The Last Picture Show

Vikki Leonard parked her car at the edge of the old drive-in lot and sat there a moment with her hands on the wheel. Fifty-four years old, twenty-four of them married to the same man, and now five of them not, and here she was at her daughter's wedding watching the fairy lights come on over a cracked asphalt lot as if the whole event had been arranged just to make her feel her age.

The drive-in had been dead for years, everyone knew that. The screen still stood though, a great grey slab at the far end of the lot, and someone had strung it with lights and hung a banner that read ELLEN AND MONTY in letters that would have been visible from the highway if the highway had ever come back this way. Folding chairs in rows where the speaker posts used to be. A long table of food under a marquee. Somebody's speaker system playing songs that had been old when Vikki was young.

She got out. Her heels clicked on the broken pavement, which was a poor choice of shoe and she knew it, but the dress code had said cocktail and she had honored it (the heels were the last nice thing she'd bought before she stopped buying nice things).

"Mum!"

Ellen came across the lot in white, twenty-eight years old and glowing, with her new husband Monty half a step behind her holding two glasses of something fizzy. There was a dog trotting at Monty's heel, a big brown thing with a bandana around its neck.

"There she is," Monty said. "Told you she'd come."

"I said I'd come," Vikki said. "I keep my word. It's one of the few things I still do reliably."

"Oh, stop!" Ellen hugged her, careful of the wine glasses in Monty's hands. "You look amazing. Is that new?"

"It's four years old. That's practically new for me."

"This is Bo," Monty said, nodding at the dog, who sat down as if being introduced. "He's the ring bearer. Was. The rings are on fingers now, so he's been demoted to guest."

"He's better dressed for it than half this crowd," Vikki said, and Monty laughed the way he always laughed, too loud and completely sincere.

"He likes you," Ellen said. "Mum, you'll sit with us? Monty's uncle is going to do a toast and I'm warning you now it's going to be embarrassing."

"I have survived worse toasts."

"You have not," Ellen said. "You have survived exactly one wedding toast in your life and it was Dad's best man and he talked about a fishing trip for eleven minutes."

"And I have never been the same," Vikki said.

They went off to greet someone else, and Vikki found her chair. Second row, because Ellen had assigned seats like it was a theater, which in a way it was.

* * *

The toast happened. It was, as promised, embarrassing, though mostly in a warm way. Then the dancing started on a plywood square somebody had painted matte black in honor of the occasion, and that was where it stopped being easy.

Because Ellen was dancing with her father's brother.

Al had flown in from Auckland for the day. He had their father's laugh, that was the problem. He had the same way of spinning a woman under his arm and catching her, the same two left feet, the same grin while doing it. Vikki had married that grin at twenty-five. She had lived inside it for twenty-four years until the hospital called at four in the morning and the grin stopped existing anywhere in the world except on other people's faces.

She watched her daughter dance with a ghost wearing her brother-in-law, and she held her wine and did not cry, because she was a pilot and pilots did not cry at their daughters' weddings. She had a whole system about it. Breathe, look at the horizon, count something.

She was counting the fairy lights when a shadow arrived at her elbow.

"Rescuing you looks like a job for a professional," said Brandon Carver, holding out a fresh glass of wine. "The one in your hand's been empty for ten minutes. I've been watching you hold it like it's full."

Brandon was fifty-six, her neighbor of eight years, a tour guide at the lighthouse up the coast, which meant he spent his days telling strangers the same four stories about a lamp and a shipwreck and somehow never got tired of it. He was in a grey suit that almost fit him. His hair had gone white in the front and he'd never once seemed bothered by it, which Vikki had always found either admirable or infuriating depending on the day.

"The lighthouse is closed on Saturdays," she said, taking the glass. "What are you doing here?"

"Ellen invited me. I jump-started your car in March with her in the passenger seat. Apparently that buys you a seat at the wedding." He lowered himself into the chair beside hers with the sound of a man whose knees seemed to have their own opinions. "Besides, I could see the lights from the coast road. Looked like something worth walking into."

