I turned the white envelope over, and I could hear my own heartbeat. “That is the closing statement for the Starlite Drive Ins, Mr. Larkin,” I said. “Four million seven hundred thousand dollars. I sold all of them in the spring to a company that will keep the screens lit and the speakers working. My name is on the last page, and it is the only name that should be.” Amber looked at her husband. Her father, a heavy man from Joplin with a rancher handshake, read the figures slowly, moving his lips. The porch swing creaked in the wind, and the Ozark night smelled of rain on hot gravel.
Brent broke the silence. “Mom, I was going to pay it back out of the first profits. I promise.” I opened the blue envelope and slid the bank papers across the table. “A home equity loan, son. Thirty eight thousand two hundred dollars, on the house your father and I paid for over thirty years. The signature at the bottom looks like mine, and it is a decent copy. I have never seen it before.” I put my reading glasses on the table. “The banker said you came in alone, with a letter saying I was too ill to travel. I was in my garden that day, planting tomatoes.”
Amber turned slowly in her chair. “Brent, you told me your mother cosigned willingly. You said she was proud to help.” “I thought she would have been,” he answered, and it sounded small. Her father laid a big hand on the table. “Son,” he said, “what is that other paper under the envelope?” I held up a faded ticket stub, soft as cloth. A dollar and a quarter to see a double feature at the Starlite in the summer of nineteen seventy five. It was the stub from my first date with Gene. I kept it in my wallet for fifty years, and I carried it that night for courage.
A faded ticket stub from a summer in nineteen seventy five gave one son the weekend to bring his mother back to the drive in at Branson.
I set out my terms in the same voice I used to settle arguments at the snack bar. “Here is what happens now. You will pay off that loan out of your own pocket, every dollar, and you will bring me the lien release from the bank in thirty days. You will sign a letter that says plainly what you did. I will keep it in my safe, and I will not file a report as long as you keep your word. And you will go to the bank with me and tell the manager that you made a mistake.” Brent nodded and wiped his eyes.
The next evening I drove out to the original Starlite, and I found a surprise waiting. The new owners had left the lights on, and the lot was full of cars with their tailgates down and lawn chairs set up in the gravel. Word had gone around town, the way it does in Branson, and people who had grown up at that screen had come to say thank you. Walter, who had run the projector since nineteen eighty one, stood by the booth and tipped his cap. “Zelma,” he said, “you never let a kid in without a bag of popcorn. We remember.”
The money consequences arrived soon enough. Brent sold the things he had bought with that loan, and he took a loss on every one of them. He drove to the bank with me on the very next Monday and sat in a hard chair across from the manager, who had known him since he was a boy. The father of Amber, who had offered to help them buy a house, quietly reconsidered. Brent took on evening hours at a warehouse in Hollister to cover the payments. For the first time since his wedding, he came home too tired to be anything but honest.
I did not want to spend my days in bitterness. With part of the sale money, I started a program in the name of my husband. Gene Dockery Movie Nights pays the admission, the popcorn and the cold drinks for any family in Taney County who cannot afford a night at the drive in. We held the first one on a warm Friday in June. Two hundred and forty children came in pajamas, and they sat on the hoods of the cars of their parents with blankets on their knees, singing along to the cartoon. A little boy asked me whether the stars came with the ticket. I told him they did.
Amber came to see me by herself the following Sunday, holding a store bought pie with the price tag still on it. She laughed and tore it off, and I laughed too, and for a while we sat in the kitchen like two girls. She told me she had been mortified at the toast, and that she wanted me to know she was not like that. I told her I knew. Then I made a pot of coffee, and I showed her the photograph of Gene and me in front of the old screen, and we talked until the streetlights came on.
Brent came to the Starlite on a Saturday night in July, as I had asked, and I put him to work at the snack bar. He wore a paper hat and an apron. For three hours he popped corn, filled cups with ice and wiped the counter, with a line of fifty people growing longer by the minute. At first he was clumsy. By the end, he was calling every customer by name. When the last car rolled out, he leaned on the counter and said, “Mom, I never knew how hard you two worked here.” I handed him a bag of warm popcorn.
At the end of the summer, the family sat together in the first row of cars with the movie about to begin. The sky turned violet over the Ozarks, and fireflies drifted over the gravel like small stars come down to listen. Brent sat on the tailgate with Amber, holding a box of popcorn between them. I took the old ticket stub out of my wallet and placed it on the dashboard where the light from the screen could find it. “Mom,” Brent whispered, “is that the one?” I nodded. Then the screen lit up, and the whole drive in sighed.