I don’t cry in the car. I want that on the record.

I drive home from Maple Street with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, like a driving test, and I use my turn signal at every single corner in Hollis Point, including the ones where there’s nobody for a mile. I park in Rosemary’s driveway. I go inside. I put the kettle on.

Then I sit down at her kitchen table and cry so hard that the kettle screams for a full minute before I notice.

Go.

He said it like a gift. That’s the part I can’t get past. He said it so kindly, standing there on the sidewalk with a rope in his hands, like he was handing me something he’d wrapped himself. Go to Denver. It’s everything you’ve worked for. And I watched his face while he said it, and I know that face, and it looked exactly like a man holding the door open for someone so he doesn’t have to watch them walk out.

I turn off the kettle. I don’t make tea.

On the table in front of me is the thing I found on Tuesday, the thing I called to tell him about. It has been sitting there for two days while I waited for a phone call that didn’t come.

It’s a ledger. An old-fashioned green account book with a cloth spine, the kind you can only find in office supply stores that also sell typewriter ribbon. It was in the bottom drawer of Rosemary’s desk at the Juneberry, under a stack of tax returns, with a rubber band around it so tight it had left a groove in the cover.

On Tuesday I only looked at the first few pages. Numbers. Ticket sales and popcorn oil and the electric bill, in her tall slanted handwriting. I thought it was just the books.

Tonight I take off the rubber band and read the whole thing.

It isn’t just the books.

It starts in 2015, the year I left. Every page is one month. The numbers are on the left side, in neat columns. And on the right side, in the margins, she wrote everything else.

June 2015. Record crowd for Jaws. Snack bar ran out of hot dogs by eight. Must order more.

September 2015. H. started school. Called Sunday. Sounds tired. Sounds happy.

December 2015. Closed for season. Lost money again. Not much. Enough to notice.

She kept going like that. Eleven years of it. The numbers are what I expected. Summers are good. Winters are bad. The drive-in makes money from June to August and then bleeds it slowly until spring, a little more each year, as the county gets older and the kids move away. By 2023 the total at the bottom of the year is red, and it stays red.

But the margins are full of ideas.

Classic movie night, Thursdays. Seniors half price. Ask Bev to do a talk before?

Wedding rentals? Lucy Petrakis asked if she could get married in front of the screen. Would need a permit and chairs. Look into it.

Fall festival, October. Horror double feature, pumpkin patch in the back lot, hot cider. Could stay open six more weeks.

Film school rental. Grand Valley students need somewhere to screen short films. Call the department.

Projector repair?? Nobody left who can fix these old machines. People would pay. H. could.

I stop on that one. I read it three times.

People would pay. H. could.

Next to almost every idea, a few weeks or a few months later, she wrote the same thing in smaller letters. Too tired this year. Or: Next summer. Or just: Someday.

None of them ever happened.

I turn the pages faster. 2024. 2025. The handwriting gets shakier. The margins get emptier. In January 2026, there are no numbers at all, because the Juneberry is closed in January. There’s just one line.

Saw Dr. Hale. Not good news. Must fix the screen.

And then I turn to the last page with writing on it, and it isn’t about money.

It’s dated March 30. The day before she caught Theo’s sleeve at the bottom of the scaffolding and made him promise.

The handwriting is small and careful, like she wrote it slowly.

Hattie,

If you are reading this, you found my ledger, which means you are at the Juneberry, which means you came home. I knew you would. I’m sorry I couldn’t be here for it.

I kept something that was not mine to keep. You will find it on the top shelf in the booth, behind Roman Holiday, unless you already have. Theo left it for you the night his father got sick. I found it three days after you left for school. I didn’t open it. I didn’t need to. I knew that boy, and I knew you, and I knew that if I put it in your hands you would turn your car around and never see Chicago.

So I held on to it. I told myself I would give it to you when you came home for Thanksgiving. Then you didn’t come home for Thanksgiving. Then it was Christmas. Then it had been a year, and then it had been too long, and every Sunday I asked when you were coming, and I think part of me was relieved when you said October.

I told myself I was protecting you. That’s the story you tell yourself when you are afraid. The truth is, I wanted you to choose this place on your own, without anybody asking you to. But that isn’t a choice, sweetheart. That’s a test. And it wasn’t fair of me to give it to you.

Don’t do what I did. Don’t do what that boy did either, though I love him, and he meant well. Don’t decide for somebody else what they can carry. Ask them. Then let them answer.

The numbers in this book don’t work the way I ran it. They might work the way you would. You’ll know. You always did know more about these old machines than I ever did.

Whatever you choose, choose it for yourself. Not for me, and not for anyone.

