It was Annabeth rapping on the glass, in her navy dress and a cardigan against the chill, with old Billie leaning on her walker a step behind. I rolled the window down. “May I sit with you?” Annabeth asked softly. “I have never seen this place from the inside of a car.” I unlocked the passenger door, and she climbed in, and for the first time in thirty four years of Saturdays, the empty seat of my father held a living person. Billie settled on a folding chair beside my door with a blanket over her knees, as if she had attended these nights forever.
The screen flickered, and a cowboy picture began. We did not watch it. Annabeth set the striped popcorn box on her lap, took the rusty key on its red yarn, and held it up between us. “Your father mailed me the envelope in November,” she said, “a week before he died. The note said only, The trunk of the Oldsmobile, Margie knows where.” I stared at her. I did know. I had driven that car to the drive in myself that afternoon, because I could not bear to sell it.
We went around to the back, the three of us, and I opened the trunk. Under the spare tire, bolted to the floor, sat a small steel lockbox I had never noticed in sixty years of riding in that car. The key turned at once. Inside lay a stack of ticket stubs bound in rubber bands, row on row, every one from the Skyview, every one dated. Seventeen hundred and sixty eight stubs. On top of them lay a letter in the square hand of my father, addressed to Annabeth Marie.
She sat down on the bumper and read it under the dome light, and I stood close enough to read over her shoulder. Dear Annabeth, it began. I am your father. I am too much of a coward to say it to your face, so I am saying it on paper. In the summer of 1958 I promised your mother a night at the pictures. That afternoon my own father collapsed in the barn, and I rode with him in the ambulance to Fremont. By the time they let me go, it was past midnight and the lot was empty.
A promise broken by a bad night can be kept for thirty four years by a man who buys one extra ticket every Saturday and sits beside nobody.
The letter went on. The next morning Billie told him what had happened on the road. He drove to the house of the mother of Annabeth and stood on the porch with his hat in his hands, and her mother told him to go away. She did not believe a boy who had not come. He wrote to the girl, and the letters came back unopened. He wrote again, and again. Then he did the only thing left. He sent an envelope every Christmas with a check from a bank, no name, because her mother had said she would burn anything with his.
My father married my mother in 1960. I read the next lines twice. She knew everything, he wrote. Dolores knew from the first week, and she never once asked me to stop. She is the one who told me to keep going to the drive in. She said a promise to a girl who waited in a yellow dress is not a promise a decent man can put down. I had to turn away. I thought of my mother drying the same plate, hearing the Oldsmobile back down the driveway, and keeping her face quiet.
Annabeth finished the letter and folded it very carefully. She was crying without a sound. “Mama never told me,” she said. “She died last spring, still limping, still saying she had never been angry at anybody.” She took my hand in her thin cold fingers. “Margie, I have spent sixty five years wondering who my father was. And all that time he was sitting here in the dark, buying me a ticket.” Billie, behind us, blew her nose like a trumpet and said, “Somebody needs popcorn.”
She fetched three boxes from the snack bar herself, on her walker, and we sat in the Oldsmobile in the back row by the fence, the two of us in the front seat with the doors open, and Billie in her folding chair, watching the end of a western none of us could have named. Annabeth ate her popcorn one kernel at a time. Near the final scene, she leaned her head against the seat and said, “So this is what the empty seat felt like to him.” I said it was warmer now.
We buried nothing that night, and we forgave everything, and in the morning we drove to Paducah together, because Annabeth had a house full of photographs she wanted me to see. She has two sons and a granddaughter with the chin of my father. I met every one of them in a single weekend. Her oldest boy shook my hand for a full minute. He said, “So you are the aunt who was hiding in the pew.” I told him that I had been hiding in plain sight for sixty six years.
In October Annabeth moved to Fremont, to a little house two streets from mine. We have supper on Wednesdays and church on Sundays, and we sit together in the last pew, where she sat that first day. The ticket stubs live in a glass case in her front room, with the key and the red yarn and the envelope. Next to them hangs the snapshot from the wallet of my father, the four year old girl, finally with a frame.
The Skyview closes for the winter in September, but they let us in one last night. Billie rolled up in her wheelchair, ninety one years old. We bought three tickets at the booth, and the girl at the window, a teenager who knew nothing of the story, asked if we were expecting someone else. I looked at my sister in the passenger seat. I said no. Everyone who was coming had come.