“…and he called her…” Brandon said, and he stopped, and I saw his Adam apple move, because the word was an unkind one. The projector repairman had told him that the tall man in the casino jacket had addressed my daughter in law as Bean. As in, Mrs. Jelly Bean. As in a girl whom a man has known for a long, long time. I sat on a stool at my own snack bar, in my house dress and cardigan, with Walt gold ring in my hand, and I felt eleven decades of Ohio common sense come down on my shoulders like a fire blanket.
I asked Brandon whether the shoebox contained anything more. He said there was a slip of lined notebook paper, folded very small, tucked inside one of the markers. He handed it to me. It was Amber loopy handwriting. Tony, I will have the whole amount by Halloween, I promise. Do not call Mike. Do not call the old lady. Under it, a telephone number, with an area code from Cincinnati. I read it three times. I asked for a pencil. Then I called the number, from the old black phone behind the counter, and a man answered, rough and sleepy. “Yeah?”
I did something I am still proud of. I did not give my name. I said, in the high, sweet, stupid voice that Amber always assumed I had, “Is this Tony? This is Mike mother. Amber asked me to call.” A pause. Then the man said, quite politely, that Amber was late on a payment, and that he understood she had a source of money coming from the old theater. He said, “Miss, I do not want trouble. But your daughter in law owes the house two hundred and twelve thousand dollars, and I have been told the drive in is her collateral.” I thanked him, and I hung up.
A shoebox behind the old carbon arc projector, a ring scratched with a receipt, and a nickname nobody should have known.
Collateral. My Starlite. I had paid for every light bulb on that lot. I called Mike at his office. I told him to come to the drive in at once, and to come alone, and not to tell his wife. He arrived in forty minutes, in his work tie, looking pale and puzzled. I did not waste time. I sat him down on a snack bar stool and handed him the shoebox, and the markers, and the ring. He turned the ring over and read the scratched letters inside. PAID 14K. A.K. His face went through disbelief, and anger, and a great, quiet, bottomless sorrow.
He did not cry. Mike has never cried in front of me since he was eight. He put the ring on the counter, very carefully, as if it were a sleeping animal. He said, “Ma, when Dad passed, I asked Amber where his wedding ring went. She told me the hospital lost it. I believed her. I told you that.” I said I remembered. He said, in a hollow voice, “She sold it, did not she? For fourteen thousand dollars. To pay a casino marker. And she wrote it inside the band, like a receipt.” He put his head down on his arms.
Amber arrived at dusk. She had been summoned, in a text from Brandon, a clever young man who had pretended to be the projectionist. She parked her white SUV beside the ticket booth, in a long camel coat, with her sunglasses on her head, and came through the lobby in her high boots, looking annoyed. Behind her, at a cautious distance, walked a tall man in a satin casino jacket. I had never seen him before. He wore a tight smile and a pinkie ring. I rose from my stool, took off my cardigan, and folded it over the counter. And I said, “Welcome to the Starlite, Bean.”
She froze. The man behind her stopped short. Mike turned on his stool and looked at his wife for a long moment, and the silence in that snack bar was thick enough to cut with a bread knife. Then Amber, to my astonishment, did not fight. She sagged. Her face crumpled, and the whole bright, shiny woman fell away, and in her place stood a frightened girl of forty four. She said, in a small voice, “Mike, I am so sorry. I could not stop. I tried. I could not stop.” And Mike, who is a good boy with a weak spine, found his spine.
He told the tall man, flatly, to leave. He told Amber to go sit in the car. Then he took out his phone, called the Greene County sheriff, and reported the debt collector, who left through the side door in a hurry, and was stopped by a deputy at the entrance. Amber went to a treatment program in Columbus, voluntarily, for gambling addiction. Mike filed for separation, and later divorce. He paid what he could on her debts, from the sale of his boat, and the sheriff arranged a plea for Tony that put him away for a spell.
I kept the ring. I had a jeweler in Dayton polish out the scratches, and I wore it on a chain around my neck, next to my heart. The Starlite, as you know, had been sold, and I did not take that back. But the Columbus company, to my delight, agreed to leave the old screen standing, and to host one last public night before the demolition. They called it Starlite Farewell. And on the last Saturday in October, as the sun went down behind the tall corn, the cars began to roll in, one after another, headlights blinking, filling the lot.
Four hundred cars came. Three generations of Dayton, in station wagons and pickups, with lawn chairs and blankets and thermoses of cocoa. I ran the snack bar one more time, in my old apron, with Mike beside me popping corn. We showed Casablanca, on the big screen, in black and white, with a crackle of static. I stood at the booth window at midnight, as the final scene played, and saw, on the dark horizon, the red taillights of the last cars leaving. I touched the ring at my throat. “Good night, Walt,” I said. “Great picture.”