Eclipse at the Overlook

I locked the register at six and looked at the clock. Forty-seven years old, and I was closing a coffee shop on a Tuesday like I did every Tuesday.

Dinah was wiping down the counter. She did the last half shift twice a week and I paid her in cash and muffins.

"You're doing the sigh again," she said.

"I don't sigh."

"You've done three since the guy with the laptop left. Big ones. Like the air's leaving you on purpose."

I untied my apron. "It's nothing. I caught myself in the window reflection. That's all."

"And?"

"And nothing. It's just, some days you look at yourself and the person in there isn't the one you filed away in your head at thirty-five. That's all it was."

Dinah leaned on the mop. "Camilla. You're forty-seven, not a hundred and two."

"It felt like a hundred and two in the window."

She rolled her eyes and went back to the floor. I flipped the sign to closed and got the door half open when Aiden came up the walk with a paper bag under his arm.

"Please tell me you're still open," he said. "One cup. I'll be quick."

"For you? Sure. I haven't cleaned the machine yet."

He followed me back in and Dinah gave him the look she always gives him, which is a long look with eyebrows.

"Lemon cake," he said, setting the bag on the counter. "Well, no cake yet. But I found this."

He pulled out a recipe card, yellow and soft at the corners, handwriting in blue ink.

"Lunar Lemon Cake," I read.

"1950s estate lot. Whole trunk of paper goods from a house out past Millbrook. Recipe boxes, receipts, a ration book. This was tucked in the back. Somebody named Eleanor wrote it out for somebody named June. I felt like I was reading their mail."

"Old recipe cards are the best part of your job," Dinah said from the floor.

"They're the only honest part. Everything else in that trunk was fake or broken."

I made his coffee while he read the card out loud. One cup lemon juice, he said. One cup sugar. Butter the size of an egg, which apparently meant something in 1954.

"You could make it," he said. "For the eclipse."

"The what?"

"The lunar eclipse. Friday night. You haven't heard about this? Whole town's going out to the Overlook."

"The drive-in?"

"It's not really a drive-in anymore. The screen's down, the concession stand's a shed. But the lot's flat and dark and the eclipse club sets up telescopes there. Richie goes every year. He asked me to ask you."

"Richie asked you to ask me?"

"Richie said, and I quote, tell Camilla, and bring a blanket, because it gets cold and you'll want something to sit on."

Dinah made a sound from the floor that she pretended was coughing.

"I don't know," I said. "Friday. I close at six. I'd be dragging by eight."

"You'd be dragging with company," Aiden said. "It's a free sky. You used to like free skies."

I looked at him. He was fifty-two and he still had all his hair and he knew exactly what he was doing with the word "used to." We'd had our three months, three years ago, and ended it the way you end a thing when both people are scared of it working. Friendly ever since. Neighborly. That word came up a lot.

"Fine," I said. "Friday. If it doesn't rain."

"It won't rain," he said. "Eleanor's cake says so."

"Eleanor's cake doesn't say anything about weather."

"The moon does. Look it up." He took his coffee and left a five in the tip jar even though I told him not to, and the bell rang behind him.

* * *

Friday I closed at six, went home, changed three times, and hated all three outfits. Dinah called at seven.

"What are you wearing."

"A sweater. It's going to be forty degrees."

"A sweater is fine. Which sweater."

"The green one."

"Good. Don't change it. I'm picking you up in ten."

"You're coming too?"

"Obviously I'm coming too. Richie's coming. It's a community event, Camilla. It says so on the flyer."

Dinah drove us out past the grain elevator to the old Overlook lot. Half the town seemed to be there. Folding chairs, coolers, dogs on ropes. The eclipse club had four telescopes set up in a line and the moon was already going brown at one edge.

Richie waved us over to a blanket near the middle. Aiden was already sitting on it.

"Room for two more," Richie said. "I brought hot cider in a thermos and I brought gossip, and the cider is better."

"There's no gossip," Aiden said.

"There's three years of gossip," Richie said. "I've known this man since he was twenty-two. I watched him sell a cradle to a lady from Poughkeepsie and then drive to Poughkeepsie to buy it back. He does not do things halfway, except with you, where he does nothing at all."

"Richie," Aiden said.

"What! I'm being helpful. Dinah, back me up."

"Oh, I'm just here for the moon," Dinah said, in a voice that meant she was there for all of it.

We sat down. I ended up next to Aiden because the blanket decided it, or Dinah decided it, which is the same thing. The moon got browner. Somebody's kid was yelling about it two blankets over.

