The Loan I Never Told Her About

The Line

Kinsley is eleven years old and she cannot keep a secret to save her life. On Monday she came home from school and said, “Grandma climbed the ladder.”

I said, “What ladder?”

“The ladder in the Dreamland. She went all the way up. She’s going to run the picture.”

I said, “Nobody can run that machine but Grandpa.”

“Grandma can,” said Kinsley, with the flat certainty of a girl who has seen something and has no interest in your doubts.

For three weeks I watched from outside. I will admit it. I drove to Raine on my lunch hour and parked across Main Street from the Dreamland, in front of the hardware store, and I looked at the building. On the second Tuesday the light was on in the little window at the top of the back wall, the booth window, a square of yellow behind a ladder shadow. I sat there with a sandwich I did not eat. At six o’clock that evening I drove home the long way, through Raine, to see if it was still on. It was.

Penny spent a week of evenings at her mother’s, and she did not say much about it, and I did not ask. On the Friday before the reopening, I came home and found her at the kitchen table with a roll of tickets and a pair of scissors. She said, “Pearline wants them in strips of ten.” She did not look up. “She doesn’t say a word about you, Kent. Not one. Do you know what that means?”

I said I did not.

“It means she is not angry,” Penny said. “It means she’s busy.”

On Saturday the seventh I came home from the bank at noon, and I changed my shirt, and I drove to Raine, and at a quarter past three I saw the line for the four o’clock. I had never seen a line at the Dreamland. It ran from the front doors, past the barber shop that has been closed since 2014, past the hardware store, and around the corner. It was cold, and bright, a hard blue sky, and nobody minded. There were farmers in feed caps and women in good coats. A boy in a Royals cap held his grandfather’s hand and hopped from foot to foot.

I got in line. I want that known. I got in line like anyone else, behind two Methodist ladies, with my five dollars out. At the front I could see my wife behind the glass at the ticket window with her sleeves pushed up, tearing a strip off a roll as fast as she could, and my daughter beyond her, at the counter, running a scoop through a kettle of popcorn as big as her forearm.

They turned me away at the four o’clock. The house had sold out, and the line had folded in on itself, and Penny leaned out of the window and said, very gently, “Sorry, sir. We are full.”

I said, “It’s me, Penny.”

“I know it is,” she said. “Standing room is against the fire code. Come back Thursday.”

I stood on the sidewalk in the cold. Through the front windows I could see the lobby, full to the walls, my mother-in-law’s red carpet crowded with people in their coats, the popcorn machine glowing, and above it all a woman I had told to sell.