Chapter 5 #2
"Send me all ten. Rough is fine. A phone on a kitchen counter is fine. I'd rather have the room noise than a demo somebody polished the life out of." She was already stepping back. "One thing."
"Say it."
"Don't send them if you're going to want them back in six months when things settle down. I don't take deposits."
"Nothing's settling down," Savannah said.
"All right, then."
She went out the red door without looking back at the room, and Savannah stood there holding a business card and could not have told anybody, for two full seconds, what her own face was doing.
The man was in the last chair on the aisle by the door.
She saw him when she turned around, and something in her chest went sideways for half a second and then came back down, because it was not him.
It was a big man in his late fifties, white hair cut close, canvas jacket, sitting in that exact chair with his hands on his knees. He had been there the whole round. She had looked straight past him four separate times, which said something about what she had been braced for and what she had not.
He stood up when she came down the aisle, which made him considerably taller.
"Silas Rourke," he said.
She knew the name the way everybody in town knew the name. He had written for other people for thirty years and had never once been famous, and there were four songs on the radio in any given week that existed because he had sat in a room and fixed them.
"Savannah."
"I know who you are." He put no weight on it at all. "That bridge."
"Yeah."
"Who wrote the bridge?"
"I did."
He nodded, slow, and she understood he was not finished. "Who was in the room?"
"Nobody."
"Nobody at all."
"I wrote it on a paint bucket in an empty house six years ago and I fixed it Tuesday morning by myself," Savannah said. "Nobody's in it. That was what was wrong with it."
Silas Rourke took his hands off his hips and put them in his jacket pockets. It was a small thing. She watched a man rearrange his opinion in real time and not bother to hide any part of it. He looked at the stage lights a second. Then back at her.
"I've been coming in this room since it had another name on the door," he said. "That's the best thing I've heard in here all year."
"It's March."
"I know what month it is." He almost smiled. "It's the best thing I've heard in here all year."
He did not give her a card. He did not offer her anything.
On his way out he asked Junie whether the round ran every Thursday, and Junie said it had run every Thursday since 2003 and would run the Thursday after she died, and Silas Rourke said that was good to know and pushed the red door open with his shoulder.
Savannah stood there with the case against her leg.
"Junie."
"Mm."
"How often does he come?"
"Four, five times a year." Junie was winding a cable around her elbow. "Sits in the back. Buys nothing. Talks to nobody."
"He talked to me."
"I saw that." Junie hung the cable on its nail and did not turn around. "Twenty-two years I've run this room. That's the second time."
"Who was the first?"
"Tobe. About nine years back." She dropped the clipboard in her fanny pack and zipped it. "He'll tell you the whole story if you let him, and I'd recommend you don't. Go home, honey. You've got a face on."
"What face."
"The one where you're about to go home and take it apart to see if it's real." Junie killed the second stage light. "It was real. Go on."
The bar was on the east side and it was, as promised, ugly.
Drop ceiling. Christmas lights in March.
A cover band called Full Freight playing "Chain of Fools" a half step under where anybody alive could sing it.
The bass player did have a ponytail, and at ten forty a woman came in with a sandwich in a bag and handed it to him and left without taking her coat off.
"Told you," Dahlia said.
"You did."
"Say it."
"You told me."
They got a table with one short leg and a basket of something orange.
Nobody in that room knew who Savannah was.
She checked, out of habit, the way you check your pockets — one slow look around at who was looking — and nobody was, because every person in there was thirty deep into their own Thursday.
Dahlia made her dance to a song she hated. Then to one she didn't. Savannah had not danced badly in public since she was twenty-six, because for nine years there had been a version of her that people took pictures of, and that version did not dance badly anywhere on earth.
Dahlia led badly and laughed about it. At no point in an hour and a half did anybody's hand arrive at Savannah's waist from behind and turn her a quarter turn out of the way of a tray, which for nine years had been a thing that happened to her about twice a night.
She got out of the way of the tray herself.
By eleven thirty she was sweating and out of breath and laughing at nothing.
At one point Dahlia leaned across the table and shouted, "That woman gave you a card."
"Yes."
"A real one?"
"Hensley."
Dahlia sat back and put both hands flat on the table like a woman about to be sworn in, and did not say one word about it, and somehow that was better than anything she could have said.
They ate tacos off a truck on Gallatin at half past midnight, standing up in the cold against the side of Dahlia's car.
Dahlia told a long story about a wedding she had worked where the groom's uncle drove a riding mower into a tent.
Savannah laughed so hard she had to set her food down on the hood.
It was the first hour in five months that cost nothing and meant nothing, and she would not have traded it for the buyout.
She got back to the rental at ten after one.
She hung her coat on the chair. She stood the guitar in the corner. She poured a glass of water and drank it in the kitchen that was too small for a table, still buzzing a little, the way you do after a room goes quiet on you.
She was running the bridge back in her head — checking it, listening for whether it had actually worked or whether she had only wanted it to — when she noticed the thing.
She had not thought about Deacon all day.
Not once.
She went back through it to be sure, because she did not trust herself on this and hadn't for weeks.
Tuesday morning on the floor with the songs, no.
Dahlia and the coffee, no. Getting ready, the drive, the clipboard, the green room, Kip's hat.
The bridge. Corinne Ledbetter's boots. Silas Rourke in the last chair on the aisle, and even then it was half a second and then nothing.
Fourteen hours. Maybe sixteen.
She stood there and waited to feel good about it.
What came instead was the floor going out from under something.
Because if she could do sixteen hours in March, she could do a whole day by April and a week by summer, and that was not healing.
That was practice. You get better at anything you do every day.
She had built a nine-year career on that exact principle.
She had probably built a marriage on it too, which was not a thought she was going to have all the way through at one in the morning in a rented kitchen.
The other thing was smaller and worse.
She had solved a bridge she had been carrying since she was twenty-eight. Alone. In forty minutes.
And there was exactly one person on this earth who would have understood what she'd done and why it had been hard, and he would have understood it in about four seconds, and he would have made the face he made.
She had her phone in her hand.
She had not decided to pick it up. It was just there, and the screen was lit, and his name was under her thumb, and she had gotten as far as the first two words.
I fixed
She looked at it a long time.
Then she deleted it one letter at a time, because holding the key down felt like something she'd think about later.
Her thumb stayed on the dark screen a while after there was nothing left to delete.
She set the phone face down on the counter and went to bed.
The bed in the drummer's spare room was a double.
She had been sleeping on the left of it since March, which nobody had decided.
The right side stayed made. Twice now she had come half awake around three and put a foot back across the cold half of it hunting a shin, and found sheet, and taken the foot back.
She did not make anything of it. It was a fact about a bed.
She lay in the dark in a stranger's house and understood that the best day she'd had in five months and the loneliest one were the same day, and that nobody was ever going to explain that to her in a way that helped.