Chapter 12
October.
The studio outside Dripping Springs was a metal building with a live oak growing through the middle of the deck, and it had no windows in the room where the work happened, which Marlee said was the entire point.
"You don't need to know what time it is."
"What if I do?"
"Then you're not working," Marlee said.
They did six days and then Marlee gave her the seventh.
Georgia had thought — and she had been embarrassed about it in advance, which did not stop her — that recording would feel like something. A door opening. A curtain going up. Some music underneath it.
It did not feel like anything. It felt like work. It felt like a great deal of standing in a room saying the same seven words forty times while a woman in her forties said "again" from behind glass in a voice with no expression in it whatsoever.
By day three she had a headache that lived behind her right eye.
By day four she understood that she had never once in her life been treated as though what she did was difficult, and that it was the most restful thing that had ever happened to her.
Nobody at that studio was kind to her. Nobody asked how she was holding up. Rusty came down for two days and played steel on four songs, and did not once mention Jesse, because Marlee had clearly told him not to and because Rusty had been raised right.
On the sixth day Marlee played her the rough of the one with no chorus.
Georgia sat in a chair in a windowless room and listened to a woman singing a song about a house and a truck that turns out to be somebody else's truck, and it took her about ninety seconds to work out that the woman was her.
"Well," she said, when it was over.
Marlee waited.
"Play it again."
They played it four times. Georgia cried on the third one and did not apologize for it and Marlee did not acknowledge it in any way, and that was, in Georgia's opinion, the single most decent thing any woman had ever done for her.
November.
He did not come.
That is the whole content of November, and it should be stated plainly, because she spent the month waiting for the other thing to happen, the way you wait for a second shoe or a second shot.
He did not come up the drive. He did not send flowers. He did not send a letter, a book, a truck, a song, a check, a friend, a mother, a preacher, or a man with a folder.
Once, on a Thursday, a package came, and Georgia stood in the kitchen with it for a full minute before she opened it and found that it was a hose fitting she had ordered in September.
She was so angry she had to go outside.
That was the part nobody could have told her about. She had spent seven months building a woman who could withstand Jesse Rawls coming at her, and had gotten extremely good at it, and he had simply stopped coming, and it turned out that all that armor did not do one thing against an empty road.
Fine, she thought, most days. Good.
And then, at midnight, over the notebook: Seven months. He's had seven months and he can't hold a thought that long, he never could, he's like a dog with a —
And then she would stop, because she could hear what she sounded like.
Rusty came out the week before Thanksgiving to bring back an amp and stayed on the porch for a beer.
They talked about the record. He was proud of the steel on the third one and said so twice, which for Rusty was a parade.
Then he said, "You seen the credits go through?"
"What credits."
He got a look on his face.
"Rusty."
"I thought you'd have — " He set the beer down. "Aw, hell."
"Rusty Kelso."
"He fixed Half a Tank," Rusty said.
Georgia sat very still in her chair.
"Fixed it how."
"Filed the correction. Your name's on it.
Not a courtesy line, not a thank-you in a booklet — the actual registration, the copyright, the split.
Says you wrote the bridge, 'cause you did.
" He turned his hat around. "It went through the second week of November.
Everybody in Nashville's been talking about it for ten days, which is why I opened my mouth, 'cause I figured there's no way she hasn't —"
"Nobody told me."
"No."
"Rusty, that's — " She was doing arithmetic and coming up with a number she did not like. "That's twelve years of money."
"Backdated," Rusty said. "All of it. Twelve years of publishing off the biggest song in his catalogue, and he's the one that filed it against himself.
" He shook his head slowly. "And you got to understand what that room was like.
He did it in front of the label and both publishers, and he had to sit there and say out loud that the record's been wrong since the day it came out and that he knew it was wrong the whole time.
That's a lie he's been telling since before he was famous, Georgia.
That was the first lie. Everything he's built sits on top of it. "
"What did they say?"
"What could they say? It's his song. It's her song." He caught himself. "It's your song."
Georgia looked out at the pasture.
"He didn't tell me," she said.
