Chapter 13
The ask came in February, through the lawyer, on paper, which she had not expected and which annoyed her because it was exactly right.
Her attorney read it out over the phone in the flat voice of a woman who bills in six-minute increments.
"'Mr. Rawls asks whether Mrs. Rawls would be willing to speak with him for twenty minutes, at a time and place of her choosing. He asks me to say that if the answer is no, he will not ask again this year, and that no is a complete answer.'" A pause. "There's a handwritten line at the bottom."
"Read it."
"'I'm not going to do this every month. If you'd rather never, tell her and that's the end of it.'"
Georgia stood in her kitchen and looked out the window at a pasture that had gone the color of a paper sack.
"Is that all?"
"That's all of it. Georgia, for what it's worth — I've had a lot of these. That's the least lawyered piece of paper a man in his position has ever put in front of me."
"Well," Georgia said. "He's had a year to practice."
She did not answer for six days.
She turned it over while she fed the dog and while she drove and while she lay awake. She got as far as writing no on a card twice.
What she kept getting stuck on was that there was no lever in it.
She had spent a year learning to find the lever — the if you'd only, the for the sake of, the small hooked thing at the end of every gesture — and she went over those three sentences the way you go over a fence line looking for the gap, and there wasn't one.
No is a complete answer.
She hated that sentence. She hated it the way you hate a good move in a game you did not agree to play.
On the seventh day she called her attorney back and said: "Sunday. Two o'clock. My porch. And tell him twenty minutes means twenty minutes."
He came up the drive at one fifty-eight and sat in the truck until two.
She watched him do it from the kitchen window and had to put her hand flat on the counter.
Then he got out.
He had lost more weight. That was the first thing. He was wearing a coat she recognized from about 2014 and his hair was too long in the back and he looked, in a way she could not have described to anybody, like a man who was doing his own laundry.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps.
"Hey."
"Hey."
"I'm not gonna come up unless you say."
"You can come up."
He came up two steps and stopped, which put him below her, and she understood he had planned that and hated that she noticed and hated more that it worked.
There were two chairs. He looked at them and did not sit down.
"Sit down, Jesse."
He sat.
Here is what they talked about for twenty minutes, in February, on a porch, eight months after she changed the locks.
Nothing.
That is not a figure of speech. He asked about the fence in the west pasture. She said she'd fixed it twice. He asked whether the tank had come back up over the winter and she said about halfway, and he said that sounded about right for the rain they'd had, and she said it did.
He asked about the dog. The dog was old. He said, "She still get on the couch?" and Georgia said, "Every night of her life," and neither of them said anything for a second.
And under all of it, running like current in a wire, was the fact that they had been married for fifteen years and that this man had once been able to make her laugh so hard she had to pull the truck over, and that she could still smell his coat from four feet away.
She had thought — genuinely, honestly, all six of those days — that the danger would be if he came at her. She'd braced for the speech. She had four different versions of herself ready for four different Jesses.
Nobody had prepared her for a man asking about a stock tank.
She sat in her own chair with her hands around a cup of coffee she did not want, and about nine minutes in she caught herself watching his hands on his knees — the crooked ring finger, the way the left one always sat a little open from twenty years of holding a neck — and she had to look at the pasture for a while.
Do not.
Her body had gotten there before her, the way it always did, and it had gotten there fast.
"Can I ask about the record?" he said.
"You can ask."
"Is it done?"
"It's mixed."
"When's it out?"
"March," she said. "Maybe April. It's small."
"Marlee Bowman's doing it?"
"Yes."
He nodded slowly. "That's a serious woman."
"She is."
And then he did not say the next thing.
She sat there waiting for it. It was right there, obvious, the easiest thing in the world for a man in his position to reach for — I could make a call. There's people I know. Let me help. One sentence, and it would have cost him nothing, and it would have finished the afternoon.
He didn't say it. He sat there and let the silence stand, and Georgia realized, watching him not say it, that he was working.
She could see it. There was a man in that chair doing actual labor to keep his own mouth shut, and the labor was visible, and it was the first thing all winter that had actually gotten through.
