I’ll leave the gear on the office desk with a note.

The booth light is on.

She’s asleep in Rosemary’s old rolling chair, with the manual open on her lap and her head tipped against the wall. There’s a smudge of grease on her cheekbone. Her pencil has fallen out of her hair and rolled under the projector.

I stand in the doorway for longer than I should.

When she was seventeen, she fell asleep just like that during the second feature on our first real date. We were sitting on a blanket in the bed of my truck, parked in the third row by post fifty-one. She had talked me into a black and white movie I didn’t understand, and she had talked through the whole first half of it explaining the camera angles, and then she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder right before the ending. I didn’t watch the ending either. I watched the light from the screen move across her face and thought, I am going to remember this for the rest of my life.

I was right about that, at least.

I set the gear down on the counter. The little clink wakes her.

“Theo.” She blinks at me. “What time is it?”

“Late. Or early.” I hold up the gear. “Take two.”

She’s up out of the chair before I finish talking.

We do it together this time. She holds the housing steady and I seat the gear and she tightens the set screw, and our hands keep ending up in the same six inches of space, and neither of us says anything about it. She threads the test reel. She looks at me. I nod.

She flips the switch.

The projector hums. The shutter spins up. The sound it makes is smooth and steady, a deep clean rhythm like a heartbeat heard through a wall, and it does not chatter, and it does not stop.

“Oh,” Hattie says softly. “Oh, listen to that.”

She reaches over and switches on the lamp.

A beam of white light jumps out through the booth window and across the whole dark lot and lands on the screen. It’s only the test reel, just numbers counting down in a circle, but out there on that enormous pale wall they’re thirty feet tall. Dust drifts through the beam in slow gold specks. The lake is black behind the trees. The sky is just starting to gray.

She laughs. It’s a real laugh, surprised and wide open, the one I haven’t heard in eleven years, and it hits me somewhere under the ribs.

“You did it,” she says, and turns around.

I’m closer than I meant to be. So is she.

The light from the projector is behind her, and it makes a bright edge along her hair and her shoulder, and her face is in shadow except for her eyes. For one second the whole booth goes very still. She tips her chin up. I can see the grease smudge on her cheek, and the little scar on her eyebrow from the time she walked into the snack bar door at fourteen, and I lean in, because I have been leaning toward this person for most of my life and I’m too tired to remember why I’m supposed to stop.

She puts her hand flat on my chest.

Not hard. Just enough.

“No,” Hattie says. Her voice is shaking. “You don’t get to do that. You left, Theo. You left without a word, and you never called, and you never wrote, and now you don’t get to stand in this booth and look at me like that.”

The countdown on the screen reaches one and flicks back to ten.

“I did write,” I say. “I wrote you a letter.”

She takes her hand off my chest. She steps back, until her shoulders are against the window and the light is all around her.

“No,” she says. “You didn’t.”