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would have happened, but he didn’t. The dog he owned at the time (for a very short time) could be bribed, and while the dog feasted on homegrown beef from Astrid’s freezer, Lee and his friends climbed upward and sprayed we were here in bright orange paint in the top left-hand corner of the screen, like a return address on a giant white envelope. The sun has since faded it but you can still make out the hint of orange.
    A hundred yards south of the movie screen, toward the highway, is the house in which Willard and his sister-in-law Marian live—a modest, prefab bungalow constructed in 1960 by Willard and Ed to replace the trailer they’d lived in for so many years, and to provide an incentive for the woman, as yet undiscovered, whom Ed planned to marry. Its original lap siding has been replaced in recent years with beige-coloured, no-paint vinyl, purchased from a travelling salesman who sold the exact same siding to half the homeowners in the district and then disappeared. There’s an old barn on the property that had once housed the brothers’ chick hatchery, and then a hog operation (unpopular with the Juliet town council because of the smell), and then a chainsaw and snowmobile sales-and-service shop, and, finally, a camel named Antoinette. Since Antoinette, the barn’s been empty except for the odds and ends it stores and the shelter it provides for Willard’s vehicles, which include a shiny new Silverado crew cab, a twenty-year-old Ford Taurus (driven to town twice a week by Marian), and a Massey Ferguson tractor that doesn’t like to start on a cold, blizzardy day when you need it most. There are the remains of an old shed that Willard knows he should tear down, and of course the drive-in ticket booth and concession stand plastered on all sides with layers of movie listings and Coca-Cola posters. At night, the white face of the movie screen looms over the sandy lot, a giant relic from a different world. And beyond the fence that is designed to keep out those who don’t want to pay, the sand hills roll northward. On a windy day the surface of the land rises, and grains of sand hit the back of the movie screen like buckshot.
    Willard’s current German shepherd dog (this one can’t be bribed) has a number of favourite spots in the yard, but tonight he lies among the movie screen’s elaborate supports, unconcerned, pricking up his ears with only mild interest when the owl hoots above him, or a coyote yips in the hills, or a small nocturnal animal, a skunk perhaps, rustles in the bushes. These sounds are familiar; they tell him that nothing unusual is happening here. No vehicles stopping where they shouldn’t. No kids trying to climb the fence just because it’s there, to do damage for the sake of getting away with it.
    Inside the house, Willard is awakened, not by anything he hears outside the window, but by Marian in the hall. Through the crack beneath his door he sees a light go on, and then she closes the bathroom door and opens it again a few minutes later, and the light goes off. He hears her footsteps in the hallway once more and they stop, as they have been stopping every night for the last month, outside his door.
    Although Willard was initially perplexed by Marian’s lingering every night in the hallway, he now has it figured out. She wants to tell him something, and he’s concluded after several weeks of mulling that she’s made the decision, finally, to pack up her things and move on. He’s been expecting Marian to leave ever since Ed’s death nine years ago. It’s a wonder, he reasons, that she’s stayed this long.
    He checks the digital numbers on his bedside clock: 3 a.m., about the usual time. The minutes pass. The night is as still as a church. He imagines he can hear her breathing. Five minutes. Six. Seven. Seven minutes is the record, but tonight he counts eight and she’s still there. What makes her hesitate? he