The Loan I Never Told Her About

One, Please

On Thursday night I stood in the lobby of the Dreamland with a five-dollar ticket in my hand and a payment stub folded in my wallet that my mother-in-law had never seen.

I should say who I am. I am Kent Ulmer. I am forty-seven years old, I am a loan officer at the bank in Walsburg, and I have been married to Pearline Waldrip’s daughter for twenty years. You heard from Pearline, and she told it fairly. She said I stood in her kitchen and told her she had never once climbed the ladder to the booth, and that I sat in my truck for a long time afterward. All of that is true. What she did not know, and what you have not heard, is the reason I was in her kitchen with a folder.

I put the ticket in my shirt pocket. I stood on the red carpet of a building I had told her to sell, a hundred and sixty-eight of my neighbors going past me in coats, and I thought about the fifteenth of the month.

The fifteenth is when the payment is due. It was due on the fifteenth of every month for eleven years and nine months, and then on the fifteenth of September of last year Cliff Waldrip was not there to bring it, and I paid it myself. I have paid it fourteen times. It is $376. The next one comes Sunday. I have a calendar alert on my phone for it that says only “Dreamland,” and nobody has ever asked me why.

That is what this story is about. It is not about a theater. It is about a small number written on the fifteenth of every month, and what a man will do to keep somebody from finding it.

The Booth in October

In the fall of 2013 Cliff Waldrip came to see me at the bank. I had been a loan officer for four years, and I was thirty-four years old and still thought a signature was a signature.

He sat down in the chair in front of my desk with his hat on his knee. Cliff was a stocky, bald, soft-spoken man, and he had a way of looking at a problem as though it were a piece of equipment that had stopped running and might still be coaxed. He said, “Kent, the studios are done with film.”

I knew that. Everybody who read a trade paper knew that. The film companies had announced they would stop printing film for the big pictures by the end of the year, and a one-screen house like the Dreamland could either buy a digital projector or run old pictures until the last print wore out. Cliff had priced the machine. The projector, the server, the lens, the screen, the installation, and a new cooling system for the booth came to $62,000.

He had $12,000 saved. He asked me about the remaining $50,000, and I looked at the numbers for a long minute, because they were not good numbers. The Dreamland cleared about what a small town can clear, which is not much, and Pearline’s books, which I had read at the Waldrip table at a dozen Sunday dinners, were honest and thin. A fifteen-year note at 4.25 percent. About $376 a month. A business that took in less in the winter than the payment.