Moe Sorrentino, 53, makes his living bringing dead neon back to light. He runs his repair shop out of a boarded-up 1950s Texaco station outside Steubenville, Ohio, and he’s spent the last three months sanding, rewiring, and refilling glass tubes for the town’s annual retro fair’s centerpiece: the original Moonlight Drive-In marquee, which had been rotting in a farm field since 1987. The fair wrapped an hour prior, and he’s camped at the far end of The Rusty Spur’s bar, work boots caked in fairground gravel, flecks of pale blue phosphorous still stuck under his thumbnail, sipping a cheap lager to avoid the crowd of town council members clapping him on the back and asking for free sign repairs for their businesses. He’s avoided any kind of casual socializing that could spin into gossip ever since his ex-wife left him for a roofing contractor eight years prior; she still texts their 24-year-old daughter weekly updates on anyone Moe so much as holds a door open for, and he’s got no interest in giving her new ammo.
The bar door swings open, and a woman he recognizes as Lila, the new town librarian who curated the fair’s retro movie lineup, slides onto the stool two spots down from him. She’s wearing faded denim overalls slung low on her hips over a thin white tank, a smudge of buttered popcorn streaked across her left jaw, half her dark hair pulled back with a frayed scrunchie, strands stuck to her neck from the 80-degree humidity. She orders bourbon on the rocks, no water, and when the bartender slides her glass across the sticky linoleum, she reaches for it the same second Moe reaches for his fresh beer. Their knuckles brush, and he notices the thick callus on her index finger, the kind you get from turning thousands of book pages, the rough, warm skin catching on the small cut on his own knuckle from a broken neon tube earlier that week. She holds his eye contact for three full beats longer than polite, a half-smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth, before she pulls her drink to her lips.
She says she saw the marquee lit up at dusk, the pink neon lettering bleeding into the orange sunset, and it made her cry. Her grandma used to take her to the Moonlight every Saturday in the 70s, they’d sneak in gummy bears in her grandma’s purse and sit in the back of a station wagon. Moe knows he should nod, smile, and go back to his beer. He also knows she’s his ex-wife’s second cousin, that if anyone in the bar sees them talking for more than two minutes, the gossip will hit his ex’s text thread before the sun comes up. But she’s funny, snorting when she tells him the town council tried to pull Grease from the lineup because they thought the drag race scene promoted reckless driving, leaning in so far he can smell coconut shampoo mixed with bourbon and the clover perfume she’s wearing, the heat of her arm brushing his through the thick denim of her overalls when she gestures at the jukebox blaring Johnny Cash in the corner. They shift closer, stools scraping the linoleum, until there’s no space between them, no barrier. He finds himself telling her about the 1960s diner “OPEN 24 HOURS” sign he’s been restoring in his shop for fun, the one that flashes orange and cream when it’s working, that he’s been too busy to finish for six months.
She checks her watch, says the marquee’s on a timer to shut off at midnight, they’ve got 18 minutes if they want to go see it again before it goes dark. He hesitates for half a second, thinking about the texts his ex will send, the side-eye he’ll get at the grocery store next week, then nods. They walk out into the sticky summer night, the air thick with the leftover smell of fried dough and cotton candy from the fairgrounds down the street, crickets chirping loud enough to drown out the distant traffic. The marquee glows pink and electric blue when they pull up to the empty drive-in lot, the letters casting colored streaks across the overgrown grass of the field. She leans against the rusted metal support pole, looking up at the sign, then back at him, says she’s heard all the stories about him, all the garbage his ex has spread around town, and she doesn’t care. He lifts his thumb, brushes the dried popcorn butter smudge off her jaw, his skin lingering on her soft cheek for a second, and she doesn’t pull away. She tangles her hand in the back of his graying hair, pulls him down for a kiss, slow and soft, tasting like bourbon and cherry Lifesavers, her other hand pressed flat to the front of his faded work shirt, he can feel her heartbeat fast under his palm where he rests his hand on her waist.
The neon clicks off right as they pull apart, the whole lot going dark except for the moon peeking through the oak trees at the edge of the field. He asks her if she wants to come back to his shop, he can plug in the half-finished diner sign for her, show her the stack of old neon tubes he’s collected from closed diners and bars across the state. She laces her fingers through his, her calloused index finger resting over the cut on his knuckle, says she’d like that a lot. They walk back to his beat-up Ford F-150 parked at the edge of the lot, his boots crunching on the gravel, her shoulder pressed tight to his the whole way.
