Neglected By Her Country Star Husband (You Chose Her. Now Grovel. #18)

Chapter 1

The calendar in the kitchen was not hers.

It hung by the back door on a nail Jesse had driven crooked years ago, and every square on it belonged to him.

Lubbock. Wichita. Two days off that were not really off, marked promo.

A red circle around the last week of April with nothing written inside it, which meant Curtis had held the dates for something he hadn't told her about yet.

Georgia stood with her coffee and read March like a woman reading a bus schedule for a town she didn't live in.

She had stopped writing her own things on it about four years back.

There had been a stretch where she penciled in the small stuff — dentist, Trina's birthday, the Wednesday she drove her mother to Kerrville — and one morning she'd looked at the month and seen how the pencil sat under the ink.

Little gray words hiding under his. She'd erased them all and never started again.

The house was clean because she cleaned it. The mail came because she got it. She had a husband the way other women had a brother overseas.

She rinsed the cup and set it upside down on the towel.

His laundry was still in the dryer from the last time he'd been home, nine days in February.

She had washed it and never folded it, which was as close to a statement as she'd made in a year.

She pulled the shirts out now and folded them anyway, on the kitchen table, because the alternative was leaving them there another six weeks and she couldn't stand the sight of the open dryer door.

Fifteen years of marriage and she still knew the weight of his shirts by hand.

Guerra Feed and Seed sat on the county road with its doors propped open by two cinder blocks, which was Trina's whole approach to climate control. The place smelled like alfalfa and dust and the sweet chemical rot of fly spray. Georgia came in for chicken scratch and stayed, the way she always did.

"You look like death," Trina said.

"Good morning to you too."

"I'm just saying. You want a Coke?"

"It's nine."

"It's nine somewhere." Trina hauled a sack onto the counter without being asked and slid the Coke across anyway. She had a cap on backward and forearms like a man who roofed for a living. "Y'all's roof still leaking over the porch?"

"It's not leaking. It's weeping."

"That's worse."

"That's what I said."

Trina laughed, big, from the belly, and two men by the salt blocks looked over and smiled without knowing why.

The knot under her ribs loosened half an inch.

That was the thing about Trina. She had known Georgia since Georgia was a girl who could not drive, and she had never once in sixteen years asked her what it was like being married to him.

The woman came in around nine thirty.

She was maybe fifty, in a church-clean blouse, buying nothing, and she stood at the end of the counter with the particular patience of somebody working up to something.

Georgia clocked her and kept talking about the roof.

She had gotten good at this. You could feel a fan the way you could feel weather coming, a pressure change in a room.

"Mrs. Rawls?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I don't want to bother you."

"You're not."

"I just — " The woman pressed her hand flat to her chest. Her eyes were wet and kind, and that was the part Georgia would think about later. She was kind. "I just wanted to say I think you're handling it with a lot of grace."

Georgia smiled. "Handling what?"

And the woman's face did something awful. It fell open. She had come in here holding a covered dish of sympathy and she had just found out there was nobody home to eat it.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, honey."

"It's all right."

"I thought you knew. Everybody — " She stopped. She had her phone out already, which was the worst part, that the phone was already in her hand. "It's probably nothing. It's just the videos."

"Show me."

"Ma'am, I don't think — "

"Show me."

The woman showed her.

It was a phone video from a crowd, shot from about the tenth row, shaky at first and then steady. Jesse in the white light with his hat off, which he only did for the encore. And a girl walking out from the wing to a noise that hit the microphone like weather.

Georgia watched her husband sing Half a Tank with Peyton Kinney.

She knew that song better than she knew the Lord's Prayer.

She had written the bridge of it at the kitchen table with a pen that kept skipping, in a house with a window unit, in the year they ate a lot of eggs.

She could hear the place in the second verse where the melody wanted to go up and she'd made it go down instead.

Twelve years he had been singing it. Twelve years she had listened to him do it right.

He was not doing it right. He was doing it to somebody.

That was all. That was the entire crime on the screen — a man singing a song toward a woman's face instead of out at eighteen thousand people.

