Page 56 of The Second Chance Cinema
And then, you’ll hear the voice that’s meant for you to chime in, a little louder than the rest. It might be a voice you didn’t know you needed to hear. She offers you a piece of advice. The whole thing feels monumental, so much bigger than shopping, than a dress.
“You picked well,” Melinda tells me, returning us to theillusion of choice. I’ve learned better in my time here. She rings up my dress and places it into the safety of a dark travel bag with a silver zipper on it. “By the way, I wrote the note on that one myself.”
The dress I’m buying tells me this: When things get hard, think of the very first time you met them. The very first time.
So, I close my eyes. I grin. I do.
Drake set the story down. When he looked up, Ellie had come through the back door. Nancy’s leash was still in her hand. “Well,” she said eagerly, sipping a latte from the coffee shop she never went to before ten. “What do you think?”
“I love it,” Drake said. There were details about his town he would’ve tweaked for accuracy, but it was well written. “It’s well written.”
Ellie slid into the chair across from him and unbuckled Nancy from her restraint, leaving her to tuck her nose into all corners of the kitchen. “Okay,” she said. “Good. What else?”
Drake wasn’t sure what Ellie expected. He worried there was a trap here, a catch, some hidden statement she was waiting for him to make about Melinda. “I think,” he said, patting her coat, which resembled the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, “I think you really captured the town …” Tread carefully, he reminded himself. “The store,” Drake told her. “And the town.”
Drake could feel Ellie struggling on the other side of the table. This was the first work she was proud of in a while, a story people were going to read and enjoy. It was also a story that would tie Ellie’s and Melinda’s names together. He felt for her. Yes, she’d looked up Melinda and tracked her down, but she hadn’t known where this would all lead.
“Did you find my tree?” Drake asked her. “When you were walking around Main Street?”
“I …no!” Ellie said. She perked up. “They named a tree after you?”
“Yeah. It was for community service. Really, I just ran around fixing a lot of things. People would come by Melinda’s shop to find me whenever something broke.”
“Wow, Drake,” Ellie said. Her expression started to sour. He should’ve known better than to mention the shop. “It seems like there’s so much I still don’t know about you.”
25
Since reading Ellie’s story, Drake kept returning to one thing: the photos. Their details became more menacing with time. Why had Ellie not brought them up yet? He reminded himself, for the third time that week, that this was how she handled conflict. Her big moments were stored out of reach until they exploded.
Drake feared the explosion would happen soon.
As Ellie and Drake parked that Saturday night for the seventh showing at the cinema, paid for the tickets, and found their seats, Drake hoped it would show the end of his love story with Melinda. He was ready to see it all come crashing down. But the title that appeared after the dancing hot dogs warned him there was more romance in store.
TICKET SEVEN:TOGETHER
The movie’s structure was different that night, Drake noticed right away. They weren’t seeing a single memory. Instead, they watched a montage of younger Ellie’s romantic escapades with a string of eccentric characters:
The dry cleaner heartthrob.
The park guy.
The professor who played Professor Harold Hill inThe Music Man.
The opera guy.
The silver fox with a front-tooth gap who sang while he made burrata.
The girl with the—Drake sputtered a cough—girl with the paint-stained overalls and Joni Mitchell collection.
The photographer with a bunker-style loft.
The dancer into dark wave.
The taxidermist-motorcycle man.
The Orwell-quoting line cook.
And so on.
