Chapter 4
The Sylvan Room held eighty people and had never once held eighty people.
Nine years ago The Holloways had played their first show in that room. Thirty-one people. They'd split forty-two dollars and eaten at a Waffle House afterward and argued about whether they should be a band.
Savannah had not walked in the door since.
The first Thursday she went, she sat in the lot for seven minutes before she got out of the truck.
There was a clipboard on a nail by the door with a pen tied to it with kite string. Twelve lines on it, and whoever got a name down got a chair. She wrote Savannah on line seven and left the rest of the line blank.
Nobody looked up. That was the whole thing right there. Nobody looked up.
She played two songs and left before the last round, and drove home with her hands shaking on the wheel, and came back the next week.
Thursday started badly, the way most of them did now.
At ten in the morning a producer named Farrow called to move a session she'd been booked on since January — background vocals on a record by an artist she liked, three days of work, honest money.
He moved it to June. He was very warm about it.
He used the word schedules four times in ninety seconds and never once used the word Deacon, which was how she knew.
"June's fine," Savannah said.
"It's just a moving target right now."
"June's fine, Farrow."
He was relieved and got off the phone fast.
She stood in the drummer's kitchen and looked at the counter, where Odette's acknowledgment letter had been sitting for six days under the salt shaker. One line, three inches long, above her printed name.
She had picked it up twice that week. Both times she'd put it back.
At noon she took a two-mile walk because sitting still had begun to feel like a decision.
At two she restrung the guitar. At four she ran the old no-title song through until her voice sat down where she wanted it, and then she made herself stop, because a song you work all afternoon comes out embalmed.
At six she put the case in the truck.
The Thursday round was the one thing on her calendar that nobody had to approve.
Tonight was her third.
Junie Marsh ran the room. Sixty-odd, silver braid down her back, reading glasses pushed up into it, and a fanny pack she used as a cash drawer without one ounce of shame about it.
She ran the board from a folding chair at the end of the front row and she had a rule she said out loud at the start of every round: nobody talks during a song, and I mean nobody, and I will look at you.
"Line seven," Junie said, checking the clipboard. "Savannah. You want the pickup on channel two or you singing off the vocal mic?"
"Channel two."
"Good girl. Half of them don't know."
The green room was a hallway with a couch in it. Tobe Whitaker was already on the couch, a heavy man in his sixties with a resonator across his knees, restringing it while he talked.
"You're the one from last week," he said. "The waltz."
"That's me."
"That bridge went somewhere I didn't think it was going." He bit off the string end. "Who wrote it?"
"I did."
"Huh," Tobe said, and went back to his winding, and that was the best review Savannah had gotten in four years.
The third player was a kid named Kip Vance, twenty-two, all elbows, tuning a guitar that had been badly refretted by somebody who loved it.
"Y'all been doing this long?" he asked the room.
"Since before you had teeth," Tobe said.
"I mean her."
Savannah put her capo on the second fret. "A little while."
"You don't sound new."
"I'm not new. I'm just new here."
Kip nodded like that was a normal thing to say, because in this town it was, and asked her if she knew anybody at a publisher, and she said no, and it was not even a lie in any way that mattered.
Sixty-one people, Junie said afterward. It felt like more, the way a small room does.
They sat in a half circle in the two stage lights with the window unit going, and they went around, three songs each.
Tobe played a thing about his brother's boat.
Kip played a breakup song about a girl who worked at a bank, and it was better than it had any right to be, and he rushed the last chorus because he was scared of it.
Then it came to her.
Savannah put her foot up on the rail of the chair and did not say anything before she played, because she had learned in three weeks that saying something first was a thing people did to buy insurance.
She played an old one. No title on it, no title yet. She'd written the first verse in a motel in Amarillo and finished it in a laundry room, and it had sat in a drawer for years because a Holloways record only ever had so many slots on it and it was not a duet and never would be.
She sang it alone.
That was still the strangest part. Not the room, not the folding chairs, not the fanny pack.