"Neighborly of you all to arrange the seating," I said.

"We're very neighborly," Richie said. "That's our whole thing. Neighbors. People who live near each other and are friendly. Like on a cul-de-sac."

"You've made your point."

"Have I? Because I have more. In 2022, this man came to my house and said, and I quote again, I think about her more than is polite."

"Richie, I swear."

I looked at Aiden. He was looking at the moon, or pretending to. The eclipse had him about half swallowed.

"Is that true?" I said.

He was quiet a second. "It's true I said it. Richie didn't have to repeat it, but it's true."

"We ended things for good reasons," I said.

"We ended things for scared reasons. Good and scared are different words."

The kid two blankets over yelled that the moon was gone. It wasn't gone, it was copper, the whole disc gone dark red, and the whole lot went quiet at once. Even the dogs.

"That's the peak," Aiden said. "Half hour of it."

I couldn't stop looking at it. Red and flat and enormous.

"I look like that," I said, without meaning to. "Old light on an old rock."

"Don't," Aiden said. "Not about yourself."

"You don't get to say what I get to be about myself."

"Right. I don't." He shifted so he was facing me. "But I'll say what I get to say about myself, which is that I thought about you for three years and never once got tired of it, and every time you laughed in your shop I heard it through the wall, because your walls are my walls, apparently, and I built a whole shelf display around the fact that I could hear it."

"You built a shelf display."

"The antique birdcages. You hate the birdcages."

"I hate the birdcages."

"And I put them there anyway because every time you came in to complain about the birdcages, you stayed ten minutes."

The moon sat there red and patient. Dinah and Richie had drifted to the telescopes, talking loudly about not eavesdropping, eavesdropping the whole way.

"Come for cake Sunday," Aiden said. "Eleanor's recipe. I'll make it. It'll probably be terrible and you'll come anyway."

"If it's terrible I'm leaving."

"That's fair."

The moon started to brighten at the edge, a thin white line coming back, and I sat there in the cold with my green sweater and thought, well. Maybe the person in the window isn't the only one who got older.

* * *

The crowd started packing up slow after the peak. Chairs folded, coolers clinked, the kid got carried off asleep. Dinah looked at me across the blanket.

"We're going to take Richie's advice and go warm up the car before the traffic," she said.

"You drove us," I said.

"And I'll be right there, with the heater on, for as long as you need," Dinah said. "That's the advice part."

"I'll walk her to the car," Aiden said.

"Sure you will." Dinah looked right at me. "Tuesday. Six. Don't be weird about muffins."

Then they were gone and it was just us and the last of the light coming back onto the moon. Aiden stood up and brushed off his knees.

"Want to see the best view? There's an old projection booth. You can climb the ramp and look through where the window used to be. The eclipse club doesn't use it but the roof's still solid."

"How do you know the roof's solid?"

"Because I climbed it in October and I'm still here."

"You climbed it alone in the dark in October?"

"I was appraising the marquee sign for the county. I got curious. Come on."

So we walked across the lot, past the screen with the trees grown up in front of it, to the little building behind it. The ramp was concrete and cracked and the door hung open on one hinge. Inside there was a rusted projector and a floor full of leaves and a window opening facing the lot.

"It smells like mice," I said.

"It smells like 1962." He leaned on the sill. The moon hung there, mostly back, a white ring around a red shadow. "Okay. I'm going to say a thing and you can ignore it."

"That's a promising start."

"I miss us. The three months. I've been polite about it for three years and tonight I'm not going to be."

I looked at the moon instead of him. "Why tonight?"

"Because Richie outed me in public and my exit is gone."

"That's a terrible reason."

"It's an honest reason. The rest of the reason is I make a cake Sunday and I want you there for more reasons than cake."

I put my hands in my sweater pockets. "Aiden."

"I know."

"You don't know."

"Then tell me."

"Tell you what? That I'm twenty pounds heavier than the last time you saw me naked? That my skin has moved? I buy moisturizer that costs more than a tank of gas and it does nothing. I caught my reflection in the shop window Tuesday and I thought, who is that, and then I thought, that's what Aiden would see."

He was quiet for a second. Then he reached over and took my hand out of the pocket and held it, just held it, thumb moving over my knuckles.

"I'm fifty-two," he said. "My knees sound like the projector in here when I climb stairs. I have hair in my ears that I find with tweezers like a man doing taxes. And you want to