Chapter 3 #2
He parked halfway down the drive like a man who wanted to be sure she could see him coming, and he got out and stood by his truck with his hat off until she came out on the porch. Fifty-two years old, gray all through the beard now, hands like a bundle of wire.
He had played on Caliche. He had played on every record Jesse ever made. He had slept on this floor, more than once, back before there was furniture in the front room.
"Georgia."
"Rusty."
"I'm not gonna come up on the porch unless you say."
"Come up on the porch."
He came up. He did not sit. He turned his hat around in his hands a few times and then quit pretending he was going to work into it gently.
"I knew," he said. "Since January."
The porch roof ticked. It did that in the afternoon when the tin got hot.
"January," she said.
"There's a thing where the bus splits after Amarillo.
He started riding on the other one." Rusty looked out at the pasture.
"That's all it was, at first. Then it was every leg.
Then it was — I'd come out at four in the morning to get my glasses off the bunk and there'd be a light on in the lounge and two voices in it, and I'd go on back to bed. "
"Did you ever say anything to him?"
"I said, one time, 'Hoss, that's a lot of hours.'"
"What'd he say?"
"He laughed at me." Rusty's mouth went thin. "And I laughed too. That's the part I'd like you to have. He laughed and I laughed and I went and got a sandwich."
Georgia held on to the porch rail.
"Why didn't you call me?"
"Because I've got Darla's mother in the house and a boy at Tarleton and twelve years left on this place," he said, and then he stopped and made himself do it properly.
"No. That's the reason I gave myself. Here's the real one.
I've been on his payroll for nineteen years, and every man out there is, and every one of us has got a version of that sentence ready to go, and we say it to each other so nobody has to be the one. "
"So nobody has to be the one," she repeated.
"Yes ma'am."
"Rusty." She waited until he looked at her. "Who else knew?"
He did not answer for a while.
"Everybody," he said.
"Say it with names."
"Georgia —"
"With names."
"Curtis. Both drivers. Janelle, and Janelle knew first, because Janelle gets paid to know first. The whole band except the new kid on keys.
Merch. The girl who does his in-ears." Each one cost him something.
His voice was going. "Hutch at the venue in Lubbock, 'cause Hutch sees everything. Some of the crew wives."
"Crew wives."
"Yes ma'am."
"So the wives knew," Georgia said.
"Yes ma'am."
She had thought she was ready for that answer.
She had turned it over in the truck a hundred times since Wednesday.
But hearing it out loud in a man's mouth on her own porch was a different animal, and it did something to the shape of the last four years — every Christmas party, every green room, every woman who had hugged her and asked how she was holding up out here all by herself.
She was not the last to know. She was the only one who hadn't.
"You know what nobody ever tells you about a marriage like mine?" she said. "There's no such thing as private. There's just a room full of people agreeing not to tell you."
Rusty put his hat back on.
"I'll quit if you want me to," he said. "Say the word and I'll be off that bus tomorrow. I mean that."
"That doesn't help me."
"No, ma'am. I know it don't."
"And it'd cost you your house."
"It would."
"Then don't." She was so tired. "Rusty — I'm not going to be one more person deciding what your life looks like. God knows there's enough of that going around."
He went down the steps. At the bottom he stopped.
"He's not gonna put a statement out," he said.
"What?"
"Curtis had it all lined up. Radio, the whole thing.
Jesse killed it. Told him if one word goes out with your name anywhere near it, he'll do the interview himself and it'll be worse for everybody.
" Rusty shrugged, uncomfortable. "I don't know if that's worth anything to you. Figured you'd rather have it than not."
He got in his truck and left.
Georgia stood on the porch a long time after the dust settled, and she was furious — at Rusty, at the wives, at nineteen years of men getting sandwiches — and underneath the fury, unwelcome as a knock at midnight, was one small warm thing she absolutely did not want.
He killed it.
She went inside before it could get any further than that.
The house was very quiet that evening.
She did not turn the television on. She did not call Trina, who had already called twice and left a message that was ninety percent profanity and ten percent an offer to come over with a pizza and a shovel.
She stood in the front room, in her own house, and she did not know what to do with her hands.
That was the thing nobody warned her about either.
She had spent fifteen years being busy on somebody else's behalf, and the whole apparatus of it had come off at once — no calendar to read, no calls to route, no house to keep ready for a man who might come home Tuesday.
She had been the operations department of Jesse Rawls, unpaid, and she had just been let go.
She walked down the hall. She stood in the door of the office and did not go in, because his laptop was still on the desk and she was not doing that again tonight.
She went to the spare room instead. The one that was supposed to be an office for her, once, and had become a room where things went to be dealt with later.
The dresser in there was full of the sediment of a life. Cords for devices nobody owned. A high school yearbook. A folder of tax paperwork from 2011.
And in the bottom drawer, under a shoebox, a green spiral notebook.
Georgia stood looking down at it for a while.
Four years since she'd opened it in front of another human being — no.
That wasn't right. She'd never opened it in front of another human being.
Not once, not ever, not Trina and not her mother and certainly not him.
She had written in it at two and three in the morning, in the same hours he was giving away on the other side of the country, and she had put it back in this drawer under a shoebox every single time like a woman hiding a bottle.
She'd told herself for years it was a hobby. A thing to keep her hands busy.
Nobody hides a hobby.
She picked it up. The cover had gone soft at the corners. There was a coffee ring on it, and a phone number that belonged to a vet who had died.
She sat down on the floor of the spare room with her back against the dresser, the way she'd sat against the dishwasher on Wednesday, and she opened the notebook on her knees.
She read the first page.
Then she sat very still, in a quiet house at the end of the worst week of her life, and thought — clearly, in her own voice, with no music around it —
That's good.