PART 2 – That night, he wasn’t merely afraid.
He was making certain it could never happen again.
—
Eight months earlier, I hadn’t been searching for a cat.
At eighty-seven, I knew better than to go looking for something that might depend on me for the next fifteen years.
I lived alone behind an abandoned drive-in theater in western Pennsylvania.
The theater had closed years before people began watching entire movies on the screens in their hands. Its enormous white screen still towered at the edge of the property, stained by weather and time, facing rows of broken pavement where families had once parked beneath the stars.
My husband and I had operated the drive-in for more than three decades.
We served popcorn, hot dogs, soda, and coffee strong enough to keep exhausted fathers awake through the second movie.
On warm summer evenings, children raced between the parked cars wearing their pajamas. Teenagers searched for the darkest spaces where they thought we couldn’t see them. Elderly couples returned every Friday night and parked in the same familiar spots.
When the theater finally closed, my husband and I remained in the small manager’s cottage behind the old concession stand.
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