Chapter 6
"You have to go," Odette said.
The window unit in her office kicked on and rattled for four seconds and settled, the way it had four times since Savannah sat down.
"I don't have to do anything."
"That's true. Let me say it the other way.
" Odette Callahan was fifty-one and had a habit of squaring a stack of paper before she said something she'd already decided.
She squared it. "There are two stories in this town right now.
One is that you two are handling a hard thing like adults.
The other is that you were thrown off a record you helped build and you're at home with the curtains shut. "
"Three. Dahlia says there's three."
"There are three. The third one is about your throat and I'm not going to dignify it.
" She set the stack down. "If you go, tonight is a woman standing in a room she's entitled to stand in.
If you don't go, tonight is an empty chair, and every person with a phone in that building writes the caption themselves. "
Savannah looked at the case files on the wall where other people kept gold records.
"The label called you," she said.
"The label's counsel called me. Twice." Odette almost smiled. "They would like me to know that they consider your attendance mutually beneficial."
"I'll bet."
"I told them I'd pass it along. Then I read the reissue paperwork myself, which is a different thing entirely, and Savannah — you're not invited to that event as anybody's wife.
" She tapped the stack. "You're a writer on eight of the fourteen tracks.
You have a statutory interest in the reissue.
If you walked in there with no last name at all they'd still have to hand you a drink. "
That landed somewhere it had not been aimed.
"Eight of fourteen," Savannah said.
"Eight of fourteen."
"They've been calling it his debut for ten years."
"They've been calling it ten years, too, and the record came out eight years ago.
" Odette turned a page around and pushed it across.
"The date they're counting from is on the tape box.
Half of it was cut in a rented room on Douglas before the two of you had a name.
Somebody in marketing decided the tape box was the prettier number. "
Savannah read it upside down and then right side up.
"So it's not the anniversary of anything," she said.
"It's the anniversary of a box."
Dahlia came at five with a curling iron she did not need to bring and a bottle of wine neither of them opened.
Savannah wore a black dress she had owned for six years and a pair of boots she had worn on four tours.
Nobody had approved either one. She had gotten used to a woman coming to the bus with a rack and three options and a phone full of what the other acts were wearing, and she stood in front of a mirror in a rental house in Berry Hill and understood that not one human being on earth was going to have an opinion about her tonight before she walked out the door.
"You want me to come," Dahlia said. It was not a question and it was not an offer, exactly. It was a door left open.
"No."
"Okay."
"If you're there I'll look at you." Savannah put her earrings in. "If I look at you I'm done."
"That's the smartest thing you've said in a month."
She stopped with her hand on her left ring finger.
She had been turning it for five months. She had caught herself doing it in a dressing room in March and made herself stop, and had been catching herself ever since.
"Don't," Dahlia said quietly.
"I wasn't going to."
"You were thinking about it."
"Taking it off tonight is a sentence," Savannah said. "In eight-point type, under a photograph. I'm not writing anybody's headline for free."
She left it on.
Cordelia Hall smelled like floor wax and old coffee.
They had the loading doors shut this time and the heat up, and there was a red runner down the sidewalk that they put out maybe twice a year, and a dozen photographers behind a rope.
Savannah got out of her own truck two blocks up and walked, because she was not going to be handed out of a car.
They got her at forty feet. She heard the shutters start and it sounded exactly like what it was, a lot of small machines going at once. Somebody said her first name in the tone people use for a dog they are not sure about. Somebody else said Savannah, over here about nine times.
She did not speed up and she did not slow down. She had been walking past these men since she was twenty-five. The trick was that there was no trick. You picked a spot on the door and you went to it at the speed of an ordinary woman going into a building.
For nine years he had walked the camera side of her through that forty feet, half a step up, so the long lenses got the back of a hat instead of her face.
She had never asked him to do it and he had never once mentioned doing it.
Nobody was on the camera side tonight. The wind came off the sidewalk on her left and there was nothing standing between it and her the whole way in.
