Chapter 5
There were ten of them.
She had thought nine. She counted them twice on the floor of the rental on Tuesday morning, laid out in two rows across a carpet that belonged to a drummer in Europe, and there were ten.
The tenth had been stuck to the back of another one. Motel paper does that in a drawer over six years. Humidity, a hot house, nobody opening the drawer.
She sat cross-legged in the middle of them with her coffee going cold and read her own handwriting getting younger as she went down the row.
Most of them were finished. She had been honest with the man at the Sylvan Room when she told him she had eight, and she had also been wrong, and it was a nice thing to be wrong about.
The tenth was not finished. It had never been finished. She had written the first verse the winter they bought the Harpeth House, sitting on a paint bucket in a room with no furniture in it, and she had carried it around unsolved ever since.
Two verses and a chorus about hard water.
Her grandmother's well in Maury County. The white scale that built up inside the kettle, that you could not taste going in and could not get off with anything but vinegar and time.
That was the whole idea. Something gets into a house so slow that nobody notices until it lines the pot.
The bridge had never worked. Six years.
She got the guitar and ran the verses to remind her hands, and then she went at the bridge again the way she had gone at it in four states and one hospital waiting room.
Four bars in, she heard the problem, and it was so stupid she laughed out loud in an empty house.
She had written a duet bridge.
Every version of it, all six years of it, had been built with a hole in the middle for a second voice.
She had left a gap and written toward the gap and then wondered why the thing sagged.
It sagged because it was a bridge with a man standing in it, and the man had never once been told he was in it.
She took him out.
It took forty minutes. She pulled the answering line up out of the gap and put it under her own melody instead, low, the way she had done by accident three weeks ago in front of sixty-one people.
Not a harmony. An answer. Her voice going down while the words went up, so it came out sounding like a woman arguing with herself and losing.
The low line sat exactly where his had sat. Same place in her throat, the same three or four notes she had spent nine years leaving room for and had never once put anything into. It fit. She noticed that it fit and went on to the next bar.
She played it through clean at ten past noon.
Then she sat with her hand flat on the strings and did not move for a while.
The song was called "Hard Water." She wrote the title across the top of the page, which she had not done in six years, because you do not name a thing you have not solved.
Dahlia came by at four with two coffees and a paper bag of something fried.
"I'm not staying," she said, and sat down.
"Sit down."
"I'm sitting." She put the bag on the floor, because there was no table. Dahlia Prater was thirty-five and had dressed every day since she was nineteen like she was about to be photographed, and it had never once been true. "Thursday. After your thing."
"After my thing what."
"We're going out."
"I don't go out."
"You don't go out because for four years you were on a bus, and now for three weeks you've been in a house that smells like a stranger's towels.
" Dahlia peeled the lid off her coffee. "I've got a place.
It's ugly. There's a cover band. The bass player has a ponytail and his wife brings him a sandwich at the break. "
"That's a real thing you've seen."
"That's a real thing I've seen twice." She looked at the pages spread on the carpet. "What's all that."
"Work."
"Uh-huh." She did not pick any of them up, which was the best single thing about her. "You finish one?"
"One."
"The one you've been dragging around since the paint bucket?"
Savannah looked at her.
"I remember things," Dahlia said. "It's my entire personality." She stood and brushed off the back of her jeans. "Thursday. Ugly bar. Say yes so I can go."
"Yes."
"There she is."
Wednesday she registered them.
It took her most of the morning at the kitchen counter with the laptop propped on a cookbook, because the rental had no desk and the drummer's internet cut out every twenty minutes for reasons nobody would ever explain to her.
Ten songs. Titles, dates, durations. She timed each one twice with the stopwatch on her phone and wrote the numbers on a legal pad first, because she did not trust herself to type into a form without a paper version to check against. That was how she had learned to do everything.
Get it on paper, then get it right, then get it in the machine.
Then the writer fields.
Writer 1. A box about two inches wide with a blinking line in it.
She typed HOLLOWAY, SAVANNAH.
Share. 100.
Writer 2.