"How'd it go?" he said instead. "The making of it."
Nobody had asked her that.
Four months of that record and about nine people had asked her when it was out and not one had asked her what it had been like to make.
"It was hard," she said.
"Yeah?"
"There's a room with no windows and a woman who says 'again' about forty times and then doesn't tell you why." She turned the cup around. "I had a headache for six days. I sang one line so many times it stopped being English."
"Which line?"
"You don't get the lines."
"No," he agreed. "Fair."
"And then on the sixth day she played me a rough and I didn't recognize my own voice.
" Georgia was talking more than she had meant to and could hear herself doing it and did not stop.
"That's the part. I've heard myself on a record before, I know what that is.
This was different. I sounded like somebody who knew something. "
Jesse Rawls sat on her porch and did not say a single word for about six seconds.
"Good," he said, finally.
That was all. Not I'm so proud of you. Not I always knew. Just good, the way you'd say it to a man who'd gotten a crop in.
Georgia looked into her coffee and found her eyes had gone hot, and was so angry about it she nearly told him to leave.
At sixteen minutes she said the thing she had actually decided to say.
"Stop calling my mother."
He went still.
"Okay."
"I mean it. Sundays, whatever y'all have got going. It's over."
"Okay."
"Don't ask me why."
"I wasn't going to." He put his hands on his knees. "Can I say one thing about it and then I'll stop?"
"Go ahead."
"I'll stop today. Not next week. Today, and I won't call her at Christmas either, and if she calls me I'll be kind to her and I'll get off the phone."
"All right."
"I liked it," he said, and his voice did something on the word. "That's the — I want you to know it's not nothing. She's about the only person left who talks to me like I'm a regular man. But it's your mother and I'm not entitled to a piece of your family while I'm not in it."
"No," Georgia said. "You're not."
"Okay."
And that was it. He did not defend it. He did not point out that Vonda had started it, which she had.
He did not tell her — and Georgia would find this out from her mother three weeks later, and it would land like a stone — that he had already asked Vonda twice whether Georgia would mind, and that Vonda had told him not to be ridiculous.
He just took it and set it down.
At nineteen minutes he stood up.
Georgia had not been watching the clock.
That was the humiliating part — she had made a great production out of twenty minutes means twenty minutes, and then she had gotten in so deep that she had genuinely forgotten, and the sight of him standing up went through her like a hand on the back of the neck.
"That's about it," he said.
"You've got a minute left."
"I know it." He picked his hat up off the rail. "I'd rather leave one on the table than take one that isn't mine."
You son of a bitch, she thought, with enormous clarity.
"Thank you for the twenty minutes," he said.
"Jesse."
He stopped.
And there was a moment — three feet of cold February air between the two of them on a porch he had roofed — where it would have taken almost nothing.
He was close enough that she could see the gray coming in at his temple.
She had her hand on the arm of the chair and she was aware of every inch of the distance and so was he; she could see that he was, in the set of his shoulders, in the way he was carefully not looking at her mouth.
If he had reached out, she would have let him. She knew it in that second with total certainty and she would deny it to herself for two more weeks.
He did not reach out.
"Drive safe," she said.
"Yes ma'am."
He went down the steps and got in the truck and drove down the drive and over the cattle guard, and did not look back that she could see.
Georgia sat down on the top step in the cold and did not go inside for a long time.
That night she could not sleep, and she was honest enough with herself about why that she did not even bother getting up for water.
It was not the conversation. It was the four feet.
She lay in the dark in a bed she had slept in alone since July and thought about a man standing at the top of her own porch steps with his hat in his hand, close enough that she could have put her hand flat on his chest without leaning, and about how her entire body had gone toward him in the space of about one second while her face did absolutely nothing at all.
She was thirty-eight years old. She had been furious at that man since March. She had said things to him in July that she still believed in February.
And she had stood on that porch and wanted him so badly her back teeth ached.
That's just a body, she told herself, at about one in the morning. That's sixteen years of a body doing what it learned.
