Wind

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Sally always cried when Rhett Butler walked out into the fog. Something about his exit just released the floodgates, especially that rainy November evening. It’d been cold in Shadyside since Wednesday, but that was typical for this time of year in Pittsburgh. Sally could hear cars driving by the building on Forbes Avenue. So depressing, not even seven in the evening, and pitch black outside.

Thank goodness for the terrycloth pink robe her mother had gotten for her last birthday. She’d curled up with it and a cup of jasmine tea before slipping the tape into the VCR. She’d resisted all her geek friends cajoling her into getting a DVD player. No, she told them, she was perfectly happy with a VCR.

After all, she’d spent her hard-earned money from the library on all those tapes. Far as she knew, she was the only person in Western Pennsylvania who had every movie that had won the Best Picture Academy Award, up to and including the most recent one. Though she grimaced when she had to buy “Gandhi” to make her set complete. No one would remember that one, not even a year later. That’s what her mother had said, too – no one would remember “Gandhi” any more than anyone would remember that lousy, stinking excuse of a father who walked out all those years ago. Poor Mama, still stuck on Daddy’s deserting them.

“After all, tomorrow is another day.”

Sally always felt a glimmer of hope when Scarlett uttered the last line. There was this tone of hope in the “after all” part of it. Sally had tried to reproduce it when she was reciting movie lines in the shower. But she could never get the same tone of sad hopefulness that Vivien Leigh conjured up. But Sally felt a little lift. Maybe Rhett would come back to Scarlett in the end.