"True. Or you could have just come to a wedding."

"That too."

They sat through a song. On the plywood square, Al handed Ellen off to Monty, who was not a good dancer but was a happy one, which covered a lot of ground.

"You've been doing the count-the-lights thing," Brandon said.

"I don't know what you mean."

"You do it at the mailbox too. When you're deciding whether to get the mail. You pick a number and stare at something and by the time you've counted to it, you've either decided or you've turned around and gone back in the house."

Vikki looked at him. "How long have you been watching me do that?"

"Eight years," he said, and had the grace to look slightly caught. "Not in a strange way. In a next-door-neighbor way. You've been going out to that mailbox less and less lately, is all I'm saying."

"I collect mail. It's a hobby."

"Sure."

"Did you come over here to interrogate me about my postal habits?"

"No!" He turned his glass a little. "I came over here because you looked like a woman doing arithmetic on a horizon, and I've done enough of that myself to know the company helps. That's all. If I'm intruding, say so and I'll go find the buffet."

Vikki considered it. She could send him off. He'd go, too, this was true about Brandon, he took no for an answer the way other men took directions, immediately and without argument, and then she'd be alone again with her empty glass and her lights.

"Stay," she said. "Tell me one of your four lighthouse stories. The shipwreck one. I always liked that one."

"Vikki Leonard asking for the shipwreck story. Somebody should alert the paper."

"I'm being polite."

"You're being bored," he said, "which is worse," and he launched into it anyway, the Waverley and the fog and the keeper who rowed out in it, and Vikki let the story do what stories do, which is make a hole in an evening that something can get through.

* * *

By the time the sky went properly dark, she had laughed twice, which was more than she had laughed in a month. The rain started somewhere in the middle of the dessert table, sudden and unapologetic, the way coastal rain is. People scattered under the marquee. Ellen shrieked about the cake.

Brandon stood up, popped open a black umbrella he'd had hooked over his chair the whole time as if he read weather for a living, which in a sense he did.

"Under," he said.

"There's a marquee right there."

"There is, and it's got forty people and a cake in it. This has you and a reasonable amount of room."

Vikki looked at the umbrella. She looked at the marquee. She stepped under the umbrella, which surprised her more than anyone, and Brandon shifted it over her head without making a production of it, and they stood in the edge of the lot in the rain with the fairy lights blurring above the dead screen.

"Ellen looks happy," Vikki said.

"She does. The dog looks stressed, I should note. He's been eyeing that cake all night like it's a lifeguard duty situation."

"Monty will feed him cake when nobody's looking. I've known that boy for two years and I could tell you his whole character from that dog."

"Go on then."

"Later," she said. "Story's worth more when the rain stops."

Brandon laughed, low. The rain came down on the umbrella and the lot and the screen, and the two of them stood there, fifty-four and fifty-six, dry in the middle of a wet wedding, and neither of them suggested going under the marquee.

The dog problem announced itself during the speeches, which Vikki thought was fitting, since most disasters do.

"Has anyone seen Bo?" Monty's voice carried across the lot, and it had that particular pitch a man gets when he is trying very hard not to panic at his own wedding.

"He was tied to the chair," Ellen said. "I tied him myself."

"Well he's untied himself, love, because there's a bandana on the ground and no dog attached to it."

Vikki stood up before she'd decided to. "He's my responsibility. Monty left him with me before the ceremony."

"He's got the run of the whole back lot," Monty said, running a hand through his hair. "There's a gap in the fence by the old projector booth, I saw him sniffing at it earlier."

"I'll take the booth," Brandon said, already moving. "Vikki, you go along the fence line. He'll head for food or water, and the only water back there is a puddle the size of a dinner plate."

"How do you know the booth?"

"I give tours for a living. I can't walk past a derelict structure without casing it." He was jogging toward the low concrete building at the edge of the lot, and Vikki went the other way, heels sinking into wet gravel, counting fence posts because it was that or think.

