Chapter 15 #2
"I'd have said yes to anything. That's not — that's not even good of me. That's just true."
"I know."
"So what happens now?"
"Now you go do it," Georgia said, "and I watch."
"How long?"
"I don't know."
"Okay."
"I'm not going to be rushed on this, Jesse. Not by you, not by my mother, not by a label with a deadline on it, not by the fact that I'm thirty-eight and everybody's got a helpful opinion about how long a woman ought to take."
"Georgia." He stood up, and he did it carefully, and he kept the table between them the way he had all spring. "You take ten years."
"Don't say beautiful sentences."
"That one's not beautiful," he said. "That one's arithmetic."
He was gone by four.
Trina came at six because Trina had a sense about Sundays, and brought a pie she had not made, and the two of them sat on the porch.
"So he said yes."
"He said yes to everything."
"Course he did."
"That's what I said."
"Well." Trina put her boots on the rail. "Here's the part you're not gonna like. He can do every one of them things and you still might not want him."
Georgia looked at her.
"That's allowed, you know," Trina said. "There's not a rule that says a man does his year and turns in his paper and gets the woman.
You could sit here and watch him do all three and feel nothing at all, and then you'd just be a woman who's free, and you'd have a record out and a tour and forty-two rooms."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Trina, I have thought about almost nothing else since the eighteenth."
They sat there. The bats came out over the tank, the way they did in April.
"What do you want?" Trina said.
And Georgia opened her mouth and found that she genuinely did not know, and that the not-knowing was not fear and was not grief and was not even indecision.
It was choice. She had not had one of those in sixteen years and had forgotten how heavy they are.
Everybody had an opinion, and every single one of them came with a clock on it.
The label called her directly on the Tuesday, which Marlee had told them not to do. A very pleasant man explained that the September routing had to be built by the first week of June, and that the rooms would not hold, and used the phrase this window twice.
"I'll answer by the fifteenth," Georgia said.
"Absolutely. And I want to say, just personally — this is the kind of thing that comes around once."
"That's what everybody told me the first time," she said, "and I gave that one to a man in a kitchen. So I'm going to take my two weeks."
Her mother called Wednesday and said, "You're not going to take it."
"I haven't decided."
"You're not going to take it, because you're waiting on him, and I want to say one thing about that and then I'll hush."
"Mama."
"I waited on your daddy from about 1994 to the day he died," Vonda said, "and I'd do it again, and it was the worst decision of my life. Both of those are true. Nobody's ever gonna explain that to you and I'm certainly not able."
She hung up.
Georgia drove down to Dripping Springs on the Thursday to hear the mixes on two new ones, and stayed four hours.
They worked. That was the point of going. They pulled a harmony off the second one that had been doing nothing but standing there being pretty, and put a real one on it, and Georgia sang it four times and got it on the third and made Marlee keep the fourth anyway.
At six Marlee turned everything off and got two beers out of the little refrigerator under the desk, which in eight months Georgia had never once seen opened.
"You're gonna turn it down," Marlee said.
"I don't know what I'm going to do."
"Uh huh."
"Marlee, I genuinely do not know."
"All right." Marlee opened hers on the edge of the desk. "Then I'll tell you what I'd say if you did turn it down, so it's out of the way and you don't have to guess at it in the truck."
"Go on."
"Forty-two rooms in a year would about kill you, and you're too old to be told what to wear, and there's a real chance those people would take that record and sand every interesting thing off of it by Christmas." She drank some. "And they'd have you doing a podcast about your husband by March."
"You said that in January."
"It was true in January."
"So you think I should turn it down."
"I think you should turn that down," Marlee said.
"There's a difference and it's the whole difference.
You've got a record out that's doing this on its own, in the dark, with a cover my nephew shot.
That's not a fluke and it don't expire on the fifteenth of May.
There'll be another one of those in eighteen months and it'll be better, 'cause you'll be coming from strength instead of from a lucky spring. "
Georgia sat with the beer she was not drinking.
"And if I'm turning it down for him?"
Marlee Bowman put her boots up on the desk.
"Then you'd be doing exactly what you did at twenty-two," she said, "and I'd think a lot less of you, and I'd still make your next record, and I would never mention it again as long as I live."
That night she put both pieces of paper on the kitchen table.
The offer on the left: two records, a budget, forty-two rooms, an answer due the fifteenth of May.
On the right, Marlee's phone number, still on the napkin from Cypress Hall, which Georgia had kept in a drawer for eight months for no reason she could ever explain to anybody.
Between them, nothing at all. No third piece of paper.
There was not going to be one — there was no contract for the other thing, no deadline, no number, just a man in a rent house in town who had agreed to give up a year and a story and would start tomorrow and would not be finished for a long time.
Georgia stood over her own kitchen table and looked at the two of them lying there.
Then she turned the light off and went to bed, and did not decide anything at all, and slept better than she had any right to.