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She can. Marie puts an arm around her shoulders and they scream together.

“Excellent,” Olivia says. “Just so you know, I’ve mentored two young men who were longlisted for the Penley, but you, Barbara Robinson, are the first to be shortlisted, and by far the youngest. There are more hurdles to jump, however, and they’re high ones. Remember that you’re in the company of fourteen men and women of immense talent and dedication.”

“You need to rest, Olivia,” Marie says.

“I will. But first we have things to discuss.”

July 27, 2021

1

At quarter to eleven in the morning, the universe throws Holly a rope.

She’s in her office (all furniture reassuringly in place), filling out an insurance company payment invoice. Every time she sees a jolly insurance ad on TV—the Aflac duck, Flo the Progressive lady, Doug and his emu—Holly mutes the sound. Insurance ads are a laugh a minute. The companies themselves, not so much. You can save them a quarter of a million dollars on a bogus claim and still have to bill them two, three, sometimes four times before you get paid. When filling out invoices of this sort, she often thinks of a line from some old folk song: a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.

The phone rings just as she’s finishing the last few lines of the poopy three-page form. “Finders Keepers, Holly Gibney speaking, how can I help?”

“Hi, Ms. Gibney, this is Emilio Herrera. From Jet Mart? We talked yesterday.”

“Yes we did.” Holly sits up straight, the invoice forgotten.

“You asked me if any other of my regulars ever just stopped showing up.”

“And have you thought of someone, Mr. Herrera?”

“Well, maybe. Last night before I went to bed I was switching around the channels for something to watch while I waited for my melatonin to work, and The Big Lebowski was on AMC. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen it.”

“I have,” Holly says. Three times, in fact.

“Anyway, that made me think of the bowling guy. He used to come in all the time. He’d buy snacks and soda and sometimes Rizla papers. Nice kid—seemed like a kid to me, I’m pushing sixty—but his picture could have been in the dictionary next to stoner.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t really remember. Cory, maybe? Cameron? This was five years ago at least, maybe more.”

“What did he look like?”

“Skinny. Long blond hair. He kept it tied back, probably because he drove a moped. Not a motorcycle and not really a scooter, just a kind of bike with a motor. The new ones are electric, but this one ran on gasoline.”

“I know what they are.”

“And it was noisy. I don’t know if something was wrong with the motor or if that was just the way mopeds like that are supposed to sound, but it was really noisy, blak-blak-blak, like that. And covered with stickers, silly stuff like NUKE THE GAY WHALES and I DO WHATEVER THE LITTLE VOICES TELL ME TO. Also Grateful Dead stickers. He was a Deadhead kind of guy. Used to come in just about every weeknight in warm weather—you know, April to October. Sometimes even November. We used to talk about movies. He always got the same thing. Two or three candybars and a P-Co’. Sometimes rolling papers.”

“What’s a P-Co’?”

“PeruCola. Kind of like Jolt. Do you remember Jolt?”

Holly certainly does. For awhile in the eighties, she was a Jolt fiend. “Their motto was ‘all the sugar and twice the caffeine.’?”

“That’s the one. P-Co’ was all the sugar and about nine times the caffeine. I think he’d go up to Drive-In Rock and watch the movies at Magic City—you can see the screen really well from up there, he said—”

“I’ve been there, and you can.” Holly is excited now. She turns over the pain-in-the-butt insurance payment invoice and scribbles Cory or Cameron, moped w/ funny stickers.

“He said he only went up on weeknights, because there were too many kids on the weekends, goofing off and grab-assing around. A nice enough young fellow, but a stoner. Did I already say that?”

“You did, but that’s okay. Go on.” She scribbles Drive-In Rock and then RED BANK AVENUE!!!

“So I said what’s the point when there’s no sound and he said—I got a kick out of this—he said ‘It doesn’t matter, I know all the dialogue.’ Which was probably true of the movies they show there. Oldies, you know. And actually there are movies where I know all the dialogue.”