It was the space over her right shoulder where a second voice went, and the fact that nothing came into it.
Nine years of a man's baritone sitting a third under her, and now there was a hole in the air the size of a person, and the song did not fall down.
It just sounded like one voice. Which was accurate.
She got to the last line and put her hand flat on the strings to kill them, and for about a second and a half nobody in that room made a sound, and Savannah stood inside that second and a half and understood exactly what it was.
Then they clapped, and Tobe hit the side of his resonator with his knuckles twice, and Junie said, "Well, all right," from her chair.
Kip leaned over. "Where's that one on?"
"It's not on anything."
"Why not?"
She didn't have an answer that was any of his business, so she smiled at him and started her second one.
A man in the third row said, "You got any more like that?"
"I've got eight," Savannah said, and the room laughed, and Junie looked at him anyway on principle.
The second one was faster and older and had a walking bass line in the thumb that she had stolen off a record when she was seventeen. She had never played it for anybody either.
The gap came up in the second chorus. She heard it coming the way you hear a stair you know is loose — four bars of nothing where a baritone had lived for nine years. It had always sat so far under her that people at the mix desk used to ask her to bring it up.
She dropped her own voice into it.
It was not the same. It was not close to the same. It was thinner and it was hers, and it took the line down instead of holding it up, and it worked, and it did something to the shape of the whole verse.
She heard it happen in real time, the way she used to hear a bad take. Except this was the other kind.
Some part of her started writing it down while her hands kept playing. Low answer, second chorus. Not a harmony. An answer. She would put it on a receipt in the truck later and forget where she'd put the receipt.
She finished. Tobe hit the resonator twice again.
She saw Deacon in the middle of her last one.
Back row, last chair on the aisle by the door.
Hat off and in his hands. No jacket she recognized.
He'd come in during the applause after Tobe's third, when the room made noise and the door made none, which meant he had stood out in that alley in the cold and waited for the exact right eight seconds.
Her right hand kept going. That surprised her.
So did the rest of it. He had lost weight — she got that in the first second, the way you get a level before you get a word, the shirt sitting off his shoulders wrong and the wrists coming out of the cuffs.
He had one hand flat on his knee and the thumb was going, small, the way it did when he was making himself sit still.
She took the reading and put her eyes on the back wall, because she had a verse to finish.
She had wondered what she would do. She had put a lot of miles on that question in three weeks — grocery store, gas station, a light on Wedgewood — imagining walking into a room and finding him in it. In every version of it she was fast and clean and said one perfect sentence.
What actually happened was that her right hand kept going and her voice stayed where it was, and she looked at the back wall over his head and finished the verse, and the sixty-one people in that room learned nothing at all.
He didn't wave. He didn't lift his chin. He didn't do the thing he did in every venue in America, where he found her in a room and made a face until she made one back.
He sat with his hat in his hands and looked at the floor for the first half of it and at her for the second, and when she finished he clapped, once, like everybody else, and no harder than anybody else.
Kip took the last slot of the night. A song about his grandfather, three chords, and he sold it.
Savannah sat through it with her heart going in her ears like a foot on a floor tom, and did not turn her head one inch.
When Junie brought the lights up, the last chair on the aisle was empty.
The door was shut. The window unit hummed. Somebody's chair scraped.
He had been in the room maybe twelve minutes.
She got her case and went down the hallway to the couch and sat on it with her hands in her lap, and Tobe Whitaker came in behind her and started packing the resonator away.
"You know that fella?" he said.
"Which one."
"Ball cap. Back row." Tobe snapped the case latches, one and then the other. "Sat like a man at a funeral."
"I might."
"Mm." He got his coat off the hook. "I had a wife once who could tell who was in a room by how the room went. Drove me crazy. She was right every time."
"What happened to her?"
"Nothing. She's at home. We've been married thirty-one years." Tobe put his hat on. "I just never did learn how she did it."
He went out the back way, and Savannah sat there another minute, and then she went looking.
She looked for the trick.