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“Don’t tell me,” she said. “There’s no movie.”

“No.”

“There’s no screen.”

“There’s a screen. It’s got no front on it, and no back, and there’s been a hawk living in the top of it since I was nine, but it’s a screen.” He’d stopped the truck in the field, nose to the thing, the bones of it standing up against the stars with the county road a hundred yards off and nothing else. “The last picture they showed was in 1998. My mother took us. Dean fell asleep and Chase cried and I don’t remember what it was, and I’m going to tell you anyway.”

It was ten at night. There’d been supper at Olivia’s on the tailgates. Edna had looked at Sunny once more over the pie and said, “It’s hot,” to nobody, and Sunny had said, “It is,” and Edna had nodded. That was enough. Then in the yard at nine he’d said, low, “Get in the truck,” and she’d said, “The terms,” and he’d said, “The terms don’t say anything about the drive-in,” and she’d got in the truck.

They sat in the bed. He’d brought a blanket and two beers and nothing else, and they sat with their backs against the cab and the screen in front of them, and he told her the movie.

He made it up. All of it. A woman came to a town she’d never seen with a car full of boxes. A man in the town talked too much. There was a horse in it, because there was always a horse, and a diner, and a dance. She laughed till she had to put the beer down. He kept going, straight-faced, with his arm along the cab behind her, the whole picture, an hour of it. It had a hawk in it. It had a cow named Mabel. When he got to the end he stopped and said, “That’s the picture,” and looked at the screen.

“What happens to her?”

“Who?”

“The woman. At the end. You didn’t say.”

“I didn’t get to the end.” He drank his beer. “It’s a long picture.”

She put her head on his shoulder. She’d never done that. Two months of a dark room and a rock and a table and she’d never once put her head on the man’s shoulder, and she did it now, in the bed of a truck under a screen with a hawk in it, and he didn’t move, and she felt him not move.

“I keep a bag packed,” she said.

He didn’t say anything.

“Since I was six. Every place. The duffel’s on the closet floor unzipped and I’ve never once in this house put a thing in a drawer. Lorna knew. She never said. She’d wash my clothes and put them back in the bag, folded, for twelve years, and never once say put them in the dresser, Sunny, you live here.” She looked at the screen. “I’ve got a house in Indianapolis with a dresser in it I’ve never used. That’s the bag. That’s what it’s for.”

He was quiet a long time. The hawk moved, up in the frame, and settled.

“Mine’s under my bed,” he said.

She turned her head.

“The duffel. Same one. I never unpacked it in February. Eight months in my own room in my father’s house with a dresser six feet off, and I’m still living out of a bag, and Remi knows, and she’s never said, and Helen would’ve said, and Helen’s not here.” He looked at the screen a while. “That’s the bag.”

Two people in the bed of a truck under a ruined screen with a bag apiece. She’d have laughed at it in a movie. She didn’t laugh.

“Well,” she said.

“That’s a pair.”

“It is,” he said, and she got her hand under his shirt.

It wasn’t the room. There was a road a hundred yards off and a hawk overhead and October coming through the blanket, and she’d meant it to be his, for once, because he’d told her about a bag and she wanted to give him something back, and it was the only thing the terms let her give him. She got his belt open in the dark and her hand around him and her mouth on his neck, and he said her name to the sky and put his head back against the cab, and she took her time about it, slow, the way he’d taught her he liked it, and listened to him lose the whole of his vocabulary one word at a time, and it was the best thing she’d heard in a month, better than a page, better than her name first.

“Sunny.”

“Mm.”

“You don’t have to —”

“I know I don’t.” She didn’t stop. “Lie back.”

He lay back. She went down on him in the bed of a truck under the stars with her hair over both of them. She’d never done it for anybody where she’d wanted to see their face after. She wanted to see his. When he came he said the quiet name and got his hand in her hair and held on, and she looked up the length of him at a man with his eyes shut and his mouth open and his whole body gone, and thought: mine. That’s mine. Nobody else has that.

She didn’t say it. It wasn’t in the terms.