I love you more than all the movies.

Grandma

At seven on Friday morning I am sitting in a booth at Raman’s on Main with the ledger open on the table and Priya’s reading glasses on my face, because I left mine somewhere between crying and deciding.

Priya is across from me with a calculator. The real kind, with paper that comes out the top. It belonged to her father. She says it’s the only calculator in Hollis Point that has never lied to anybody.

“Okay,” she says. “Walk me through it again. Slower. I own a diner. I don’t own a movie theater.”

So I walk her through it. Summer is good. Winter is bad. But if you add the Thursday classic nights, and the wedding rentals in June and September, and a fall festival that keeps the gates open until Halloween, the season goes from twelve weeks to twenty. And if the booth isn’t just a booth, but a workshop, where somebody who knows what she’s doing restores old projectors for collectors and small theaters all over the Midwest.

“The man in Ohio,” I say. “He’s emailed me four times. He wants to buy our projector, but more than that, he wants someone who can fix the three he already has. There are hundreds of those machines in basements and barns, Pri. Nobody under sixty knows how to keep them running.”

“Except you.”

“Except me.”

The calculator chatters. The paper curls out over the edge of the table. Priya reads it and pushes her lips together and runs it again, just to be sure.

“It’s not a lot of money,” she says finally. “I want to be honest with you. It’s a lot less than Denver.”

“I know.”

“You’d be poor for a couple of years. Maybe three. You’d work every weekend in the summer and you’d freeze in that booth every winter.”

“I know.”

“But it’s not red.” She taps the bottom of the tape. “Hat. If you do even half of this, it isn’t red anymore.”

I look down at the column of numbers on the curl of paper, and then at Rosemary’s handwriting on the page beside it. Someday. Next summer. Too tired this year.

I think about Denver. Twenty screens. A glass building near an airport, full of machines that run themselves and never need anybody to understand them. It would be a good life. I could be good at it.

I think about the Juneberry under the string lights, and the booth that finally doesn’t hurt to walk into.

I think about Theo, and I make myself stop, because this can’t be about Theo. That’s the whole point. Grandma said it on the last page, and Lucia would say it, and Priya is saying it right now with her eyes. If I stay because of him, I’m just taking the test.

So I take him out of it. I set him to one side, very carefully, the way you’d set a full cup down on a table. And I ask myself what I want if nobody at all is waiting for me.

The answer comes up fast and clear, like a picture coming into focus on a screen.

“I want to stay,” I say. “I want to run it.”

Priya closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them, they’re wet, and she’s grinning.

“Finally,” she says.

I spend the rest of Friday at the Juneberry, because that’s where I want to be when I do it.

I walk the rows first. All of them, one by one, the way Rosemary used to walk them every morning in summer to pick up popcorn boxes and lost sunglasses and, once, a set of dentures. The gravel crunches. The speaker posts stand in their long curved lines, paying attention.

At post fifty-one, I stop and put my hand on the silver tape.

Then I climb up to the booth. It doesn’t cost me anything to walk in anymore. The projector stands under its dust cover, and the new gear hums inside it even when it’s switched off, or at least I imagine it does. I take the Music Box ticket stub out of my wallet, where it’s been since I found it, and I put it back in the can with HOLD on the lid, next to the little scratched cat with two names.

“Okay, Grandma,” I say out loud, to nobody. “Here’s my answer.”

I sit in her squeaky chair for a while with the ledger in my lap. The afternoon light moves across the floor. Down on the county road, a tractor goes by, even though it’s Friday.

At four forty-five, I go downstairs to the office.

At four fifty-two that afternoon, I call Grant Whitford from the office at the Juneberry, with the door that Theo fixed closed behind me.

He picks up on the first ring. “Ms. Albrecht. I was hoping to hear from you.”

“I’m sorry, Grant,” I say. “Thank you for everything. You’ve been really decent about all of this. But please don’t send the contract. I’m not selling.”

There’s a pause. Then he laughs, softly, and it doesn’t sound disappointed. It sounds like a man who has been sitting in a diner drinking decaf and listening to Rosemary stories for three months.

“You know,” he says, “I had a feeling. Good luck, Ms. Albrecht. I’ll come out for a show sometime.”

“Bring a blanket,” I tell him. “It gets cool by the second feature.”

After he hangs up, I write one more email. It’s to Sandra, and it’s short, and it’s the hardest thing I have ever sent. Then I sit in Rosemary’s squeaky chair and look out the office window at the screen, pale and new against the blue afternoon.

Seventeen days until Labor Day.

Nobody in town knows yet except Priya. And Theo, who told me to go, doesn’t know anything at all.