Arlo Pickens's daughter found the box of glass slides in the back of his barn on a Saturday in September, and she was carrying it to the trash pile when a woman he had not seen in forty-seven years pulled into the driveway with one of them in her hand.
Arlo was sitting on the porch of his daughter's house, where he had lived since his second stroke, watching her clean out his old place across the road. He was eighty-nine. His left hand did not work very well anymore. His mind worked fine.
"Daddy, what are these?" his daughter, Lynn, called across the road. "There must be a thousand of them."
"Fourteen hundred and eleven," Arlo said. "There were fourteen hundred and twelve. One walked off the last night. Put them down, honey. Please."
Lynn set the box on the tailgate of her truck.
"Daddy, they're just names on glass. Half these people are gone. You can't even lift the box anymore."
"I know whose they are," Arlo said. "Every one."
Lynn sighed. She had been clearing out the old place for three weekends. Forty years of feed sacks and coffee cans full of bolts and broken lawn chairs. She was sixty, and tired, and she loved him, and she had a dumpster coming Monday.
"One shoebox," she said. "You can keep one shoebox."
"They're all one box, honey," Arlo said. "That's the point."
From 1958 to 1979, Arlo Pickens had run the Starlite Drive-In on the highway outside Hollis Ferry, Tennessee.
He had sold the tickets and popped the popcorn and climbed up into the little cinder-block booth every night at dusk to thread the big projector. He had shown every kind of picture there was. Westerns. Monster movies. Elvis. Doris Day. The whole county had grown up in his parking lot, in the backs of their daddies' cars, with the speakers hooked over the windows.
And for twenty-one years, Arlo had done one thing that no other drive-in in Tennessee did.
For a dime, a boy could have his name and his girl's name put up on the big screen at intermission.
Arlo would print it himself, in white letters, on a little square of glass, with a heart around it. Jimmy and Carol. Bobby and Faye. Lonnie and Wanda. He would slide it into the projector between the cartoon and the feature. Forty feet tall. The whole parking lot would honk.
Most boys did it on a first date, to impress a girl. Some did it on the night they got engaged. A few did it every summer for years.
Arlo had kept every slide. In shoeboxes, in order, by year. Fourteen hundred and twelve of them. Lynn had grown up in that booth, asleep on a pile of flattened popcorn boxes while the slides went by.
The Starlite closed on August 25, 1979.
It was cable television and the new mall theater with six screens out by the interstate. Arlo could not compete. The land was sold to a farmer. The screen still stood out there in the middle of a soybean field, gray and peeling, forty feet tall.
On the last night, the lot was full. Every car in the county, it seemed, had come out one more time.
And at intermission, instead of the feature, Arlo had done something he had never done before.
He had stopped the movie. And for two hours, he had put up every single slide.
All fourteen hundred and twelve of them. One by one. Twenty-one years of names in white letters with hearts around them. Couples who had gotten married and had children and divorced and died. Couples who were sitting right there in that parking lot that night, with their kids in the back seat.
His wife, Nadine, had sat beside him in the booth that night, which she never did, handing him the slides in order, one shoebox at a time. She had died in 2011. He had not looked at the slides since.
The horns had gone on for two hours. He could still hear them sometimes, at night.
The car that pulled into Lynn's driveway was a silver Buick. A woman got out. She was in her late sixties, small, in a blue cardigan, with short silver hair and a pocketbook over her arm.
She was holding a little square of glass.
She walked up the porch steps slowly and stopped in front of Arlo's chair.
"Mr. Pickens," she said. "You don't remember me. I was Carol Ann Jessup. I married Jimmy Tidwell in 1980."
Arlo looked at her for a long time.
"Jimmy and Carol," he said slowly. "1976. Green Chevelle. He paid me a dime every Friday night for three summers."
The woman's eyes filled up.
"He passed in April," she said. "Cancer. I was going through his things last month, and I found this in his wallet. Behind his driver's license. He'd carried it for forty-seven years."
She held out the little square of glass.
It was one of Arlo's slides. Yellowed, chipped at one corner. White letters with a heart around them.
Jimmy and Carol. 1976.
"I didn't know he had it," Carol said. "I didn't know he'd taken it. I came to give it back to you." She swallowed. "And to tell you something I should have told you forty-seven years ago."
Across the road, Lynn had stopped walking, with the box of glass slides in her arms.
"Mr. Pickens," Carol said. "On August 25, 1979, Jimmy and I were broken up. I was at the Starlite with another boy. And when you stopped that movie, you didn't know it, but you saved my whole life."