The rain was getting serious now, a proper coastal soaking, and the fairy lights blurred into smudges of gold. She heard Brandon shout something from the booth, heard a scrabble of claws on concrete, and then Bo came shooting out of the gap like a small furry torpedo with a mission, headed dead away from all humans.

"Bo," Vikki shouted, uselessly, because dogs do not respond to their own names when they have made a decision.

"He's going for the screen." Brandon's voice, from behind her now, closer than she expected. "They used to keep a sump pit back there, he can smell the water."

They ran. Her dress was four years old and it was not made for this, and she did not care. Brandon overtook her at the second fence post, which she noted with some professional irritation, being a person who had once outrun a boarding gate delay, and got to the pit first, dropping to his knees at the edge.

"Got him. Got him, easy, easy, you daft animal."

Bo was soaked and delighted and absolutely certain he had won something. Brandon scooped him up under one arm like a large loaf of bread, and the dog licked his chin with the enthusiasm of the recently pardoned.

"He's got your brother-in-law's cake on his breath," Brandon said. "You want to explain that, or shall we just agree Monty's a soft touch?"

"We'll agree Monty's a soft touch. Al gave him a piece, I saw it."

"Case closed." He stood, mud on both knees, dog under his arm, white hair plastered flat with rain, and looked so absurd that Vikki laughed a third time, which was becoming a habit. "Right. He can't go back under the marquee like this, he'll shake and take out the cake table. I'll put him in my car. It's just up the coast road."

"It's a fifteen minute walk."

"It's a five minute walk when you're carrying a dog and running from a bride."

Ellen came pelting over then, holding her skirt up in both fists. "Oh thank God. Mum, I'm so sorry, I know you were watching him."

"He's fine, sweetheart. He's having the best night of his life." She scratched the dog's ears. "Go back to your wedding. Brandon's got a dry car and I've got a dry umbrella, we'll sort him."

"You're sure? It's raining sideways."

"Go," Vikki said, and Ellen went, and Brandon shifted the dog to his other arm and raised the umbrella with the first one, which should not have been possible but was.

* * *

The walk to the car was five minutes of rain and shoulders. The umbrella was a good one, a big golf thing, but the wind had ideas, and every time it shoved, one of them had to move toward the other to stay dry. Vikki counted the shifts. Seven, before the car.

"Sorry," Brandon said, for the fourth shift in a row.

"You keep apologizing for weather."

"I keep being the cause of weather. I'm holding the umbrella."

"He's an umbrella, not a treaty." She ducked in as he wrestled the passenger door open with a dog under his arm and a wind trying to take the whole umbrella to sea. Bo was installed on the back seat with an old towel that Brandon clearly kept in the car for reasons that suddenly made a great deal of sense, and the door shut on a small wet complaint.

"Right," Brandon said, and shook the umbrella out, and the two of them stood there in the rain because the snack bar was twenty feet away and there was nowhere drier to be until it stopped.

The snack bar was part of the wedding now, technically, strung with more fairy lights and stacked with crates, but nobody was in it, and the old popcorn machine still sat behind the counter like a retired man at a family dinner. Brandon shook himself off at the door like a dog himself, and Vikki laughed, and he pointed at her.

"Don't. I've seen you at the mailbox in a hurricane, you're not made of waterproof anything either."

"I wear a raincoat."

"You wear a raincoat and still stand at the window deciding whether it's worth it." He found a roll of paper towels under the counter, because of course he had, a man who read weather for a living would know where every roll of paper towels in the district was kept, and handed her a wad. They stood drying off in the yellow light, and the rain hammered the flat roof, and it was very quiet in the way only heavy rain is quiet.

"Eight years," Vikki said, into the middle of it. "You said earlier. Watching the mailbox. Eight years."

"Eight. Since you moved in. Your hedges were a scandal, I nearly wrote to the council."

"That's not what I meant and you know it." She smoothed the paper towel flat on the counter, unnecessary, but her hands wanted something to do. "Why eight years, Brandon?"

He was quiet a moment. The rain filled it.

"Because you're the best thing on the street," he said, "and I've known that for longer than I should admit, and I'm fifty-six years old, and I've been divorced