"No, ma'am."
"He's known for two weeks and he hasn't —"
"It's been a month, near enough. He started it in October.
" Rusty stood up and got his hat. "And I'll tell you the last part and then I'm gonna go, 'cause I've already said more than anybody wanted me to.
When he called me about coming down here to play on your record, he said one thing about you the whole call, and it was: don't tell her anything about me, and don't tell me anything about her. "
He went down the steps.
"So don't take it as a message," he said. "That's what I'm getting at. He's not sending you one. I just couldn't stand there and let you not know."
She sat on that porch until it got dark and the cold came up out of the ground.
Here is what a woman does with a thing like that.
First she looks for the trick. She spent about forty minutes looking for the trick, and there wasn't one — the money went one direction, the humiliation went the other, and there was nobody left in his life to have advised it.
Curtis was gone. She'd read that in a trade piece in September and thought, well, that'll last three months.
Then she thought about the twelve years.
That was the part that got in under. Not the money. The fact that he had walked into a room full of the only people whose opinion he had ever cared about and told them that the thing they respected him most for had never been entirely his.
He had spent his whole life making rooms agree with him. And he had gone into one on purpose and made it think less of him, over a song, in a month when nobody in the world was going to tell her about it.
Georgia sat on her porch in the dark and said, out loud, "Don't."
Because she could feel the shape of what was happening, and she had felt it once before, in April, on this exact porch, with a man on a roof.
He's very good at this.
She held onto that sentence like a rail. It had been true in June and it was still true now, and the fact that it was working on her did not make it any less true.
December.
Her mother's water heater went out on the eighteenth.
Georgia got the call at six in the morning — Vonda, furious, standing in two inches of water in a laundry room in Bandera — and drove over with a shop vac and a bad attitude, and got there at seven, and there was a truck in the drive.
Not his.
A plumbing outfit out of Kerrville, two men, already halfway through pulling the old unit.
"Mama."
"Don't start with me."
"Who called them?"
"They said it was handled," Vonda said, with her arms crossed and her chin out and her whole sixty-three-year-old dignity arranged around her like a coat. "The man on the phone said it was handled and would I like the fifty-gallon or the eighty."
"What'd you tell him?"
"I told him the eighty," her mother said. "I'm old, not stupid."
They stood in the kitchen and watched the men work.
"He drove me to Kerrville in June," Vonda said, after a while.
"I know."
"He calls me on Sundays."
Georgia turned her head.
"Since when?"
"October, thereabouts."
"Mama."
"Don't you take that tone." Vonda got the coffee down.
"He calls, he asks how I am, we talk about the stent and one time about a dog he had as a boy, and he has never one time asked me a single question about you.
Not one. I've tested him twice." She measured the coffee. "I'd have hung up on him if he did."
Georgia stood in her mother's flooded laundry room doorway.
"You didn't tell me."
"You'd have told me to stop."
"I would have."
"Well," her mother said, "there it is."
She played the Cypress Hall round again on the Sunday before Christmas, and there were a hundred and forty people in a room that holds ninety.
Delmar had to turn people away at the door, which had never happened in his life, and he was so rattled about it he introduced the fiddle player twice.
Some of that was the videos from Kerrville.
Georgia had made her peace with that in about October: there was going to be a stretch of her life where a certain number of people showed up because of forty seconds under a tent, and there was not one thing she could do about it except be worth the drive.
She played four. Two old, two brand new. She did not play Half a Tank, and this time nobody asked, and she noticed that they didn't and could not decide how she felt about it.
Afterward, a woman about her own age came up with a coat over her arm and stood there working up to it, and Georgia braced.
"I drove down from Round Rock," the woman said.
"That's a ways."
"I wanted to ask you something and I know I'm not supposed to."
Here it comes.
"The third one you did," the woman said. "The one about the phone. Is that on anything? Can I get that anywhere?"
Georgia stood there with her guitar in her hand.
"Not yet," she said. "March, maybe. April."
"Well, I'll wait," the woman said. "I just — my sister needs that one. That's all. I'm sorry to bother you."
She left.