Chapter 3
The rental had a carport, a kitchen too small for a table, and a smell that belonged to somebody else's laundry soap.
It belonged to a session drummer named Cobb who was out on a jazz run in Europe until August. Dahlia had made two calls and gotten the key off a nail in his mother's garage.
There was a mattress, a couch with a plaid throw on it, a coffee maker, and four forks.
Savannah put her guitar on the couch and slept nine hours the first night, which she had not expected and did not forgive herself for.
On the third morning, Ridgeline put out a statement.
She read it standing at the counter with a cup of coffee going cold in her hand.
Deacon Holloway and Savannah Holloway have made the mutual decision to step back from performing as a duo while Deacon focuses on his solo album and the upcoming Long Field Tour. Both artists ask for privacy at this time. There are no further details to share.
She read it twice, which was apparently who she was now.
Mutual. Nobody had called her. Not the label, not the publicist, not her husband. Whoever wrote it had put the word in the same way you put a shim under a table leg, to keep the thing from rocking.
And there was her name. First time Ridgeline had printed Savannah Holloway in six weeks, and they had spent it on the sentence where she left.
She poured the coffee out and made a fresh cup, because she was not going to drink cold coffee about it.
Her phone had been going since six. She scrolled with her thumb, not reading, until she hit his.
Deacon — 7:52 AM I didn't see that before it went out
Deacon — 7:53 AM I'm having Holt pull it
Deacon — 9:31 AM they say pulling it makes it worse
She put the phone face down. Three texts, and every one of them was about a piece of paper.
Dahlia Prater came at noon with two bags of barbecue, a roll of paper towels, and a face like weather coming.
"Don't talk yet," she said, and set it all down on the counter, and then hugged her hard enough to hurt.
Savannah stood in it.
"Okay," Dahlia said, letting go. "Now. I have been on the phone since Thursday and I want you to know exactly what is being said, because you will hear it eventually and I'd rather you hear it from somebody who loves you."
"You don't have to—"
"There's three stories." Dahlia held up fingers. "One. You quit. You got tired, you didn't want the road anymore, you're building a life. That one's from the label, and it's the nice one, and it's the one that ends with people saying bless her heart at a golf tournament."
"Two."
"Two is that you couldn't handle a twenty-four-year-old writing better than you, and you made an ultimatum, and he called it." Dahlia's jaw moved. "That one's got legs, because it's mean and it fits in a text message."
Savannah opened a barbecue bag. "Three."
"Three is you're sick."
"Sick."
"Somebody at a publisher heard you weren't singing and decided it was your throat." Dahlia pulled the plaid throw off the couch and sat down on it. "By Tuesday it was nodes. By Wednesday it was surgery. Tammy Voss asked me at a birthday party if you'd 'gotten the results back.'"
"Good Lord."
"I told her you'd gotten the results back and it was your husband."
Savannah laughed. It came out of her sideways and surprised them both.
"There's a fourth thing," Dahlia said, "and I almost didn't tell you."
"Tell me."
"Randy Osteen called me. Booking guy out of Dallas, works fairs and casinos." Dahlia said it carefully. "He wanted to know if you were available for hire."
"For hire."
"His words. He wanted to know if you'd take a support slot on a package show in the fall." Dahlia looked at her. "Sav, three weeks ago that man could not get you on the phone."
Savannah ate a piece of brisket and thought about it.
Nine years. Half the words on every record with his name on the spine, and it had taken four days for the town to decide she was a hired singer between gigs.
"What'd you tell him?" she asked.
"I told him you were booked."
"I'm not booked."
"You will be," Dahlia said, "and until then, we lie."
She went out for coffee filters that evening because the drummer's cabinet had none, and a woman recognized her in the checkout line at the market on Bransford.
Fifties, good haircut, holding a rotisserie chicken.
"You're her," the woman said. "You're Savannah. From the Holloways."
"I am."
"Oh, honey." The woman's face did the thing. The whole thing, start to finish, right there in front of the gum. "We saw y'all in Chattanooga. We drove up. My husband cried at 'Two Chairs,' and that man does not cry."
"Thank you for that."
"You tell me it isn't true."
Savannah picked up her filters and put them on the belt.
"Ma'am, I'm just getting coffee filters," she said, gently.
"He always did seem like—" The woman stopped herself, which was a mercy. "Well. You're too good for it."
