Chapter 17
Fourteen months later, on a Tuesday in July, Georgia Rawls and her husband had an argument about a dog.
"No."
"You didn't even hear the whole —"
"I heard the word heeler and the word puppy in the same sentence, Jesse, that's the whole of it."
"Ol' Girl's twelve years old."
"Ol' Girl is twelve years old and she is comfortable, and she does not want a puppy in this house, and neither do I."
"I want a dog."
"You have a dog."
"I want a dog that likes me," Jesse said, with real feeling, and Georgia laughed so hard she had to put down the coffee.
He did not get the puppy. He asked again in September and did not get it then either. He raised it once more at Thanksgiving in front of her mother, which was a tactical error of such magnitude that Vonda took Georgia's side out of sheer respect for the institution of marriage.
He was still not over it two years later. He brought it up at parties.
That is what she would tell people afterward, when they asked — and people did ask, for years, in the way people always will.
They wanted the big answer. They wanted the moment.
What she had was that they argued about a dog on a Tuesday morning in July and both of them lost, which is to say that neither of them managed the other, which is to say the thing was over and the marriage had started.
Here is what fourteen months looked like.
The room went on the east side of the house, which had been an argument too.
She had wanted it on the west for the light and he had said the west wall was where the weather came from and she had said she did not care about the weather, and he had said fine, and had then quietly gotten a builder out who agreed with him, and Georgia had told him that if he ever did that again she would put the room on the west side herself with a saw, and he had said, "Yes ma'am," and put it on the east.
She had won that one properly, in the end, by losing it out loud. He was right about the weather. She told him so in November and he had the enormous good sense not to enjoy it where she could see.
It was twenty by sixteen with a door that shut and a window she picked and nothing in it but a chair, a stand, a spool of cable, and the green notebook on a shelf with four others behind it now.
He was not allowed in when the door was shut. He had never once tested it.
The routing was sixty days a year.
Not a plan. Not an intention. A number in a contract with the new management company, sixty days, and a clause that made going past it expensive enough that nobody would ever bother trying.
He had come back in April after his year, small, to rooms about a tenth the size of the ones he'd left.
Two thousand people instead of eighteen.
There were people in that business who thought he had lost his mind and a handful who thought he had lost his nerve, and one writer in Nashville who understood exactly what had happened and wrote it down, and Jesse sent that man a bottle of something and never mentioned it again.
He came home from every run. That was the whole of it.
He drove himself. He was gone four days and came back and slept in his own bed and swept a driveway two doors down from a rent house he no longer lived in, because Ramiro still had a bad hip and had by then found out exactly who Jesse was and had elected to keep the contractor story going out of pure meanness.
He started writing again in February.
She heard it first through the wall — the same four bars, over and over, for two hours, badly.
She did not go in. That was the hardest thing she did that whole year, and she sat in her own room on the east side with her hands in her lap and let a man be bad at something by himself for twelve days.
On the thirteenth he knocked on her door.
"Can I ask you a thing."
"You can ask."
"It's about the second line."
She got up and opened the door.
They wrote at the kitchen table after that, sometimes, not on any schedule and never for anybody's record.
It was slow and it was frequently terrible.
He was rusty and she was not, and about once a month she said something plain about a line of his and watched him take it standing up, which she had never seen him do in twenty years.
One night in June he put his pencil down and said, "You're meaner than Marlee."
"Marlee's not mean, she's correct."
"You're meaner than Marlee and you enjoy it more."
"I've waited sixteen years to be in a room where somebody has to hear what I think about a bridge," Georgia said. "You will forgive me for having a nice time."
He laughed. He put his hand on the back of her neck going past to get the coffee, the way he had ten thousand times in a previous life, and she leaned into it, and neither of them made anything of it at all.
The second record came out in May, under her own name, which is Georgia Tidwell, and always has been.
That was not a message. She had to explain it exactly twice — once to a writer who wanted it to be a statement about the marriage, and once to her mother, who wanted it to be a statement about the family.
