Excerpt: Last Night at the Halfmoon
Chapter 1
La Dolce Vita
My name is unusual, especially here on the West
Coast where very few of us speak French, even as
a second language. But I’ve learned to live
with the bungled pronunciation, the incredulous
questions and the raised eyebrows.
The story, which I’ve perfected over the
years, is both simple and incredibly complicated
at the same time.
It begins, as every important event in my life
has done, at the Halfmoon Drive-In in Halfmoon Bay
on the Sunshine Coast.
And when I say every event, I’m not kidding.
My mother tells me I was conceived at the drive-in
and I believe her.
So the story begins.
I was born in April of 1962, nine months almost
to the day after the drive-in opened and six months
after my parents were married in the registry office
on the mainland.
They’re happy, happier than most I’d
have to say. I still want their relationship to
be dark and dramatic – a feeling left over
from my teenage years – but it’s not.
They’re romantic comedy, not drama.
While I, I am a foreign film, something indecipherable
and gloomy, something in black and white rather
than color. I like to say that I’m different
and I want to be that way.
My name is Aimee Anouk King, pronounced as Amy
by everyone except my best friend TJ and my ex-husband
Brad, and my parents, who choose to variously mangle
the French pronunciation. I’m named after
Anouk Aimee though I suspect – based on my
dad’s current movie preferences – he
would rather have named me Gidget.
I see my mom’s fine hand in my name and am
only glad that she didn’t call me Anouk.
I live down the street from the drive-in and around
the corner from Mom and Dad. I’m closing in
on fifty, I have an eleven year old son, a very
nice ex-husband, and the world as I know it is coming
to an end.
I don’t know if I can explain this to you,
the way I feel about the closing of the Halfmoon.
I never worked there – though almost every
teenager in Halfmoon Bay did at one time or another.
I’m not really a movie buff. I just see whatever
(and I mean whatever) is on at the drive-in.
But I can count the number of Saturday nights I
haven’t been at the Halfmoon on my fingers
and toes. A few weeks of vacation, the night Hayden
was born – following of course in Mom’s
footprints when I named my child – and the
one summer, the year I turned thirty, when the drive-in
was closed for renovations.
So the Halfmoon Drive-In is closing and if I had
the money to fight the developers for the land,
I’d buy and run it myself. Because I’m
not entirely sure what I’m going to do with
myself on Saturday nights without it.
Hayden is getting to the age where he’d probably
be just as happy to play games on the computer on
Saturday night, but me? I remember the years when
seven or eight of us piled into somebody’s
station wagon to take advantage of the carload discount.
I try to forget the years I didn’t have dates
but went anyway with girlfriends or my parents.
I think about the years when Hayden was young enough
to sleep in the back while Brad and I watched the
double feature, and the few years since Brad left
for the mainland. In those years, I’ve watched
Hayden too come to love the drive-in. And now all
of those years are coming to an end.
I’m simplifying this because I don’t
want to admit the reality – that the Halfmoon
means so much more to me than just some place to
go on a Saturday night.
This sounds stupid coming from a woman who lives
in one of the most beautiful places in the world,
who loves her parents, whose child is perfect, and
who has a devoted following for the pottery she
makes in the studio in her back yard, but the Halfmoon
Drive-In feels like home to me.
And I’m not sure what I’ll do without
it.
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