Chapter 6 #2
He played it out at the yard. Not at her. He was careful about it in a way that was almost worse, because careful meant he'd thought about it.
Georgia stood by the ice chest with a paper plate in her hand and listened to sixteen people sing her bridge.
Not one of them knew. Why would they. There was a piece of paper in Nashville with one name on it and it had never been hers, and she'd said at the time that it didn't matter, because she was twenty-two and in love and there was going to be plenty of time for her own.
She had said there's plenty of time out loud, in a kitchen on Pecan Street, to a man who was already loading the van.
The song ended. Everybody clapped. The label man put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
Georgia went inside for more ice and stood in the laundry room with the door shut and both hands over her face for one minute by the clock. Then she washed her hands and went back out with the ice.
Later, in bed, Jesse said, "You were something today."
"Mm."
"I mean it. Everybody said."
"Everybody said," she repeated.
"What?"
"Nothing." She turned over. "Go to sleep."
She lay awake a long time with the thing still climbing.
Anger you swallow doesn't go anywhere. It just gets somewhere warmer to live.
The notebook came out on a Wednesday in the last week of June.
She had been carrying it around the house for two days like a woman carrying a positive test. She'd gotten as far as putting it on the kitchen table three separate times, and three separate times she had put it back in the drawer under the shoebox, and on Wednesday afternoon she left it out on purpose and sat down across from it with a cup of coffee to see what would happen.
What would happen was this: she would say, Jesse, I've been writing.
And he would put down whatever he was holding.
She knew exactly the face he'd make. He would be so glad.
He would be so glad, and then within about ninety seconds he would say a sentence with the word studio or the word demo or the word Curtis in it, because he was a man who loved her and who had one apparatus, and the apparatus turned things into product.
And then it would not be hers anymore.
She was still sitting there when the screen door went.
"Whose is that?" Jesse said.
Her hand was already on it.
"Feed store," she said. "It's a list."
"Ah."
He got a glass of tea and went back out.
Georgia sat at her own kitchen table and looked at the green notebook under her own hand and understood that she had just told her husband a flat lie, out loud, for no reason at all except that she did not trust him with the only thing she had.
She took it back down the hall and put it in the drawer.
That was the second one. That one she felt go down wrong.
The last day of June was a Friday, and she came in from the garden at four with dirt to the elbow and heard him on the phone in the office.
The door was open. That was the only reason. It was open about eight inches and he was pacing, and his voice came out on the swing.
" — no, I hear you. I hear you." Pause. "How much do they want?"
Georgia stopped in the hall with a bowl of tomatoes.
"Uh huh." A long pause. "And that's for all of it?"
Her heart did something slow and heavy, once.
"Curtis." Another pause. "Because I'd rather pay it than have it out there. That's why."
She stood absolutely still. The refrigerator hummed. Out the front window, the wind was moving in the live oaks like something breathing.
"Yeah," Jesse said. "Okay. Just — get it done, and don't call me about it at the house."
The chair creaked. She heard him set the phone down.
Georgia went into the kitchen and put the bowl on the counter and ran the water over her hands and watched the dirt go brown down the drain.
Don't call me about it at the house.
She turned the water off.
And then — this is the part she would come back to in August, over and over, lying in a different bed with her eyes open — she went to work on it.
Because it could be anything. Men in that business bought things all the time.
Somebody had a photograph of him drunk in 2009.
Somebody's cousin had a claim on a song.
There was a woman in Abilene two years ago who said he'd hit her car; they'd paid that; it hadn't even been his car.
He paid people to go away roughly four times a year and she had known that for a decade and had never once thought twice about it, because that was the machine, that was Curtis's whole job, that was —
And don't call me about it at the house.
She stood at the sink with her wet hands and built it.
She was good at building. She had built the version of April where he'd just been busy, and the version of the phone at midnight where it was Curtis about the fall, and now she built this one too, and it went up fast because she'd had a lot of practice that spring.
He is protecting me from something ugly. That's what a husband does.
She dried her hands on the towel.
Then Jesse came out of the office and put his arms around her from behind and set his chin on top of her head, the way he had done ten thousand times in fifteen years, and said, "What's for supper," and she said, "Whatever you cook," and he laughed into her hair.
She stood there in the circle of his arms with her eyes open.
There is a kind of woman who knows exactly what she is doing to herself and does it anyway, and Georgia had spent thirty-eight years being certain she was not one.
"Chicken," she said. "There's chicken."