"It's the name on Caliche," she told the writer. "It's my daddy's name and my mother's and it's the one that was on the record when I was twenty-two. It's not about him. Nothing on this record is about him."
"But you're still married."
"Ma'am, I'm about the most married woman you've ever talked to," Georgia said. "I've just got a job."
Jesse thought the whole thing was hilarious. He had, by that summer, developed the habit of introducing himself at her shows as Mr. Tidwell, which had gone from a joke to a bit to a thing three separate people in Bandera now genuinely believed.
The deal came back around in January, the way Marlee had said it would, and it was smaller and it was better.
One record instead of two. No relocation. Marlee producing, with a line in the contract about final say that had taken six weeks and a great deal of unpleasantness to get, and which Georgia would have walked over.
And a tour — twenty-nine rooms in the spring, not forty-two, all of them places she picked.
She was gone six weeks in April and May.
Jesse stayed home. He fed the dog and he moved the cattle and he called her at nine o'clock most nights and asked how the room had been, and when she said Abilene had been flat, he said, "They're always flat on a Wednesday, don't take it personal," and did not offer to fix a single thing about it.
He came to four shows. He bought a ticket to every one of them, which took some doing after the first, because Delmar told somebody, and by the third show there was a small industry in Bandera of people trying to buy Jesse Rawls a beer over it.
At the show in Fort Stockton he stood at the back by the merch table for the whole set with his hat down, and afterward a kid of about nineteen with a guitar case asked him if he was somebody.
"Not tonight," Jesse said.
Rusty told her about that in June, on her own porch, laughing so hard he had to set his beer on the boards.
"He didn't say it like a sad thing," Rusty said. "That's what I want you to understand. He said it the way you'd say you're not the plumber."
"He tell you to tell me?"
Rusty looked genuinely offended.
"He'd take a hammer to me," he said. "No, ma'am. I'm telling you because I like it."
Marlee came out to the house in July and stayed for supper, which she had never done, and told a long and extremely dirty story about a bass player in 1998, and Vonda enjoyed it so much she had to go stand in the yard.
At the end of the night, at the truck, she said, "Two things and I'm gone."
"Go ahead."
"The next one's better than this one and I want to start it in November."
"All right. What's the second?"
Marlee Bowman put her hat on.
"I was wrong about him," she said. "That's all. I'm not gonna make a speech and I'd appreciate you never mentioning it again."
She got in the Suburban and left.
Trina brought Peyton Kinney up exactly once, in the feed store, in August.
"You see the Kinney girl put a record out?"
Georgia was counting out a sack of layer pellets and it took her about two full seconds.
"Who?"
"Peyton—" Trina stopped. She looked at Georgia's face, and Georgia looked back, honestly baffled, with a bag of feed in her arms.
"Oh," Trina said. "Well, all right then."
That was all of it. Two seconds of confusion in a feed store, two and a half years after a woman in a church blouse had shown her a phone in that exact spot.
She thought about it once more, driving home, and found she had nothing to feel about it at all — not triumph, not pity, nothing. The name had gone the way a town goes when you have not driven through it in years.
The promise got said in a kitchen on a Thursday in September, and there was no music anywhere in the house.
It was not a big night. She had burned the rice. He had come in from the barn with grease on his hands and had washed them in the kitchen sink, which she had asked him not to do about four hundred times, and she was telling him so.
And he stopped, with his hands under the water, and said, "Hey."
"What."
"Are you happy?"
Georgia set the pan down.
Because that was not a thing that man had ever asked anybody. He had spent thirty years in a business built entirely on assuming the answer, and she had been married to him for seventeen years, and it was the first time.
"Yes," she said.
"You sure?"
"Jesse, I have never in my life said a word I was surer of."
He dried his hands.
"I'm going to say a thing plain," he said, "because I've been thinking about it since April and I don't want it sung and I don't want it at a table with anybody else at it."
"Go on."