* * *
The roof took nineteen days. Cappellini's crew stripped it to the trusses, sistered the rotten ones with Fenske lumber, and laid new decking and tar paper and a membrane that Cappellini swore on his mother would outlast everyone in the building. The pledges came to thirty-one thousand four hundred dollars. The rest—seven thousand, and then, when they opened up the balcony ceiling, two thousand more—arrived in a single cashier's check from the First National Bank of Merritt with no name on it, and Darlene Strand at the bank said she couldn't possibly say who had bought it, and then looked for a long, meaningful moment toward the booth. Ansel, when Danny asked, said he had no idea what anyone was talking about, and that the percolator needed descaling.
On the night of Monday, September 2, Labor Day, Mrs. Olin stood on the curb on Main Street with the bulb book in her arms, and Ansel threw the big switch in the box behind the ticket booth, and all eleven hundred and forty bulbs of the Sunflower marquee came on at once.
The chase lights ran. The letters blazed: BACK TO THE FUTURE — HELD OVER — 7:30 & 9:45. And at the top of the vertical sign, for the first time in six years, the sunflower bloomed, petal by petal, gold and then amber and then white, and closed, and bloomed again, and the crowd on the sidewalk, three deep from Kresge's to the corner, made a sound Danny had never heard a crowd make, which was the sound of a lot of people trying not to cry in front of each other and mostly failing.
* * *
Royce Hadley came on the second Saturday in September.
It was the 7:30 show. Danny was at the inner doors in his maroon jacket, tearing tickets, looking up, every time. He saw the Lincoln pass the bus zone without stopping and turn down Fourth Street, and a few minutes later he saw Royce walk up the sidewalk alone, in jeans and his Royals cap, and get in line behind a family of five from Hutchinson, at the end of it, by Kresge's.
It took him eleven minutes to reach the box office. Danny watched him through the glass the whole time. When he got there, Mrs. Dunning looked at him over the top of her half-glasses for what seemed like a very long while, and then said something Danny couldn't hear, and Royce counted out three dollar bills and two quarters and slid them through the brass half-moon, and she slid him back a ticket.
He came across the lobby on the path worn into the sunflower carpet. He stopped in front of Danny. Up close he looked older than he had in July, and smaller, though he was exactly the same size. He held out the ticket.
Danny took it. He tore it in half. He kept the stub and handed back the other half.