Chapter 12 #2
Georgia drove home and had to pull over at the low water crossing for the second time that year, and sat there in the cold with the engine running, for a completely different reason than the first time.
Sixteen years. Every person who had ever come up to her in a public place had wanted to talk about a man.
One woman drove down from Round Rock for a song.
Christmas was quiet.
Vonda came out and stayed two days and they cooked too much and watched a movie about a dog that neither of them admitted to crying at. Trina came Christmas evening with a bottle of something and the three of them played dominoes until midnight and Vonda cheated.
Nobody mentioned him. It was the first holiday in fifteen years that nobody had to organize around a routing.
Georgia found, cleaning up at one in the morning with the kitchen radio on low, that she had not thought about him all day, and that the noticing itself was becoming a smaller and smaller thing — no longer an event, just a fact, the way you stop noticing that a tooth is gone.
That should have been good news.
She went to bed thinking about the woman from Round Rock and the sister who needed that song, and slept the whole night through.
January.
The record was mixed the second week of January and Marlee sent it to four people.
Three of them said no. The fourth was a real label with a real building, and they said yes so fast it made Georgia's neck hurt.
The call happened on a Tuesday with Marlee sitting across the kitchen table listening on speaker.
They loved the songs. They loved the rawness. They used the word authentic four times and the word timing twice, and Georgia had been married to that business for fifteen years and knew exactly where it was going about ninety seconds before it got there.
"— and obviously the story is a huge part of what makes this land right now."
"Say more about the story," Georgia said.
"Well, people know who you are. That's not a bad thing! That's a door. And I think there's a really beautiful version of the rollout where you do two or three long-form conversations, the right ones, and you talk about the last year and what it took to make this record — "
"No."
"— and honestly, one line in the one-sheet. That's all. Something like written in the year her marriage came apart in public — "
"No."
There was a pause on the line.
"Can I ask what the objection is?"
"There isn't one word about that man on that record," Georgia said.
"Not one. And if you put a sentence like that on a piece of paper, then for the rest of my life every person who hears these songs is going to be listening for him in them, and they'll find him, because people find what they're told to look for. And then it's his record."
"Georgia, nobody's saying it's —"
"It'd be his record with my name on it," she said. "I've already had one of those. I had one for twelve years and I just got it back in November."
Marlee, across the table, was looking at the ceiling with no expression at all.
"Let me talk to some people," the woman said.
She called back Thursday. The offer was still there, materially, but smaller — a lot smaller, the kind of smaller that is a message — and the release was pushed to the fall, which in that business means never.
Georgia said no.
She hung up and put the phone down on the table and sat there.
"That was about eighty thousand dollars," Marlee said.
"I know what it was."
"I want to be sure you know."
"Marlee, I know what it was."
"Good." Marlee got up and got her hat. "Then I'll tell you the other thing, which is that they'd have had you doing a podcast about your husband in March and there is no version of that where you make another record. We'll put it out ourselves. It'll be small and it'll be slow and it'll be yours."
"That's not what I wanted."
"No," Marlee said. "It's what you picked."
She drove home in the cold with the heater going and the windows up.
Four months.
She did the accounting on the way, the way she did everything, in order.
He had canceled twenty-two shows and paid four hundred people through February for work they didn't do.
He had fired the man who had been his best friend since he was twenty-one.
He had killed the deal that was going to define the rest of his working life.
He had put her name on his biggest song at a cost she could not calculate and had not mentioned it.
He had a plumber at her mother's house at seven in the morning and had made sure it came through a stranger.
He called Vonda on Sundays and never asked about her.
In the trade press in October, when the cancellations came out, somebody had written a piece implying the wife had made him do it — and Jesse Rawls, who had never let a bad word stand about anything in his life, had put out a single sentence saying the decision was his alone and had eaten a month of being called unstable rather than let it sit next to her name.
Four months, and not one single thing addressed to her.
And that, Georgia thought, turning in at the cattle guard — that is the smartest thing he has ever done.
She put the truck in park and sat in the dark with the engine ticking.
Because either it was the smartest thing he had ever done, or it was not a strategy at all.
And there was no way on God's earth to tell the difference from out here. That was the trap, and it was a beautiful one, and it did not matter one bit whether he had built it on purpose.
She got out and went inside and shot the bolts, all three, the way she had every night since July.
Then she stood in her own hallway with her hand still on the last one and admitted the thing she had been refusing to admit since the week before Thanksgiving.
It was working.