Chapter 6 #2
"Half the writing on that record is Savannah's," Deacon said. "That's not a compliment. I'm not standing up here being sweet about my wife. That's the credit. It's how it happened."
He put his hands in his pockets and left them there.
"For a long time this business has told a story about a fella with a gift and the girl who sang with him.
I knew it wasn't true. I knew it wasn't true the first time somebody said it to my face in a radio station in Amarillo, and I let it stand, and I let it stand for nine years.
" He said it flat, like a man reading a serial number off the back of an amp.
"Because it was easier. Because it made me look better than I am. And because I made money on it."
Somebody two tables over said something under their breath.
"I'm not asking anybody for anything tonight," he said. "There's no announcement. I'm correcting a credit that's been wrong since I was twenty-six, and I'm doing it in the room where it got wrong, in front of the people who wrote it down that way, and every one of you knows who you are."
He picked his hat up off the stool.
"Play the record," he said. "It's hers as much as it's mine. That's all I've got."
They turned to look at her.
Not all of them. It only takes a dozen people in a room that size, and then the rest follow, and by the time the applause got going properly there were a hundred and forty faces and three cameras pointed at table four.
Savannah put her hands together and clapped.
Once. Then again. At exactly the speed everybody else was clapping, and no harder, and she thought about a man in a folding chair in the back of a brick room three weeks ago doing the same thing, and put that away too.
Her face did nothing. She had spent nine years learning what her face did in a lit room, and tonight it did nothing, and it did nothing well.
Under the table her left hand was flat on her knee, pressed down, holding still.
She did not watch Deacon walk off. She watched Holt.
He was standing at the side wall by the stage-left steps with his arms down and his hands open, and he was applauding, and he had gotten his face arranged inside about two seconds, which was faster than anybody else in that building could have done it.
He clapped with the room. He nodded at a woman from the label like the two of them had discussed it beforehand.
Then he took his phone out of his jacket, in the dark, and started typing with one thumb, and his eyes never left the stage.
Fifteen years he had run that man. He had a card in his other pocket with four minutes on it that nobody was ever going to read, and he was not angry, and he was not surprised, and he was already working.
That was the thing about Holt Sennett. He did not have opinions. He had a next step.
The lights went down and "Ash Creek" came up off the new masters, and it was gorgeous, and they had done a beautiful job with it, and there she was at the top of the second chorus in a three-part stack she had built with cold coffee in front of her, twenty-four years old, absolutely certain she was going to be given her share of everything.
She sat through both songs.
When the lights came up she stood, and shook four hands on the way out — the transfer engineer, whose work she praised specifically because it deserved it; the woman who'd found the reels; a man from Ridgeline whose name she used; Corinne Ledbetter, who had somehow gotten herself invited and who said only, "Send them Monday" — and she was through the lobby before the after-party had properly started.
A reporter got her by the album stand. Young, phone out, doing his job.
"Ms. Holloway — any reaction to what he said?"
"It's a good record," Savannah said, and kept walking.
He caught her in the corridor by the loading dock, which was the only way out that wasn't the sidewalk, and which he knew, because he knew every corridor in this building the way she did.
"Savannah."
She stopped. She did not turn around straight away, which she was not proud of.
"Don't," she said.
"I know."
"You don't know. You're going to say you should have asked me."
"I should have asked you."
"Then you didn't need me for that part either."
She turned around. He had the hat in his hand and the neck-rubbing had already started, up under the hairline, and she hated how legible he was.
He was closer than she had planned on. Close enough that she got the shirt — same soap, same starch, the same shirts she had bought four at a time at a place on Eighth Avenue for six years. Somebody was still buying them. It was not her.
Her hand came up. It was halfway to his collar before she knew it had left her side, nine years of straightening a collar on a man about to walk into a lit room, and she took it back down and made a fist out of it and held it against her leg.
"Every word of that was true. Do you understand what you did? You made it true and you made it yours. You stood up in front of a hundred and forty people and did the one thing I've wanted for nine years, and you did it without asking me, and now I get to be grateful in front of a camera."
"I wasn't trying to—"
"I know you weren't." That was the worst part and she said it anyway. "That's not a defense. It just means you still don't check."
His jaw went. "It needed saying."
"It needed saying nine years ago," Savannah said. "In a room with a lawyer in it. On paper. Where it does something."
Deacon looked at the floor for a second.
"Yeah," he said.
He did not argue. That was new, and she did not want it to be new, and she got out the loading dock door before anything else could happen to her.
The cold got at her arms out there and she stood in it a second longer than she needed to.
The trade reporter was waiting by her truck.
Not leaning on it. Standing a respectful six feet off with her hands in her coat pockets, which meant she had been there a while and had thought about where to stand.
"Savannah? Rennie. From Tempo."
"I know who you are." Savannah unlocked the door. "I never answered your email."
"You didn't." Rennie was maybe thirty, in a coat too thin for March. "I'm not asking for a comment. I want to say two things and then I'll go."
"Say them."
"First, I wrote that piece in March off the release the label handed me, and there wasn't one line about you in it, and I didn't ask why. That was my job and I didn't do it." She said it quickly, like a thing rehearsed on a sidewalk. "That's the first thing."
Savannah stood with her hand on the door.
"What's the second."
"There's a voice memo going around."
The parking garage was quiet enough that Savannah could hear the ballast humming in the light over her head.
"Going around where."
"Three people have it that I know of. Two of them are writers and one of them is at a label." Rennie shifted. "It's a work tape. Him and Wexler, one guitar, a verse and a half of something that isn't on the album."
"That's not news. He's been writing with her since October."
"That's what the release says." Rennie held her eyes. "The file's older than that. That's all I've got and I can't print it, because a file date is not a fact, and I'm not doing that to you twice." She stepped back. "That's it. That's the second thing."
She walked off toward the ramp.
Savannah stood in the cold garage with her keys in her hand.
October. She had built the whole shape of the last five months on that one word.
Five months of Tuesdays. She had counted them out in a storage closet with a guitar on her knee and she had gotten a number and the number had been a kind of floor, and now somebody was telling her the floor might be a step.
She got in the truck and did not start it.
Inside the building, a hundred and forty people were drinking to a record that half belonged to her, and a man she had been married to for nine years had just told all of them so, out loud, without asking.
Both of those things were true, and one of them was tonight, and one of them might be older than she was able to think about yet.
She sat there and could not make her hand turn the key for a good long while.