Chapter 10
Marlee made one phone call and Georgia got twenty minutes on the new-song stage at Kerrville, at two in the afternoon on a Saturday in September, under a live oak, in front of about two hundred people in folding chairs.
It was the least important stage on the grounds. It had a hand-lettered sign.
"You're the fourth of six," Marlee said, in the parking lot, handing her a bottle of water. "Nobody's drunk yet and nobody's tired yet. That's the good slot and it's the one they give away."
"Why would they give it away?"
"'Cause there's no money in it."
Trina had come, in a lawn chair she brought herself, and had already made friends with four strangers.
And somewhere on the other side of the grounds, on the stage with the actual roof over it, at nine o'clock that night, Peyton Kinney was fourth from the top of the bill.
Georgia had known that for six days. She had thought very seriously about not coming.
Then she had thought: twenty minutes, in the afternoon, in a chair, with my own songs, and had understood that a woman who gives up the only stage she has been offered in sixteen years because a twenty-seven-year-old is going to be standing on a different one four hundred yards away is a woman who has handed over the last thing she owns.
So she came.
"She's been closing with Dry Line," Marlee said, at about noon.
They were sitting on the tailgate of Marlee's Suburban eating breakfast tacos out of foil, and she said it the way you'd say it was going to be hot.
Georgia stopped chewing.
"What?"
"The Kinney girl. She closes her set with Dry Line." Marlee wiped her hands. "Has for a couple of years. It's a real good arrangement, actually, she takes the second verse way down — " She looked up, and saw Georgia's face, and stopped. "You didn't know that."
"No."
"Well, hell."
"Two years."
"About that."
Georgia set the taco down very carefully on the foil, because her hands had gone and she did not want to drop it.
Two years.
Every night. In front of every crowd. In front of him.
Her song, off her record, out of the one year of her life that had belonged entirely to her — and Jesse Rawls had stood in the wings of two hundred buildings and listened to a girl sing his wife's song and had never once, not one time, in two years, mentioned it at home.
"You all right?" Marlee said.
"I'm fine."
"You're gray."
"I'm going to go find the bathroom," Georgia said, "and then I'm going to be fine."
She went and stood behind a horse trailer instead, for about four minutes, with her hands on her knees.
Peyton Kinney found her at three thirty, in the hospitality tent, which was not a tent so much as a canvas roof over about forty folding chairs and a folding table with a coffee urn on it.
Georgia had played. It had gone well — better than the round, warmer, and two people had asked afterward where they could hear the songs and she'd had to say nowhere, not yet, which was a good problem and she'd enjoyed having it.
She was in a chair with a paper cup, and Trina was in the chair next to her holding forth to a fiddle player about goats, and there were perhaps forty-five people under that canvas: musicians, a couple of managers, three volunteers in yellow shirts, and a photographer with a lanyard who had been eating chips for twenty minutes.
"Mrs. Rawls?"
Georgia looked up.
The first thing she thought was that the girl was smaller than she'd expected. That is what everybody says, and it turns out to be true. The second thing she thought — and this one landed hard and cold, in a way she did not enjoy — was that she was nervous.
Peyton Kinney had come over to her on purpose, and she was nervous, and she had a paper cup in her hand too.
"I'm Peyton."
"I know who you are."
"I know. I just — " A small laugh. "I've been standing over there for about ten minutes trying to work out whether to do this."
The tent had not gone quiet. Not yet. But there is a thing a room does when two people who are famous to it end up three feet apart, and it had started to do it — the volume dropping a notch, chairs turning half an inch, the photographer putting down his chips.
Trina stopped talking about goats.
"You should sit down," Georgia said.
Peyton sat down.
Here is what the girl said, and Georgia would remember every word of it, because she had never in her life been given a gift so large by somebody who thought they were handing her one.
"I want you to know how sorry I am."
"All right."
"I'm not gonna make excuses. What happened with the recordings was — I didn't handle it right, and the way it came out was ugly, and I've had to sit with that.
