Chapter 4 #2
She went out the front first, into the lot, and stood there in the cold with her guitar still on her back and did a full circle.
Four cars and a van. No black SUV idling.
No driver on his phone. No kid with a long lens leaning on a fender pretending to look at his shoes, which she could spot at two hundred yards and had been able to for six years.
She walked the alley to the end. A dumpster and a stack of pallets.
She came back in and stood in front of Junie's folding chair.
"That fella in the back," she said. "Last row, by the door."
"Ball cap? Came in late?"
"Yeah."
"Paid the ten," Junie said. "Cash, in the can. Asked was there a seat in the back."
"He say anything else?"
Junie pushed her glasses down out of her braid and looked at her properly for the first time in three weeks.
"He said thank you," she said. "Twice. Once at the door and once when he left." She coiled a cable around her elbow. "Honey, if he bothered you, I've got a boy who works Thursdays who'd love to be told to stand outside."
"He didn't bother me."
"Uh-huh."
"How's the lineup get out?" Savannah asked. "Is it posted anywhere?"
"I chalk it on the board out front around six. First names." Junie shrugged. "And forty people know about this room and thirty-eight of them are broke musicians. Word's not a thing I control, and I quit trying about fifteen years ago."
So it wasn't a mystery. Somebody at a session had said Savannah's been playing the Thursday thing over at the Sylvan, and somebody else had said it to somebody else, and it had gotten to him in three weeks, which was about how long it took anything to get anywhere in this town.
That was not the part she couldn't work out.
She sat in her truck in the lot and did the rest of it on her phone, methodically, the way you check a signal chain when something's buzzing and you start at the wall.
Tempo: nothing. Nothing since the tour piece.
The other two trades: nothing.
Deacon's accounts: a photo from the rehearsal hall, posted Tuesday, a shot of a set list on the floor. Nothing since.
Holt's account: a lot of nothing, professionally maintained.
The tagged photos, which took longer and which she did not enjoy: three from a truck stop in Dickson, one of a man's back that wasn't him.
She searched the room's name. Two posts from tonight. One was a blurry shot of Kip with the caption this kid. The other was Junie's chalkboard from six o'clock, first names, hers on line seven, six likes.
Nobody had made anything of it. Nobody had been told to.
She sat with her thumb on the dark screen.
That was what she could not get around. If he had brought one photographer, she'd have had him.
If a single item had run — Deacon Holloway spotted supporting estranged wife at intimate Nashville show — she could have laughed at it out loud in this parking lot and driven home feeling clean.
That would have been the buyout again, in a different suit.
She had a whole shelf of feelings ready for that and every one of them fit her hand.
He had paid ten dollars in cash to a woman with a fanny pack, sat twelve minutes in a folding chair in the last row, said thank you twice, and left before she could get to him.
There was no headline in it. There was nothing for Holt to spin, no angle, no photograph, no version of it that ended up anywhere. It had cost him a Thursday night and it bought him not one single thing he could show anybody.
Which meant it hadn't been for anybody.
Savannah put both hands on the wheel and sat there in the cold and did not like one thing about how that felt.
The publishing had been enormous and it had been paper. This was a man in a folding chair, and it had gotten further into her in twelve minutes than nine pages had in nine days.
She thought about the space over her right shoulder while she was singing, and how he had been sitting in a straight line behind it the whole time, forty feet back, in the dark, in a room where they had once split forty-two dollars.
Her right hand had never once faltered. Her body had known he was in that room a good four bars before her eyes found him in it, and she sat in a cold truck and turned that over for a second and then quit.
"No," she said, out loud, to nobody.
She started the truck.
She was in the rental at ten to twelve, sitting on the plaid throw with a bowl of cereal, when her phone went off twice in a row.
Dahlia. Then a session player she hadn't talked to in a year. That was the pattern by now. When two came in together it was never good.
don't look at it if you don't want to. but you'd rather hear it from me.
She looked at it.
It was on one of the gossip accounts, the kind run by somebody with a laptop and no lawyer, eight thousand followers. A phone photo, shot from a car through a windshield, grainy and blown out on the right where a streetlight sat in the lens.
A woman on a sidewalk with a guitar case and a tote bag over her shoulder, going out a glass studio door. Long light hair, denim jacket. Kinsley Wexler, and it was not arguable, because whoever took it had gotten her face.
The caption said: cutting it late over on wedgewood ?? grind never stops
Under that, the time stamp on the post: 11:04 PM.
Savannah put the bowl down on the floor.
She went back through it, slowly. The photo was tonight. The streetlight, the wet street — it had spit rain a little after ten, she'd had the wipers on going home. Wedgewood was a fifteen-minute drive from the Sylvan Room in no traffic, and at that hour there was no traffic.
She got the pen out of the kitchen drawer and wrote it on the back of a grocery receipt, because writing things down was how she had always found the thing that was wrong in a mix.
10:21 — he comes in the door. 10:33 — he's gone. 11:04 — she's on a sidewalk on Wedgewood.
She looked at the three lines.
It did not have to mean anything. A studio near Wedgewood was a studio near Wedgewood, and there were four of them on that stretch, and a twenty-four-year-old with an album coming out in six weeks would be in one of them until eleven every night God sent.
She knew that. She had lived that. She had been the girl walking out of a studio at eleven o'clock with a tote bag on her shoulder for most of her twenties.
And it did not have to mean the other thing either. He had sat in the back of a room and said thank you twice and gone home.
Both of those were true.
That was the trouble. She could not get them into one shape.
If he was a man running a play, then the folding chair was the play and the sidewalk was the truth, and she could go to bed.
If he was a man who had driven across town alone to sit in the dark and listen to his wife sing a song he had never heard, then the sidewalk was a girl with a job, and she could go to bed.
She could not make either one of them win.
She sat on a stranger's couch in a house that smelled like a stranger's laundry soap and held a grocery receipt with three times on it, and turned it one way, and then the other, and it would not resolve.
At half past twelve she checked her phone one more time, and understood while she was doing it exactly what she was checking for.
He hadn't texted.
In nine years, the man had never once been in a room with her and not said something about it afterward. He texted from forty feet away. He texted from the other side of a bus. There had been a night in Louisville when he sent her a photograph of the back of her own head from the wings.
Nothing. Not tonight, not while she drove home, not now.
Whatever that was, it was on purpose, and she could not decide if it was the kindest thing he had done in five months or one more thing he had thought through without her.
She put the receipt on the arm of the couch and left it there.
She was cold. She pulled the plaid throw up over her own shoulders and sat there under a stranger's blanket, and it did the job.
The kitchen light was off in here. Nobody in this house left one on.