Chapter 6
June was good.
She would want that on the record, whatever came after.
June was good, and it was good in the small ways, which are the only ways that count.
He got up first. He learned to make the coffee.
He drove her mother to Kerrville on the tenth because Georgia finally said yes, and he sat in that waiting room for two hours and forty minutes with a cardiology pamphlet he had actually read, and Vonda came out and said, in front of him, "Well, he's not useless. "
From her mother, that was practically a christening.
He asked about her days and he listened to the answers. He remembered things she'd told him on Tuesday and brought them back up on Friday. He noticed when she was tired and did not make a production out of noticing.
It was everything she had wanted for four years, delivered, in order.
Around the middle of the month she started to be afraid of it, and it took her a while to work out why.
Here is the thing about a man who is very good at his job.
Jesse Rawls had spent twenty years learning to walk into a room where eighteen thousand people wanted something specific from him, and to give it to them, and to make every single one of them believe it had been made for them personally that night.
That is a skill. People talk about it like it's a gift, but it isn't; it's a skill, and he had worked at it, and he was one of the two or three best in the country at it.
She had watched him do it a thousand times from the side of a stage.
And somewhere around the third week of June, Georgia was standing at the sink washing a pan when it hit her: the last twelve days had a set list.
Not that it was false. That was what she could not get her hands around, then or later. Every bit of it was real. He meant all of it.
But it had an order to it. He asked about her mother on the days he had not asked about the work.
He touched her shoulder going past the stove roughly as often as a man would need to touch a woman's shoulder to be a man who touched her shoulder.
When she was quiet at supper he waited exactly long enough and then said the right thing.
She stood there with a pan in her hand and thought: he's running it.
Then she thought: that's an ugly thing to think about a man who drove your mother to the doctor.
She put the pan in the rack and went to bed and did not say anything, and that was the first one.
Her mother came out to the house on the twelfth to return a dish and stayed four hours, which was Vonda's way of conducting an inspection.
She went through the whole place. She looked at the porch roof from underneath and said it was crooked, which it was. She opened the refrigerator and commented on its contents. She sat at the kitchen table and drank three cups of coffee and told a very long story about a cousin.
Jesse was out at the barn. Georgia could hear the compressor going.
"He's doing all right," Vonda said, into her cup.
"He is."
"He drove me to Kerrville."
"I know, Mama, I was there when he left."
"He read the pamphlet."
"He did."
Her mother turned the cup around on the table.
Vonda Tidwell was sixty-three years old and had buried a husband and worked thirty years at a school district and there was not one thing in this world that she was afraid to say out loud, which was the great cross of Georgia's life and occasionally its only mercy.
"What did they talk about?" Vonda said.
Georgia's hands did not stop. She was slicing peaches. She kept slicing peaches.
"What?"
"Him and that girl. Nine weeks, you said. Two hours a night." Her mother's voice was not unkind. That was the thing. It was flat and practical, like a woman asking whether the well was down. "What did they talk about?"
"Mama."
"It's a fair question."
"It's not a question you get to ask me in my kitchen."
"Then it's a question you ought to be asking him in your kitchen," Vonda said, "and I've been sitting here four hours waiting for you to tell me you did."
Georgia set the knife down.
"He's changed," she said.
"Well, he'd better have."
"Mama —"
"I'm not saying he hasn't." Vonda got up and rinsed her cup and set it in the rack, and then she stood there with her back to her daughter, which she only ever did when she was about to be gentle and didn't want to be watched doing it.
"I'm saying you've got a thing in this house that y'all haven't opened, and every day it don't get opened it gets heavier, and I have watched what a thing like that does to a marriage. I watched it do it to mine."
"Daddy never —"
"Your daddy never," her mother agreed. "And I never asked. And I was a very happy woman for about nine years."
She picked up her purse.
"Bring the dish back when you're done with it," she said, and went out to say goodbye to Jesse at the barn, and hugged him, and told him he was too skinny.
Georgia stood in the kitchen with a cutting board full of peaches going brown and did not move for a while.
