Chapter 17 #2
"This isn't a probation." He put the towel down.
"I want to say that out loud one time and then never again.
I'm not working off a debt in this house.
I'm not on any kind of terms. You didn't take me back on a trial and I'm not behaving myself till further notice.
" He looked at her steadily. "You're my wife.
I'm going to be here in ten years and in thirty.
That's not a promise I'm making to earn something.
It's a description of the rest of my life and you can do whatever you want with it. "
Georgia stood in her kitchen with a pan in her hand.
"All right," she said.
"That's it. That's all I had."
"That was a good one," she said, "and I'd like you to know I mean it different than I meant it in July."
"I know you do."
"Come here."
He came, and she got a fist in his shirt, and got grease on her own hands off his, and told him so, and he said, "Well, don't wash 'em in the sink."
She played Cypress Hall the second Saturday in October.
Not the round. Her own show, her own band, two nights, both of them sold in about an hour and a half. Delmar had to bring in extra chairs from the Methodist church and then take them all back out because there was nowhere on this earth to put them.
Vonda sat at a table down front in a blouse she had bought for the occasion and told four separate strangers that she was the mother.
Trina worked the door, uninvited and unpaid, because she had appointed herself.
Marlee stood at the back by the sound board with her arms crossed and her hat on and did not smile once, which by then Georgia knew meant she was having the time of her life.
Rusty played steel.
And Jesse Rawls sat in the fourth row with a beer he did not drink, in a room where about a third of the crowd had watched his marriage come apart on the radio three years earlier, and clapped for his wife.
She played for an hour and forty minutes.
Nine off the new one, six off the last one, two off Caliche — the second of which was Dry Line, and she had not played it in public since she was twenty-three years old, and when she got to the second verse there were a hundred and fifty people in that room singing it back at her.
She did not play Half a Tank.
She had thought about it for a month. In the end she left it off, because it was his song too and there was no version of playing it in that room on that night that wasn't about him, and Georgia Tidwell had built two records out of not doing that.
Then, with about ten minutes left, she took a drink of water and looked out at the fourth row.
"Y'all know my husband," she said.
There was a noise. It went on a while.
"Now hold on. Hold on." She let it run down.
"I want to be real clear about how this works, because there's people here who've got opinions.
" That got the laugh she was after. "This is my show.
This is my room and my band and my name on the sign out front, and I have thought about this for four weeks and I'd have been within my rights not to. "
She looked at him.
"But I want to sing this one with him," she said, "so get up here."
Jesse Rawls came up out of the fourth row.
They sang the one from the van — the one from Amarillo, with the broken heater, that had two lines and no ending for sixteen years, and that the two of them had finished at the kitchen table on a Sunday in June with a pencil and an argument about the third verse.
Nobody in that room had ever heard it. It was not on any record. It was two people at one microphone doing a thing they had first done in a parking lot sixteen years back, and it was, by any measure that has ever mattered, hers.
When it was over he went and sat back down in the fourth row.
She played two more and then she was done.
Afterward, in the lot, with the doors open and the crew loading and the last of the crowd standing around in that way people do when nobody wants to leave first, Georgia sat on the tailgate of her own truck with her boots hanging off.
Jesse came out with two bottles of water and handed her one and got up on the tailgate beside her.
"That third verse is still wrong," he said.
"It is not."
"It's wrong and I'm gonna fix it."
"You are not touching that verse."
"Georgia."
"That verse is mine, I wrote it in a Waffle House while you were asleep, and if you so much as look at it —"
"All right, all right." He drank some water. "It's a little wrong."
"Get off my truck."
"No, ma'am," Jesse said, and stayed exactly where he was.
She leaned into his shoulder.
Inside, somebody dropped a chair, and Trina hollered something at them about it, and Vonda's voice came out through the door in the middle of telling one more stranger that she was the mother.
Georgia sat on the tailgate with her husband's arm around her and thought about the woman who had stood in a kitchen four years ago folding a man's shirts in an empty house, and how there had been absolutely no way to tell her any of this.
She would not have believed a word of it.
She had not even known there was anything to want.
"You want to go home?" Jesse said.
"In a minute."
"Take your time."
She took her time.
Then she took his hand, and the two of them got down off the tailgate and went home together, the way they were going to do for the next forty years — because he loved her, and she had chosen him, and there was not one thing about it that was still being decided.