Her jaw dropped, gasps trembled her as she stared across Main Street to the brick building with a two-story tower, glass doors, and a yellow marquee.
A man’s voice: “Are you okay?”
“That’s me,” she whispered. “The movie theater.”
“You mean the Roxy? Been there since before we were born.”
“I’m where people go to watch the movies in their heads.”
“You’re your own movie,” said the man, maybe thirty, clean and lean, quiet looking, with a smile and eyes that seemed wide open.
She wanted to hit him. “You don’t know who I am.”
“I’m Paul.”
“Good for you.”
“Well, I should do better.”
“Everybody should. Get over yourself.”
“That’s the whole point, right? Over yourself and with somebody.”
“Look, cowboy,” she said, and a smile twitched his lips, “I’m not in your movie.”
“So where are you?”
“Walking. And I’m not gonna do whatever you wanna.”
“I wanna walk with you, see my hometown through your eyes. ’Course, if you want coffee, we could pop into the Tap Room.” His nod flicked her eyes to a bar beside them with its door open to the morning. “Just dropped off breakfast for Gary to get into Denny. Gary’s the bartender, makes sure Denny eats, won’t let him sit ’less he does. Or we could go ’cross the street to the café. You saw Teresa and Bev walk in for their every-morning go-to-coffee, they’d like meeting a new face that could be a granddaughter since all theirs aren’t around.”
“Doubt they’d like to have coffee with a stripper.”
“Then we’ll get another table.”
Roxy blinked. She turned the way she’d been drifting. He fell in step beside her.
“What’s with you and the theater?” he said as that building slid past on their left.
She kept her eyes on the road out of town to Jammers’ slaughterhouse, heard the truth sneak out of her: “Roxy’s not my real name.”
“I’ve always been Paul. We keep going this way, you’ll see the post office where I work.”
“You’re the mailman?”
“And here I am out for a walk. What was I thinking?”
Stop smiling at him. Ice eyes.
“Mostly I staff the counter or the sorting room. You like your job?”
“Are you crazy?”
“I’m here,” he said. “Born and raised. Tried college, didn’t feel right. I wasn’t at home in other people’s big ideas. Worked, saved up, drove around the country.”
“What did you see?”
“That everyplace was someplace, even the road.” He shrugged. “I took a chance. Came back here where ’least I am who I am.”
They turned off the main drag. He pointed out this, told her about that, about the library where he’d get books — only fictions, got enough facts just waking up. That tan house was where Linda used to live, heartbreaker but worth it, moved three hundred miles away to Billings, married, kids. The Curtis boy came out of that peeling white paint place, marine, didn’t make it back from Iraq. Paul’s great-aunt used to live down that street, not far from the Methodist church that never was for him.
“What would your aunt say if she knew you were with me?”
“We can ask her, she’s back that way in the Heritage, assisted living.”
“Better spare her heart.”
“Hell, the eyes in this place — by now, half the town knows we’re out walking.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because there you were in my here I am. Because you see more than just a theater. Because there’s something about you that’s nobody else’s movie.”
“No! I’m no rescue-me girl. I needed money, and work one party led to work another, then you’re on the circuit, so what, I’m not poking a fast-food cash register, not some forget-it face behind a counter like they said I’d be, I’m... I’m...”
“Roxy,” he said.
Their footsteps crunched gravel. Lilacs scented the wind. They’d die.
“I got nothing for you,” she told him.
“I get to walk with you. Hear you. See you.”
“You wanna see me, it’s all out there for a five-dollar cover at Jammers, but tonight’s the last night.”
“I want to see you, not it.”
Her bones cracked. “Why?”
“Might take forty, fifty years for me to answer that.”
The wind blew dust into her eyes. She whispered: “Don’t come tonight.”
“Don’t leave tomorrow.”
Roxy said: “I don’t believe in this kind of shit.”
“How’s the shit you believe in working out for you?”
She watched him scan his windswept town.
Then he walked backward facing her like some goofy teenager: “I don’t know why you hit me like you do, but if the hit is all I get, ’least my hurt is earned and true.” He swung around to walk beside her again.
Can’t look at him, can’t breathe, can’t—
“You know what I want to do now?”
YES, I KNEW IT, HERE IT COMES, ALL HE EVER WANTED TO DO WAS—
“Listen,” he said.
And he did. About her mother. That shit in high school. How her dad never backed down and seldom got it right, left her his IOUs. How she wouldn’t walk away from what was owed to creepy Luke because that’s not right or who she was, but the harder she worked to pay it off, the more she was who she wasn’t. How she was tough.
“I believe you,” he said.
Shelby was a small town. They didn’t walk up Knob Hill or cross the tracks to the pink high school three times the size today’s student population needed. They circled back to the west side of town and were crossing a truck stop’s parking lot when the white minivan roared off the street, crunched gravel in front them, and slammed to a stop.
“Leave!” Roxy told Paul as Bear squeezed out of the van where Cherry rode shotgun. “I got nothing for you! I’m bad trouble!”
Paul stood beside Roxy. “And I’m right here.”
Bear stomped closer: “DezAray’s doing a date like she should, Star’s got the shakes in the motel shower, Cherry and me figure to grab some breakfast, end up finding your ass out here with some dude ain’t been road-boss cleared.”
Roxy tried to stop Bear. “We’re just walking!”
His paw spun her toward the van — she plopped on her bottom.
“No!” yelled Paul.
Under the law, he attacked Bear first when he grabbed him.
Whump! Bear’s fist slammed into the mailman’s guts, lifted him off the gravel.
Bear caught him on the way down, yelled, “Stop!” for witnesses to hear, tossed the gasping local guy smack into the closed sliding side door of the minivan — dented its white metal. Paul bounced off and fell to the ground. Bear gave him the boot.
On her ass in the gravel, Roxy heard a new voice yelclass="underline" “Done!”
A brown-skinned man in blue jeans and a snap-button shirt loomed in front of Bear. “I seen Paul make his move, that’s on him and between you two, but it’s done.”