Which was true and did not help even slightly, because the trouble was not that she wanted him. She had wanted him at his worst; she had wanted him with a phone bill on the table. The trouble was that on Sunday, for twenty minutes, she had also liked him.
That was the new thing. That was the thing there was no defense against.
A woman can hold out against wanting for a very long time. Wanting is loud and stupid and you can name it and set it aside. Liking is quiet. Liking comes in through a conversation about a stock tank.
At two she gave up and got the guitar and sat at the kitchen table.
What came out was four lines and part of a fifth, and she wrote them down before she looked at them, which was a habit that had saved her about nine times that winter.
Then she looked at them.
They were about a man sitting in a truck at the end of a drive for two minutes because he was early and would not be early.
She sat there with the pen in her hand.
She did not tear the page out. That was the part she would think about for weeks — that she had every opportunity, and that her hand did not go anywhere near the top of the page, and that some cold professional piece of her looked at those four lines and thought, in a voice with no feeling in it whatsoever: that's the best thing you've written since October.
She closed the notebook and put it in the drawer and went to bed at half past three.
Vonda called Wednesday, deeply put out.
"He's quit calling."
"I know."
"You did that."
"I did."
"Well, I'd have liked to be consulted," her mother said, and then, after a silence, "He was very nice about it. He said it was his own idea."
Georgia stood in her kitchen with the phone against her ear.
"Did he," she said.
She went down to the studio on Thursday to hear the last master.
Marlee played it end to end without saying anything and then sat with her boots on the console desk, which was the closest that woman ever came to relaxing.
"It's better than Caliche," she said.
"Don't do that."
"I don't do that." Marlee turned her head.
"Georgia, I have made forty-one records and I have told exactly four people that a record was good.
Caliche is a hell of a record made by a twenty-two-year-old who was showing off.
This one's made by a woman who has been paying attention for sixteen years and got mad enough to write it down.
There's no comparison and you know there's no comparison. "
Georgia sat in the chair with her arms crossed.
"I saw him Sunday," she said.
"I don't want to know."
"Twenty minutes."
"I specifically don't want to know," Marlee said, and got up and started coiling a cable, and then, with her back turned: "Was it awful?"
"No."
"That's worse."
"Yes," Georgia said. "That's what I've got too."
Marlee coiled the cable and hung it on the hook and stood there a second with her back still turned.
"I'm gonna break my own rule," she said.
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't." She turned around and leaned on the desk.
"Here's the whole of it, and then we're back to never discussing it.
I don't care what that man does. I don't care if he grovels in the road.
I have got one interest in this world and it is that record coming out in March with a woman's name on it who is standing up straight. "
"Marlee —"
"If you go back to him in February, that record comes out in March and every review of it is about a marriage." Flat as a level. "If you go back to him in three years, it's a record. That's my whole objection and it's a selfish one and I'd like you to weigh it at about what it's worth."
Georgia sat with that.
"That's not why I'd wait," she said.
"No. But you'd be waiting either way, so it don't cost you anything to let an old woman think she got a vote."
"You're forty-five."
"I've been fifty since I was nineteen," Marlee said, and put her hat on.
She thought about it for ten days and then she wrote him a letter, because she was not going to have this conversation through an attorney at three hundred dollars an hour, and because she was not going to call him.
It was four lines.
Twenty more. Same terms. Sunday the fifteenth, two o'clock.
This is not anything. Do not make it into anything.
Don't bring anything with you. Nothing at all, Jesse, I mean it.
G.
She read it over twice. Then she took out the last line and put it back in and took it out again and finally left it, because it was true, and because if she was going to do this she was going to be honest in her own handwriting at least.
She drove it to the mailbox at the end of the drive and put the flag up.
Then she stood out there on the county road in the cold with her hands in her coat pockets and admitted, to nobody, that she had been counting the days since Sunday, and that she knew the number without working it out, and that a woman who knows the number is already in trouble.
Ten days.
She walked back up the drive to a house with three bolts on it and a record in it with her own name on the front, and she was furious the entire way.