Peyton Kinney sang the low harmony on the bridge, Georgia's bridge, and she sang it well, and at the end of it she laughed at something he said off mic and put her hand flat on his chest for less than a second, and the crowd made a sound Georgia had never heard a crowd make.

The video had four million views.

"See, it's nothing," the woman said, miserable now. "It's nothing. People just — they make things up."

"How long have people been making things up?"

"Oh, I don't — a while. Since last spring, maybe? They've got a name for it and everything. It's foolish."

"What's the name?"

The woman told her.

Georgia handed the phone back. Her hands were fine. Her hands were completely fine, which she noticed the way you notice a stranger's hands.

"Thank you for telling me," she said.

"I'm so sorry."

"You didn't do anything."

"I feel just sick."

"Don't." Georgia picked up her sack of scratch, and it weighed what it always weighed. "You're not the one who put it on the internet."

She got as far as the door before Trina said her name, and she did not turn around, because Trina's face would have finished her right there in front of the salt blocks. Pity is worse than cruelty. Cruelty at least has the decency to show its teeth.

Trina caught up to her at the truck.

She came out fast for a woman built the way she was built, no cap now, wiping her hands down the front of her jeans like she meant to hit somebody with them.

"Georgia."

"I got what I came for."

"Put the sack down."

"It's fifty pounds, Trina, I'm not going to hurt myself."

"Put the damn sack down."

Georgia set it in the bed. It landed harder than she meant it to. She stood with her hand on the rail and looked out at the county road and the propane tank across it and the sky doing nothing at all.

"Did you know?" she said.

"No."

"Would you tell me if you did?"

"Yes." Trina didn't even take a breath before it. "You know I would. I don't got a dog in this. I sell hay."

Georgia laughed. It came out wrong, one hard syllable, and she pressed her lips together after it.

"That's about the nicest thing anybody's said to me in a year," she said.

"That's the saddest thing you've ever told me."

"Probably."

Trina leaned against the truck beside her, arms crossed, and did not say a single one of the twelve things she obviously wanted to say.

That was a kind of grace nobody ever gave her credit for.

Georgia had been handled gently by professionals for fifteen years, publicists and managers and women at galas with their heads tipped over, and none of it had ever felt like this — a woman in work boots standing there keeping her mouth shut on purpose.

"You want to come sit at my place tonight?"

"No."

"You want me to come sit at yours?"

"No."

"Then what are you gonna do?"

"I'm going to go home," Georgia said, "and get the mail."

She drove home with the windows down.

The hill country in late March was showing off, the way it always did before it got mean — bluebonnets down both bar ditches, the live oaks pushing new leaves out and dropping the old ones all over the road at the same time, which she had never understood about live oaks.

They didn't let go of anything until they had something better.

She was not crying. She was not anything. She kept both hands on the wheel and took the cattle guard at the speed she always took it, and the sack of scratch slid across the truck bed and hit the wheel well, and she thought, clearly, four million people watched him look at her.

Then her stomach turned over and she had to pull onto the caliche and sit.

Her body knew before she did. That was how it always went with her. The mind gets to keep its dignity a few minutes longer, and the body just goes ahead and tells the truth in the bar ditch.

She sat with her forehead on the wheel and did the arithmetic she had been refusing to do for a year.

Ten months a year on the road, four years running.

Nine days in February. Six days at Christmas, three of which he slept through.

Phone calls that had gotten shorter and then gotten strange — him talking fast and warm and about nothing, the way you talk to somebody at a party when you're watching the door.

She had told herself it was the schedule. Everybody in that world told her it was the schedule. Curtis told her it was the schedule in a voice like a man explaining weather to a farmer.

Georgia sat up, wiped her face with the flat of her hand, and pulled back onto the road.

The mail was in the box at the end of the drive, and she brought it in and set it on the counter and made herself eat a sandwich first, standing up, because she was not going to be a woman who fell apart on an empty stomach.

Then she went through it.

Water bill. A catalog for a woman who had not lived here in a decade.

Something from the county. And the phone statement, which came on paper because Georgia had asked for it on paper years ago, back when she still handled all of it and it made her feel like part of a business instead of part of a household.