The girl at the register scanned the filters and did not look up, which Savannah appreciated more than anything anyone had said to her all week.
She got to the truck before she put her hands on the steering wheel and just sat.
It was going to be like that in every line she stood in for the rest of her life. That was the thing about a marriage people bought tickets to look at. It did not end when you left the house. It ended in public, slowly, in front of strangers holding chickens.
Odette Callahan's office was up a set of outside stairs over a coffee shop in Berry Hill, in a house somebody had converted badly in about 1978.
No gold records on the walls. Case files, boxed and labeled and stacked to the picture rail, with a hand-lettered index card on the end of every box. A window unit that shuddered when it kicked on and made the blinds tick against the frame.
Odette was fifty-one, in reading glasses and a cardigan, with a legal pad and a mechanical pencil and no interest at all in who Savannah was.
"Sit," she said. "I've read the trades so you don't have to catch me up. Tell me what you own."
"I don't know."
"That's a real answer. Most people say they know." Odette clicked the pencil. "Let's find out. The house."
"Both names."
"Bank accounts."
"Both. There's a business account too, for the touring company."
"Who signs on it?"
"Holt's office signs on it," Savannah said, and heard how it sounded.
Odette wrote that down without commenting, which was somehow worse.
"The catalogue," Odette said. "The songs. Whose are they?"
"Ours. Both of us. It's all under one publishing entity."
"Do you have the paper?"
"Somewhere."
"Get it." Odette looked at her over the glasses. "Not a copy of a copy. The signed original with the exhibits attached. Every page."
"Holt would have it."
"Holt should not be the only person on earth who has it." Odette clicked the pencil again. "Who drafted it?"
"He did. His firm did. Nine years ago."
"Represented which of you?"
Savannah sat there.
"It was a wedding present," she said.
The window unit kicked on and the blinds ticked.
"All right," Odette said, and wrote a line on her pad, and drew a small square box beside it, and did not fill the box in.
"We'll come back to that. I don't want to chase it before I've read it, and I'd rather read it slow.
Nine years of a thing nobody has looked at line by line — that's usually just boring. Sometimes it isn't."
"You think there's something in it?"
"I think I've been doing this thirty years and I have opinions about gifts from managers." Odette put the pad down. "Now. What do you want?"
"What do you mean?"
"It's the only question in this office that matters. Some women want out fast. Some want the house. Some want him ruined, and I'll take that case too, though it costs more and feels worse." Odette folded her hands. "What do you want, Mrs. Holloway?"
Savannah looked at the boxes on the shelves.
"I want my name on what's mine," she said.
Odette wrote that down too.
She went back to the Harpeth House on a Monday morning, when she knew he'd be at the rehearsal hall, and let herself in the side door.
The kitchen light was on.
It took her forty minutes to find the file drawer she wanted, in the office off the den, under two years of tax folders. HOLLOWAY PUBLISHING — AGREEMENT. She sat on the floor and went through it.
The agreement was in there. Twenty-two pages, three-hole punched, with her signature on the last one in the handwriting she'd had at twenty-five, when she still put a little loop on the S.
It was a photocopy.
She checked every page. Photocopy, all the way through, and the exhibit pages were photocopies of photocopies, gray and soft at the edges, the way paper gets when a machine has eaten it four times. At the bottom of one page a staple shadow ran through the text like a bruise.
She sat on the floor of her own house and thought about the day they signed it.
A conference room with a bowl of mints. Holt with his sleeves rolled up, telling them both it was housekeeping, it was the boring part, it was his gift to them and they'd thank him in ten years.
Deacon signed first, fast, because he signed everything fast. She had read maybe four pages of it and then felt rude, and stopped.
She put the copy in her bag and left the light on, because it was not hers to turn off.
Odette turned it over in her hands the next day and made a face.
"This is what we've got?"
"That's what's in the house."
"Then the original's in Holt Sennett's fireproof cabinet," Odette said, "which is a sentence I'd like you to remember later," and she put it in a box with a hand-lettered card on the end and set it on the shelf.
The offer came on a Wednesday, by courier, in an envelope thick enough to stand on its own.
Odette called her in and had it on the desk when she got there, along with two cups of coffee from downstairs, one of which was for Savannah and one of which Odette had clearly already been through.
"Sennett Media sent it," Odette said. "Not Deacon's counsel. His manager's office. That's the first thing I want you to notice."
"Okay."