Inside, a girl with a tablet said, "Ms. Holloway, we've got you at table four," and then went slightly gray, because table four was where they had put her.
"Table four's fine," Savannah said.
They had done it nicely, she'd give them that.
The lobby had the album cover blown up to nine feet on a stand — the two of them on a tailgate, ten years younger, her hair a color it had not been since.
There was a listening station with the new masters and a wall of the original session photos.
Wade Pruitt was in one of them with hair.
Half the room turned when she came in, and then did the thing where everybody remembered a drink they needed.
Holt Sennett got to her before she was fifteen feet in.
"There she is," he said.
"Holt."
"You look well." He took her hand in both of his, which he had done at every event for fifteen years and which had never once meant anything. "I mean that. I've been worried."
"You could have called."
"I called."
"You called Odette." She got her hand back. "Twice."
He laughed like she'd made a joke, because he was very good, and had been very good for a long time. "It's a good night. It's a nice night for the record. Four minutes of remarks, then they play 'Ash Creek' and 'Dry County' off the new masters, then everybody drinks and goes home."
"Whose four minutes?"
"His." Holt patted his inside pocket. "It's on a card. I wrote it Monday and legal read it Tuesday. It's about the record, and it thanks the room, and it says the word Holloways four times, which is more than anybody expected me to get in there."
He said that last part to her like it was a present.
"Holt," she said. "Is he going to talk about me?"
Holt Sennett's face did not change at all, which was how she knew he had considered the question before.
"He's going to talk about the record," he said.
Table four was three rows back on the left, which was better than she'd expected and worse than it should have been.
She sat with a publicist she had known for six years, a man from the pressing plant who talked about vinyl weights for four solid minutes and was the easiest company in the building, and two empty chairs.
Kinsley Wexler was not there. Savannah checked the room once, properly, the way you check a set list, and then quit thinking about it. Somebody had been smart about that, and it was not Deacon, and she knew exactly whose card it was on.
Wade Pruitt came over between the second and third pass of the waiters. He had a beer he was not drinking and he had put on a jacket.
"Savannah."
"Wade."
"Alma's here." He tipped his head toward the back. His wife lifted two fingers off her glass. "She made me come say hello. I was going to anyway. She just made it quicker."
"How's the room treating you?"
"Like a man who signed a paper." He turned the beer around on the tablecloth. "They've got me on the tour, and I'm going on it, and I've told about nine people tonight that I'm going on it, and every one of them looked at me like I stole a car."
"You didn't."
"I know what I did."
"You told me the truth in a hallway when nobody made you." Savannah picked up her water. "Go on the tour, Wade. Buy the bus payment."
He stood there a second longer, the way a man does when he came over expecting a fight and did not get one and does not know where to put his hands.
"That harmony on 'Ash Creek,'" he said. "I ran that mix nine hundred times. I know whose it is."
Then he went back to Alma.
They gave the remarks at nine, in the hall itself, with the house lights half up and a hundred and forty seats mostly full and three cameras on tripods at the back.
Deacon came out from stage left with the hat off.
He looked like a man who had not slept, which she noted and refused to do anything with. He had a card in his hand. She watched him not look at it.
He thanked the room. He thanked the engineer who had done the transfers, by name, and the woman at the label who had chased down the original session reels, by name, and Savannah thought: all right, so far that's the card.
Then he stopped and put the card in his jacket pocket.
The stillness came into the room about a half second after it came into her.
"This record's ten years old," he said. "Or eight. Depends what you count. I want to say who made it."
Nobody moved.
"The harmony on 'Ash Creek' — the three stacked parts, the thing everybody plays for their friends in a car — my wife built that at our kitchen table over two days singing into a phone.
It's not an arrangement. It's a composition.
She wrote it." He looked at the back of the room, not at the front.
"The second verse of 'Tall Weeds' is hers, whole, every word.
'Cold Hands' is hers. Words and melody. I changed one word in it and I've been thanked for that song about four hundred times. "
Savannah heard the man beside her stop chewing.