Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Vivien
The laughter gets louder as I reach the lobby, and some of it is masculine. She must be with someone. One of the many brothers?
I walk out into the main room. Two people are stomping snow off their boots on the rug by the front door.
The woman, Daphne, I assume, has dark, wavy hair laced with highlights.
She smacks the man next to her on his arm. “Do not tell Dalton, I will literally kill you.”
“Oh no, I’m so scared.” The guy rolls his eyes, holding up his hands. “You’re absolutely terrifying.”
Definitely siblings. Upon closer inspection, they have the same high cheekbones and thick, dark brows.
Daphne growls. “Fine. I won’t kill you. But I’ll tell Molly about that one time you put on a Ghostface mask and streaked through the school naked.”
His mouth drops open. “You will not.”
She crosses her arms over her chest. “I absolutely will.”
“Fine,” he sighs. “I won’t tell Dalton. Happy?”
She grins. “Yes.”
I don’t want to interrupt them, but I also don’t want to startle them, so I end up approaching slowly like a creepy sloth.
Daphne’s head whips in my direction. “Oh my god.” She stalks toward me and throws her arms around me, giving me a quick hug before stepping back, her hands still on my shoulders. “You look amazing. I thought you would be injured.”
“What?”
“I heard you were breaking into the police station, and Jerry threw you through a window. Were those reports exaggerated?”
“Slightly.”
“I also heard you stayed the night with Spence. What was that like? Is he any good? How big?”
“Daphne!” The guy puts a hand to his head.
“Come on, he is literally the town’s hottest bachelor who isn’t my brother or Jerry.”
“Ignore her. She’s always like this. No filter.”
I shrug. This is better than some of my other fan encounters. “She’s honest. It’s refreshing.”
He groans. “Don’t encourage her.”
Daphne smiles. “I knew we would be besties.” Then her smile drops, and she steps back. “I don’t mean that in a problematic parasocial way, more in like a kismet way. You know?”
He steps closer and sticks out his hand. “Hi. I’m Jack.”
I shake it. “Vivien.”
He jerks a thumb at the woman. “This is my obnoxious sister, Daphne.”
“Daphne.” I stick my hand out and she finally releases me and then shakes my hand.
“Don’t fall for it. He acts like he’s so unimpressed, but he literally begged to come with me to meet you.”
Jack sighs. “Why couldn’t you have been a boy?”
Daphne snorts. “Our four older brothers aren’t enough men in the family for you?” Then her eyes light up, and she focuses back on me. “They’re all single, by the way, including Jack.” She gestures to him like she’s a game show host or salesman and he’s a prize, look at this brand new car!
“Is he? What about Molly?” I ask.
Daphne points at me. “You’re good. They’re just chatting, or whatever. It’s not serious. He’ll totally drop her for a sugar momma like you.”
She’s kidding. I think.
Jack’s eyes fall shut. “I can’t handle this anymore.
Vivien, it was nice to meet you. We don’t need to date, I am not a crazed fan, and I’m going to go check on the candy stock because we haven’t done inventory in a week, and that is why I wanted to come here with you, not to embarrass ourselves in front of Vivien Hart.
” He mutters to himself under his breath as he walks away, disappearing behind the concession counter into the back room.
Well, that was entertaining. And distracting enough that I forgot about the fact that I’m a recluse who has mostly forgotten how to talk to people. Maybe it helped, eating breakfast with Spencer and Quinn this morning, greasing my rusty conversational skills.
There is also something about Daphne that’s very disarming. Maybe because she seems to say whatever is in her head without any filter or forethought.
I step closer to Daphne. “So, what is it you don’t want Dalton to know?”
Daphne appraises me. “You are quick.”
I shake my head. “Compliments aren’t going to deter me.”
“That’s why we’re meant to be friends.” She blows out a breath. “I don’t want my older brother to know that I quit one of my jobs.”
“This job?”
“No, not this one.” She huffs. “Beverly would haunt me.”
I wrinkle my nose. “How many jobs do you have?”
She groans. “Too many. He thinks I need a husband and a pack of kids, but I’m only twenty-eight. He’s thirty-one, and he’s still single and childless.”
“So why is he so hard on you?”
“Because she still lives with our parents,” Jack calls from the back.
Daphne winces. “That’s not entirely false.”
“It is entirely true,” Jack yells.
