Chapter 2 #2
"You told me it was the network thing. Two questions and a photo.
" She kept her eyes on him. "I stood in that hallway at four o'clock and thought, he looks tired, I ought to get some food in him before the six o'clock.
I was worried about your blood sugar while you were downstairs talking about your tour. "
"I didn't want you sitting through it."
"You said, go eat something."
"I did."
"Deacon. You were protecting the schedule."
The last thing was the yellow page.
She turned it over and pushed it across the granite with one finger, and she said nothing, because it didn't need her.
His hand and the blue hand. Verses in his big slanted print, pressing too hard the way he always did. Underneath, in small round letters, a word struck out and replaced. A line lifted from the second verse and dropped into the bridge with an arrow drawn to show the move.
And down the margin, in blue: this one's the true one. everything before it is you being polite.
Deacon looked at it a long time.
"That's a work sheet," he said.
"I know what it is."
"That's how you work with somebody. You know that better than anybody alive."
"I do," Savannah said. "That's why I carried it in from the truck."
He picked it up. He put it back down. He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Sav. I swear to you on my mother. I never touched her."
Three.
And that was the moment.
It was not the tour, and it was not the girl, and it was not the eight-point type in a building full of people who knew before she did.
It was watching her husband reach for the same card a third time in one hour — calm, certain, a little wounded — because in his mind he kept handing her the good news and she kept declining to take it.
He wasn't lying. She'd have bet the house on it.
He just did not know what he had done.
"Deacon," she said. "I believe you."
"Okay." He let out a breath. "Okay. Good."
"That's not the good part."
"Savannah—"
"You think this is about a bed." She put both hands flat on the island. "You could have taken her to a hotel in Memphis and I'd have had a name for it. There's a whole aisle of women at the drugstore who've been through that. There's casseroles for it. There's songs."
"Don't."
"You gave her the table." Her voice never went up.
That was the strange part. "We had one thing that was ours.
Not the house. Not the ring, not the two feet of stage.
The part where you say it needs something and I'm the one who knows what.
You carried that down the road and handed it to a twenty-four-year-old, and then you let a trade magazine tell me at 3:41 in the afternoon. "
He stood there.
"That's what you did," she said. "And you have spent forty minutes in my kitchen telling me what you didn't do."
She went upstairs.
He came up behind her, and she let him. She pulled the canvas bag out from under the bed, the one that had been to Oslo and back, with a shoelace where the zipper pull used to be.
She folded things.
That surprised her some, later. She had always assumed that if this ever came, she'd be a thrower. Instead she stood in a closet where his shirts hung six inches from hers and folded four pairs of jeans in half, and then in half again, and squared the corners.
"Stop," Deacon said. "Stop doing that."
"I need my gray coat. It's on your side."
He didn't move. She reached past him and got it.
"You are not driving anywhere at midnight."
"I've driven at midnight my whole life. So have you."
"Where."
"Somewhere."
She got her boots. She took the good hairbrush and left the bad one. She went down the hall to the little room over the porch and took the two composition notebooks off the shelf, and the drive with the session files on it, and her tuner.
Then she opened the bottom desk drawer.
There were nine or ten songs in there, on legal paper and on the backs of set lists, going back years.
Hers. Whole ones, finished ones, things she had never played for anybody because there had never been a reason to and because a Holloways record only held twelve.
She stood there with the drawer open longer than she meant to.
She took all of it.
She left the picture frames, because those were not hers alone.
He followed her the whole way. He was a big man in a narrow hall.
"Tell me what you want," he said.
"Nothing."
"That's not — Sav. Tell me what you want and I'll do it. You want me to call Holt right now? I'll wake him up. You want a co-headline? You want the record shelved?" He was talking faster. "You want me to cancel the tour?"
She stopped at the top of the stairs with the bag on her shoulder.
"Do you want to cancel it?"
He hesitated. It was not long. It was about as long as it takes to breathe in.
"That's what I thought," Savannah said, and went down.
In the kitchen she picked up her guitar case and the yellow page.
"That's mine," he said.
"It's got two hands on it. That makes it half mine, by the rules of this house."
He laughed. It came out wrong and he heard it.
"Come on," he said. "Sav. Put the bag down. Sit down and let me make you eggs, and we'll fight about it in the morning like people do."
There he was.
That was the move. The grin at the edge of it, the eggs, the promise of a tomorrow where nobody had to say anything hard. It had worked on a promoter in Bakersfield. It had worked on a deputy outside Ada, Oklahoma. It had worked on her more times than she was going to count tonight.
She looked at him and felt it work a little, low in her chest, and hated that.
"You still think you can talk me out of this," she said.
"I think we've been through worse."
"We have never been through worse. Nothing has ever happened to us." She shifted the case to her other hand. "That's the thing nobody gets about us. We have been lucky our entire lives. This is the first one."
He came around the island then, fast, and got her hand. His hand was warm, and the ridge of scar across two knuckles from the bus door was right where it always was, and her body knew it the way it knew the drum fill.
"Don't go," he said. "Please."
That was closer. She marked it, the way she'd mark a good take, and did not let it in.
"I'm going to Berry Hill," she said. "Dahlia knows a drummer with an empty house."
"For how long."
"I don't know."
"Savannah."
"I don't know, Deacon." She took her hand back, slowly, because fast would have been a lie about how hard it was. "Go to bed. You've got a six o'clock call."
She was at the door when he said it.
"I never touched her."
She stood with her hand on the knob and her back to him and didn't turn around. That was the whole answer, and he didn't understand that either.
He came out into the drive barefoot while she was setting the guitar behind the seat.
The gravel had to have hurt. He stood in it anyway, in the light off the kitchen window, holding his own elbows in the cold, and for one second he looked like a man who had finally worked something out.
"Sav," he said. "I don't know how to fix this."
"Not tonight."
"Tell me and I'll do it. Anything you say."
"That's the problem," she said. "You have to be told."
She backed out. He was still standing in the gravel when she straightened the wheel, one hand up — not waving, just up.
At the end of the road she checked the mirror. The kitchen light was on. He'd leave it burning all night for her, and tomorrow night, and the night after that.
Her phone lit up on the seat where the binder had ridden home.
11:47 PM. Holt Sennett.
She let it ring twice while she pulled onto the state road. Then she picked it up.