So I’m at the post office, carrying a stack of twenty-three mail crates out to my car.
As always, the line of people waiting for personal assistance snakes all the way from the (no so helpful) help desk in back to the glass doors out front. As I make my exit — trying to beat the oncoming rain — a woman snags me by the sweater. “Wait a minute,” she says. “I know you.”
I pause. I blink. I don’t know her. Outside, the first fat drops of rain are starting to fall.
She lights up. “Oh, you’re one of those people who owns the Deville Cinema!”
Clyde was, in fact, one of three owners of the Deville Cinema — Jackson’s last, desperate independently-owned theaters. Back when we first met, I occasionally worked the ticket booth or helped with clean-up. “I worked there some.”
She clasps her hands together and beams at me. “Oh, we love the Deville Cinema! We come there all the time. What are you showing right now?”
I’m not sure what to say. “Actually, the Deville is closed.”
She looks as though I’ve told her the hospital is out of her blood type. “Oh, dear! Oh, no! That’s terrible! When did you close?”
I hesitate. “Um, ah … about seven years ago, actually.”
[Editor’s Update: Clyde and I did the math over dinner. The Deville has actually been closed for almost a decade.]
She draws back, as though offended. “There was nothing in the paper about it!”
I start to explain that there was something in the paper about it — a huge article, complete with photos, marking the end of the Deville era. I start to say that someone who really “loved the Deville” enough to come there “all the time” should have noticed that the cinema closed years ago (and that there’s now a department store in its place).
But the rain is coming, so I just smile, and shrug, and walk out to my car.
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