My Cousin Gave Me Three Days To Leave The Projection Booth

Faisal Rahmani set his folder on my workbench before he took off his coat. Under it, a small square of blue paint broke in two.

"You can pack your hobby by Friday," he said.

My father had died in Pueblo, Colorado, six days earlier. He had been buried the day before. There was still a tray of rice in my truck, sent home by a woman who had held my hand through the meal after the funeral.

I looked at the broken paint.

"Lift your folder."

"Amina. Be serious."

"That sample took three hours to lift."

He moved it with two fingers.

I was a thirty-year-old Pakistani American woman with brown skin, a long black braid, and a pale scar through my left eyebrow. My father had called the scar my second parting. I had earned it at twelve, under the snack counter, certain I could fix a stuck drawer.

Now I worked as an architectural-salvage conservator. I saved old doors, signs, plaster, and paint for people who wanted to keep what a building had been. I carried fragments of old paint in folded paper packets, each marked with its place and layer.

My cousin saw trash that had learned to travel.

That week, my paying job was a set of tin ceiling panels from a closed shop across town. I had taken soot off one square inch at a time, leaving the old finish in place. The owner had paid a $900 deposit. I still owed her careful hands, even if mine shook when I thought about Dad.

Faisal was a tall Pakistani American man with close-cut black hair, a neat beard, and silver glasses he kept pushing up with one finger. At thirty-eight, he sold land he rarely walked across. He called himself a property broker. My father had called him our family's weather report: always certain something valuable was about to blow in.

"There's a new will," he said.

He laid out a copy. My father's name, Yusuf Qureshi, sat above a line of firm black print. Faisal had covered half the second page with a yellow note.

"He left me the estate. He named me to handle it."

"Have you been appointed?"

"The papers are going in."

"Then who's giving me a deadline?"

He smiled as though I had asked how money worked.

Outside the booth window, weeds stood between the speaker posts of the Mesa Lantern Drive-In. Beyond the screen, the flat land east of Pueblo ran toward freight tracks and a low brown rise. A train horn reached us after the train had passed.

We had not shown a film in six years. The roof over the snack bar had failed first. Then my father's knees. He had let me use the booth and storage rooms for my paid conservation work while we planned repairs.

Faisal tapped his yellow note.

"The cinema. The land. All this. It's an estate asset. You can't squat in it because you saved some paint chips."

"Those invoices on the wall paid my bills."

"Fine. Take the hobby somewhere with plumbing that works."

The plumbing worked. I had paid $1,860 to fix it in March. The receipt lay in the same drawer as my brass key and a green folder.

That folder held a certified copy with a county recording stamp. Another document inside carried my father's signature beside mine. I had checked both that morning, while waiting for the kettle.

I put the blue fragments into a fresh packet.

"Leave me a complete copy of the will. Without your note."

"Don't make this ugly."

"You're standing on my sample."

He stepped back. A red flake clung to his shoe.

"I've got someone who'll buy the whole parcel," he said. "Seven hundred eighty thousand dollars. You understand that number?"

I understood it. It was almost twice the sum my father had paid for the place twenty years earlier. It was also a number Faisal had mentioned while my father was still well enough to curse at baseball on the radio.

"Who?"

"Calder Reed. He builds storage yards. The screen comes down. The posts come out. Clean deal."

I folded the packet's last corner over its first.

"Has he checked the title?"

"He has people for that."

The booth door opened before I could answer.

Beatrice Moss came in carrying a dented coffee tin. She was sixty-seven, white, and wore her gray hair cut short enough to escape a projector fan. She had run our projector until the last paid screening.

"Your dad's loose screws," she told me, shaking the tin. "A rich inheritance."

Faisal sighed.

"We're discussing family business."

"Then discuss it with some manners."

He gathered his papers, leaving the will copy. At the door he turned.

"Friday. I'm trying to spare you embarrassment."

Beatrice watched his car pass the blank ticket booth.

"Did he read the green folder?"

"He hasn't asked."

"Well. Reading always did interfere with his talking."

My phone buzzed against the workbench. A message from an unknown number filled the screen.

SITE ACCESS NOTICE. MONDAY, 7:00 A.M. DEMOLITION ASSESSMENT. HAVE ALL STRUCTURES UNLOCKED.