Chapter 10 #2
"You didn't want to be a singer," she said.
"You wanted to be me. And you've spent two years trying to buy it, and you paid for it with the only thing you had that was worth anything, which was the part of you that meant it when you sang my song.
That's gone now. You can't get that back.
And in about a year, when he doesn't return your calls and he doesn't think about you at all — and he won't, honey, he won't think about you for ten seconds — you're going to be standing on some stage somewhere singing Dry Line to four hundred people, and you are going to know exactly what you traded. "
She picked up her cup off the ground and dropped it in the barrel.
"Enjoy your show," Georgia said, and walked out of the tent.
She got about thirty feet before Trina caught up with her, and neither of them said anything until they were past the horse trailers.
"Well," Trina said.
"Don't."
"I'm not saying a word."
"Trina."
"I would just like it noted," Trina said, "that I have known you since you were nine years old and I have never once been scared of you until about four minutes ago."
Georgia laughed. It came out of her like something breaking loose, and she had to stop walking and put her hands on her knees, and it went on longer than it should have, and there was a piece of it at the end that was not laughing at all.
Trina stood there and let her have it.
"You want to go home?" she said.
"No."
"Okay."
"I want a lemonade," Georgia said, "and then I want to go watch the songwriter thing at five, because the woman from Utopia is on it."
Here is what she had expected to feel, and did not.
She had expected the meeting to be the thing. She'd had it in her head all summer — the girl's face, the reckoning, some final piece of information that would explain how a fifteen-year marriage had come apart over nine weeks of phone calls.
There was no information. That was the whole discovery.
She had sat three feet from Peyton Kinney and found nothing there but a young woman who wanted things and had taken a shortcut, and a man on a bus who had wanted somebody to ask him a question, and between the two of them there had not been one single ounce of anything you could call a love story.
It was so small.
That was the freeing part, and it was also the worst part, and she carried both of them around the grounds all afternoon.
Fifteen years. A house, a life, a career put down in a kitchen at twenty-two.
And the thing that had finally taken it was not a great passion or a beautiful girl or even a betrayal with any grandeur to it.
It was a tired man being flattered on a bus, over and over, for nine weeks, because it was easier than driving home.
You can survive being left for something magnificent. Everybody knows how that story goes.
Nobody tells you how to survive being left for something cheap.
By eight o'clock it had gotten around the grounds.
She had not thought about that. She genuinely had not — she'd have said the same words to that girl in an empty room, and she would say so, later, to anybody who asked.
But she had said them under a canvas roof in front of forty-five people, and by six there was a video, and by eight there were four.
Kerrville is not a country radio crowd. Kerrville is three thousand people who drive out to sit in the dirt and listen to songwriters, and about a third of them owned Caliche on a physical disc, and had for sixteen years.
Georgia was at the back of the main field at nine when Peyton Kinney came out.
The applause was fine. It was polite. It was the applause you give a pretty girl with a band, and it was not what a girl gets when she is fourth from the top of a bill in front of three thousand people.
By the third song, people were leaving.
Not all of them, and not dramatically — that is not how a crowd like that does it. They stood up in twos and threes and went to get something to eat, and did not come back, and the gaps opened up in the middle of the field, and the field went quiet in the way that eats the bottom out of a set.
Georgia watched a twenty-seven-year-old girl on a stage feel the room go.
She knew exactly what that felt like from the inside, and she stood there in the dark at the back of the field with a lemonade and did not enjoy it as much as she had planned to, and she did not feel one bit sorry either.
At the end of it, Peyton stepped up to the microphone and said, "This last one's a cover —"
Somebody near the front shouted something.
The girl stopped. She stood there for a second with her hand on the mic stand.
Then she said, "Y'all have been great," and walked off, and the band played the song out without her, and the lights came up on a field that was half empty.
Marlee Bowman found her first, by the fence at the back of the field, with her hands in her jacket pockets.
They stood and watched the crew strike the stage for a minute without saying anything.
"You know that's gonna follow you," Marlee said.
"I know it."
"There's four videos of it. My phone's been going since seven."
"I'd do it again."
"I didn't say don't." Marlee took a breath through her nose. "I'm saying there's about to be a lot of people who want to talk to you, and every last one of them is gonna want to talk about her. Radio's gonna call. Somebody's gonna offer you a podcast."
"I'm not doing that."
"You say that now."
"Marlee." Georgia turned and looked at her. "I have spent four months being a story about a man and a girl. I would rather never sing another note as long as I live than get a career out of forty seconds under a tent."
Marlee Bowman looked back at her for what felt like a long time.
"The week of the sixth," she said.
"What?"
"October. I had a week open, I told you that at the hall.
It's yours if you want it. Six days, and I'll give you the seventh if we're close.
" She said it exactly the way she'd said the girl closed with Dry Line — like weather.
"That's not because of today. I want that clear, and I'd appreciate you believing it, because I'm not gonna say it a second time.
That's because of two hundred people in folding chairs at two o'clock this afternoon who didn't get up and go get a beer. "
Georgia stood at the fence and found that she could not immediately speak.
"I've got thirty-one that are finished," she said.
"Bring all thirty-one."
"Some of them are bad."
"I should hope so," Marlee said. "Bring 'em anyway. It's easier to find the good ones with the bad ones sitting next to 'em."
She pushed off the fence.
"Get some sleep," she said. "And Georgia — eat something before you drive. You didn't eat that taco and you didn't eat anything after and I've been watching you all day."
She walked off toward the parking lot.
Georgia stood there by the fence in the dark for a minute, in a field where three thousand people were milling around and packing up chairs, and thought that she had been noticed — actually noticed, by somebody paying attention — twice in one day, and that neither time had it been by a man who loved her.
She went and found Trina.
She did not think about Peyton Kinney again — not that night, not that winter, not for a year, and by then only as a way of measuring how far she had come.