The worst part of dying, Hanna thought as she settled into the theater’s cool darkness, was never again being able to watch a movie. It was hard to imagine, all of Hollywood, gone from the screen forever.
Since her uncle’s funeral, the first she’d ever been to, Hanna hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what it would be like to be in a wooden box, alone, so deep in the dark ground. Nothing to watch. No one to talk to. Forever and ever.
“He’s finished. Gone,” everyone said. But Hanna had a hard time believing that Uncle Abe couldn’t hear the dirt as it landed, loud thuds, on his coffin. It all seemed so unreal.
On the drive back from the cemetery, she’d noticed that “Move Over, Darling” was still playing at the Utopia Theatre. She’d seen the Doris Day romp about a woman who, believed to be dead, resurfaces in time for her husband’s nuptials to someone new. But Hanna often saw movies more than once, especially if they starred her favorite actress.
“Get out a little, mamele, her mother had encouraged earlier in the day when she’d gone downstairs. She hadn’t left the shiva house since Thursday.
“Others will watch the boys,” her mother assured her. “Go, maybe to see that show with the Que Sera, Sera lady.”
Her mother knew that movies were Hanna’s heaven — that she never could get enough of the blond-haired, blue-eyed actress, so different from the adults who otherwise peopled her life.
Hanna walked the streets of the neighborhood she’d gotten to know well in...
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