She stomps a foot. “I don’t live there when I work out of town, and I’m the only one Dalton thinks needs to be barefoot and pregnant. What about the rest of you?”
“Still can’t get pregnant.”
“Semantics! Anyway.” She flicks her hair over her shoulder. “Enough about me. Did you have a look around? Let me show you all the business things so we can get the boring stuff over with.”
I follow Daphne, pointing to the reel room. “That one is locked. Is there a key somewhere?”
“No. I haven’t been able to get in there since she passed. I was hoping you would have it.”
“You didn’t get the key? You got in somehow.”
“I only have a key to the front door.”
“Ah.”
She nods. “When I asked Spence about the reel key a few weeks ago, he said you would get it eventually. In the meantime, we’ve just been using digital stuff.
Not as fun as the 35-mm reels, but it works and not many people are coming in to shows anyway.
” We reach the door to the office, and she opens it, flicking on the overhead lights.
She pushes some buttons on a white cube on the wall just inside the door. “This is the thermostat if you need to adjust it. We’ll push it up a bit since you may be spending your days in here.”
I glance around the office. Four gray metal filing cabinets line one wall.
In the center is a small desk with an ancient computer surrounded by a few tan-colored chairs.
Mail, pens, paperclips, and notebooks litter the desktop, despite a few organizers with some papers and folders haphazardly thrown into them.
Daphne walks around the desk and motions for me to follow. “I’ll show you the password to log in and where everything is stored and filed.”
While the computer boots up, Daphne swivels in the desk chair to face me.
“Okay, basics first,” she says, tapping the desk with a pen.
“Tickets. People can buy them online through the website, but most folks around here still like the old-school version. They can purchase starting a week before the showtime.”
I grab one of the notebooks and a pen and flick to a blank page to take notes.
“We’ve got a little ticket printer behind the concession stand.
I’ll show you how to use it later. It prints out those old carnival-style ones.
People love them. Half the town saves them as bookmarks.
If they buy online, we just check their name at the counter.
No fancy phone scanners or anything like that.
Beverly refused to upgrade the system when they tried to sell her one. ”
“Why?”
Daphne shrugs. “Costs. Seats are assigned,” Daphne continues, pulling up a seating chart pinned to the corkboard behind the desk.
“Customers can pick them online, or we do it at the counter. The love seats in the back rows go fast for date nights. Right now, though, we’re only running one show a weekend. ”
“Just one?”
“Staffing.” She sighs. “It’s mostly me right now. Jack helps out a bit, and we hire teenagers to usher and run concessions on an on-call basis. For a while, it was just Beverly and me, but after she got sick, she had to scale way back, so it’s been . . .”
“Just you.”
“Just me,” she confirms. “I’ve been able to run one movie, Friday or Saturday night, depending on staff availability. We open concessions an hour before, show the film, clean up, repeat the next week.”
The computer finally finishes loading with a soft chime.
Daphne perks up and leans forward. “Okay. Now for the fun part.”
She clicks open the accounting program and rotates the monitor toward me.
Spreadsheets fill the screen, color coded with rows of numbers, charts, and expense columns.
“At the moment,” she says, “the theater isn’t exactly covering its costs.”
“How much is it not covering?”
“Well, there’s no rent or mortgage, which is great.
Beverly’s family has owned the building for decades.
But we still have property taxes, insurance, utilities, equipment maintenance, and the occasional emergency repair.
Heating this place in the winter costs a small fortune because the front of the building is basically one giant glass wall.
Then there’s maintenance. Oh, and film licensing,” Daphne continues.
“Even classic movies cost money to show. Plus concession inventory, cleaning supplies, website hosting, the occasional plumbing disaster . . .”
Daphne scrolls further down.
“With the limited ticket sales and only one showing a week, the income from tickets and concessions just isn’t enough to keep up with everything.”
Silence settles between us for a moment as the reality of the numbers sinks in.
It’s always about the money. At least Daphne has been managing the funds responsibly, from what I can tell.
Past experience has taught me that when money is involved, people lose any sense of morality.
Old resentments flare to life. My own mother cared more about looking like we had money than anything else.
She was my manager until I turned eighteen, and to this day, I don’t know how much of my money she took for herself.
I know she invested it, and that’s what she and Audrey live on, and they live well, so it must have been a lot.
A few years ago, I reached out to the firm that manages my funds, trying to get more details, but they sent over a million pages of documents full of legalese and statements. I put it aside because it was overwhelming.