She left it blank and hit the button that added the next song, and the form cleared and gave her a fresh empty box, and she typed it again. Ten times. HOLLOWAY, SAVANNAH. One hundred. Blank.
Somewhere around the seventh one she stopped and put both hands in her lap and just looked at the screen.
She had filled out these forms before. Not many — Holt's office had a woman who did the registrations, and had done them since before Savannah's name was on anything.
But she had filled out enough over the years to know the shape of the thing, and it took her until the seventh song on a Wednesday in a rented kitchen to notice she had never once been the name in the first box.
Not on any record. Not on the ones she wrote by herself and gave away, either, because when a Holloway song went in, it went in the way the office typed it, and the office had always typed it the same way.
It was not a thing that had ever cost her a nickel that she knew of. It was alphabetical, probably. It was just how they did it.
She finished the last three, and paid the fee with a debit card in her own name, and got a confirmation email back before she had shut the laptop, with a number in it that did not belong to anybody but her.
She printed it at a copy shop on Nolensville Pike for thirty cents and put it in her bag.
Junie Marsh had the clipboard on the nail before six.
"Line seven again," she said, "or you want to mix it up and scare everybody."
"Seven's fine."
"Seven's fine." She wrote it in herself, which she had not done the first three weeks. "Channel two?"
"Channel two."
"Good girl."
The green room was the same hallway with the same couch. Tobe Whitaker was on it with the resonator across his knee. Kip Vance had gotten a hat somewhere and it was not working for him yet.
"That hat is brand new," Tobe said.
"It's not brand new."
"Son, I can see the crease."
Savannah put her capo on the second fret and let them go at it. There were four players tonight instead of three. The fourth was a woman her own age named Deb who taught school in Hendersonville and wrote murder ballads, and who shook hands like she was closing on a house.
Junie counted sixty-eight in the chairs. On a Thursday in March, in a brick room with a window unit, that was a crowd.
They went around. Tobe played the boat song again because a man asked for it.
Deb sang a murder ballad and did not blink through any of it.
Kip played the bank-teller song and did not rush the last chorus, and looked up afterward to see whether Savannah had caught it, and she gave him one nod, and he went about six inches taller.
Then it came to her, and she played "Hard Water" in front of people for the first time.
She said nothing before it. She had learned that in the first week.
The verses did what verses do. The room came in around the second one, the way a room does when it decides to pay attention, all the small noises stopping at slightly different times.
Then the bridge.
She dropped her voice into the low line and let the words climb over the top of it, and the room quit making any sound at all, and she kept her eyes on the back wall and did not go looking for what that meant, because that was a good way to break your own hands.
She landed it and killed the strings with her palm.
Junie said, "Well." Then she did not say anything else, which from Junie was a standing ovation.
Tobe hit the side of the resonator twice with his knuckles, and then, after a second, twice more.
The publisher was standing by the coffee can while Savannah shut her case.
She was around fifty, in a good coat and boots that had been rained on plenty, and she waited until both latches were closed before she opened her mouth. That by itself was worth something.
"Corinne Ledbetter," she said. "Hensley Music Group."
"Savannah."
"I know."
Savannah stood up with the case in her hand. "Then let's do the part where I ask."
"Go ahead."
"Do you know who I'm married to?"
"Yes."
"Is that why you're standing here?"
Corinne Ledbetter did not do the thing people did, which was to look wounded on Savannah's behalf. She shifted the strap of her bag on her shoulder.
"That bridge is eight bars," she said. "You come off the second one with the answer under the melody instead of over it.
Nobody does that, because it's hard to sing and it's harder to mix.
It is the only interesting thing I have heard in this town since January, and I sit in three writers' rooms a week.
" She got a card out of her coat pocket.
"So, no. I've got a girl cutting a record in June with eleven songs and one hole in it, and I don't much care who anybody's married to. "
Savannah took the card. Heavy stock, a phone number, no title under the name.
"You said you had eight," Corinne said.
"You were here last week."
"I've been here three weeks. I sit in the back and I've paid the ten dollars every time. Ask Junie."
"I have ten," Savannah said. "Eight finished. Two I want another week with."