" She turned the cup in her hands. "But I need you to know it was never about hurting you.
It was never — I mean, honestly, you're kind of the reason I'm even out here. "
"Am I."
"Caliche is the record." Her whole face changed when she said it. That was the part that was almost impressive. "My mom had it in the truck. I learned to play out of that record. Dry Line is the reason I write. I've closed my set with it for two years — I don't know if you knew that —"
"I know it now."
" — and every night I say your name from the stage. Every night. Georgia Tidwell. I want you to know I never once let anybody call it anything but yours."
She said it like a woman handing over a check.
She waited.
And Georgia understood, sitting there in a folding chair with a paper cup, that Peyton Kinney had come over here to be forgiven, and that she genuinely believed she had earned it, and that the currency she had brought was admiration — because in the world that girl lived in, being loved by somebody is a payment, and she had loved Georgia Tidwell since she was twelve years old, and surely that counted for something.
Forty-five people. A photographer. A phone or two up already.
"Can I ask you something?" Georgia said.
"Yes ma'am. Anything."
"When you were on that bus at two in the morning, and he was telling you about a kitchen sixteen years ago." She did not raise her voice at all. She was aware that she had never in her life spoken so evenly. "Did you know I still thought it was my idea?"
The girl's face did something.
"I don't —"
"It's not a hard question."
"I don't think he ever exactly said —"
"He said it into a microphone. It ran on the radio in July.
I heard it in a parking lot." Georgia set her cup down on the ground beside her chair.
"So let's not do that part. You knew that woman out in Bandera thought she'd made a choice.
You knew it for weeks. And you had a phone in your hand the whole time. "
Nobody in the tent was talking now.
"That's not — " Peyton's chin came up a little. "I wasn't in a position to call his wife."
"No," Georgia agreed. "You were in a position to sell it to a radio show."
"That is not what happened."
"Seven episodes."
"They came to me —"
"Honey," Georgia said, "I have been married to the business for fifteen years. Nobody comes to anybody."
The girl sat there.
Georgia looked at her for a moment and felt — she would examine this later, in the truck, and find that it did not change — absolutely no pity. None. Not one drop.
"I'm going to tell you what you did," she said. "Not what you did to me. What you did to you. And I'm only going to say it once, and then I'm going to go get a lemonade, and you and I are never going to speak again as long as we both live."
"Mrs. Rawls —"
"You had it." Georgia leaned forward, elbows on her knees.
"You had the whole thing. You're twenty-seven and you can sing and you can write and you came up the same road I did, out of the same dance halls, off the same record.
You were three years away from having your own room.
Do you understand what I'm telling you? You were going to get there. "
Peyton did not say anything.
"And instead of doing that work, you found a tired man on a bus and you asked him questions late at night, because that's faster.
" She let that sit. "And you got exactly what you paid for.
You got nine weeks of a man who wouldn't be seen with you in the daylight.
He never once took you to dinner. He never once said your name to anybody who mattered.
He put you on his stage for one song a night because it moved merch, and then he got on the other bus. "
"You don't know anything about — "
"I know all of it," Georgia said. "That's the thing, sweetheart. I know it in my bones. You want to know why?"
The tent was so quiet she could hear the generator behind the food trucks.
"Because that's my life," she said. "That's the exact life you took.
You didn't take my husband, you took my seat.
You got to be the person he says the true things to at two in the morning and can't put in a room in the daytime.
That's not the prize. That is the thing I have been sitting in for four years and I would not wish it on a dog. "
Somebody at the back of the tent said, "God," very quietly.
"And here's the last of it," Georgia said, "and then I'm done."
She stood up. She was not looming; she just stood, and picked up her hat off the chair.
"You told me every night you say my name from that stage.
I believe you. And you have stood up in front of a crowd every night for two years, singing a song a woman wrote about being twenty-two years old and free in this county, and calling it a tribute — while you were on the phone at two in the morning helping the man who took that from her go on believing he never did. "
She put the hat on.