The Loan I Never Told Her About

Thursday

I came on Thursday because my wife told me to come back, and because it was the one night she said she could promise me a seat. I had left the folder of receipts in the truck. I had not yet decided what to do about it, and I think I knew by then that I was not going to decide at all.

I stood in the lobby a minute after I bought the ticket. I had bought it from my own wife, who said, “Five dollars, honey,” in a voice a little higher than usual. I looked at the carpet, and at the old popcorn machine, and at the framed photographs on the walls of Raine in other years, and at my own neighbors.

Then I heard the machine start up in the wall. It is a sound I had not heard since the weekend before Cliff’s funeral. A low, even hum, like a refrigerator in a quiet house. I turned and looked at the stair hall beside the ladies’ room, where the ladder goes up.

I walked to the foot of the steel ladder, put my hand on the second rung, and climbed. It is fourteen rungs, and a loud ladder. I stopped twice, and the second time I looked up and saw the little door open at the top and a woman standing in it with her hand on the frame, in a navy cardigan, watching me come, and I did not know what her face would do.

I came up through the hatch. I did not look at her first, and I have thought about that since. I looked at the machine. A tall gray cabinet, bigger than I remembered from the 2013 installation, and smaller, too, as things are. I put my hand on the side of it, the cool housing, the way you put a hand on a horse you used to know. I had signed for that machine. I had never once touched it.

I said, “It’s smaller than I thought.”

“The picture’s bigger than you’d think,” Pearline said.

I swallowed. “Pearline, I was wrong about the ladder.”

“You were right about the ladder, Kent. I hadn’t climbed it. I have now.”

“I was wrong about the roof. I mean, the roof still needs…” I could not finish a sentence. I started again. “I stood in the line outside on Saturday, you know. They turned me away at the four o’clock. Penny said it was the fire code.”

“Standing room is against the fire code,” she said. “I checked.”

I laughed, and I wiped my face with the heel of my hand, and she turned off the booth light and let the dark come in. The room hummed. Down in the house a hundred and sixty-eight people settled into their seats, and somebody’s grandchild said “shh” very loudly. Pearline pressed the button. The curtains went back. The light went out of the little glass window and landed on the screen thirty feet away, where it belongs, and a snowy street in 1946 came up in front of the whole town of Raine.

She pulled Cliff’s stool out from the wall and put it at her elbow, and patted the seat.

“Sit down, Kent. Somebody besides me ought to know how to run this machine.”