Then she wiped the board and got out the sugar and went ahead and made the cobbler, because there was going to be company, and because a woman can do a great deal of work with her hands while she is busy not doing one small thing with her mouth.
Curtis Meeks started coming to the house.
He had not set foot on that property in six years. Now he was there on a Tuesday, and then the Friday after, and then twice the next week, always with a reason and always around lunch, in a truck that had never been dirty in its life.
He was lovely to her. That was the worst of it. Curtis had a way of being lovely that was like being handed a warm towel.
"Georgia. You look wonderful."
"I look like a woman who's been moving hay."
"Well, it agrees with you." He'd hold up a bag. "Brought barbacoa. Y'all eat, I'm not staying."
He always stayed.
The two of them would end up out on the porch, or worse, in the office with the door not quite shut, and their voices would go down into that register men use when they're doing arithmetic.
Georgia would be in the kitchen. She would hear a number.
She would hear the word October and the word bridge and the word bridge again, which in that room did not mean a piece of a song.
And every time, at some point, one of them would remember she was in the house, and the door would go the rest of the way shut.
Once, going past with a basket of laundry, she heard Curtis say, "— she doesn't need to be in this," and Jesse say, "No, she doesn't," and both of them meant it kindly, and she stood in her own hallway holding a basket of towels and felt about nine years old.
She thought about pushing the door open. She thought about it with the specific clarity of a woman who has already decided she won't.
The sound of a door being closed considerately is a sound you can hear from anywhere in a house.
He threw the thing on the last Saturday of June.
It wasn't a party. Jesse was careful to call it just some folks coming out, and it was: the band, three of the crew, a couple of wives, Curtis, and a guy from the label who came all the way from Nashville for a barbecue and left after ninety minutes.
She knew what it was. He didn't hide it, exactly. He said, standing in the kitchen with a pack of foil in his hand, "Folks have been asking. I'd rather it come from us being normal than from Curtis putting out a piece of paper."
"Us being normal."
"That's not — Georgia, I'm not staging anything."
"I know."
"If you don't want to do it we won't do it."
"No," she said. "Let's be normal."
And she went and made two pans of dressing, and she wore the blue shirt, and she was, by every account, a wonderful hostess.
Rusty came and hugged her at the gate and then held on about two seconds too long, which was the closest thing to an apology anybody was going to hand her that day.
The rest of them were fine. They were nice. They were so nice.
Here's how it went, four separate times over the course of an afternoon.
The label man: "So this is the wife! Jesse, you've been holding out."
The new keys player, who had not known and was the only one of them who had not known, and who was therefore the only one who could have said it innocently: "Ma'am, it's real good to finally meet Jesse's wife."
A crew wife named Charla, who Georgia had sat next to at a Christmas party in Waco two years ago and who had asked her that night how she stood the loneliness: "There she is. You are a saint, you know that? Standing by him through all this."
And Curtis Meeks, out by the smoker with his hand on the small of her back, to the label man again, at four o'clock: "You know Georgia."
That was all. You know Georgia. Which the label man did not, and which meant she got to stand there and be a name that had already been used.
She did not correct one of them.
She smiled and passed the potato salad and asked Charla about her boy at Texas State, and the whole time there was something climbing up the inside of her chest with claws.
I made a record, she did not say. I was on the radio in this state before he was. I wrote the bridge of the song you're going to ask him to play in about an hour, and every one of you knew what was happening on that bus for two months and not a single one of you called me.
She got through it. She got every single one of them through it.
At six o'clock somebody got the guitar.
She had known it was coming since about two. There is a physics to a barbecue with a musician at it, and it ends the same way every time, and everybody in that yard had been waiting politely for the sun to get low enough to ask.
Jesse looked at her before he took it. Across the whole yard, over the top of the smoker, one look — is this all right — and she gave him a nod so small nobody else saw it.
He played two nobody knew, which was a kindness. Then Charla's husband called out for Half a Tank, and there was that noise a group of people makes when somebody says the obvious thing, and Jesse said, "Y'all have heard that one," and they laughed, and he played it.