Chapter 8 #2
That was the part she would go over later.
She had the certified copy on the counter and her thumb on his name and she was going to call Deacon Holloway and say sit down, there's something in the paper Holt wrote us, because whatever else was true, he was the only other person alive who had been in that conference room, and because if it was not a decision then he was standing on the same floor she was.
She had gotten as far as looking at the screen.
It rang in her hand.
"Deacon."
"Rourke."
Not hello. That one word, first, before anything.
He had said it low. He said everything low when he was scared, down in the part of his range that had sat under her for nine years, and it came out of a phone speaker in a rented kitchen and went in her ear and down the back of her neck and did what it had always done. She had no say in that. She never had.
Savannah put the printout down on the counter and squared it with two fingers.
"What about him," she said.
"Ten songs. That's what I'm hearing. Ten songs and a record and both names on the front." His voice was doing a thing she had heard maybe four times in nine years, and every one of those times had been about money or his mother. "Is that right?"
"Where'd you hear it."
"Does it matter?"
"It matters to me quite a lot, actually."
"A guy at a session Thursday. Bass player. He heard it from somebody at Silas's publisher." A breath. "Then Marlene called me about it Friday because Holt's office had it too. So that's three people in my life who knew before I did."
"Uh-huh."
"Savannah, is it true?"
"He asked me," she said. "Two weeks ago. I haven't answered him."
"But you're going to."
"I don't know."
"You know."
She let that sit for a second, and then she said, "Careful."
He should have stopped there. She could hear him deciding not to, and there was about a half second where she could have hung up and they'd have been all right, and neither one of them took it.
"Ten songs," he said. "You'd write ten songs with a man you met a month ago."
"Deacon."
"You wouldn't write one with me for four years. I asked you. I asked you at the table about a hundred times and you'd say you had the vocals to do, and now Silas Rourke walks in a room and it's ten songs and your name on the front—"
"Stop talking."
He stopped.
The refrigerator in the rental hummed. She had never noticed it before. It sounded exactly like the one in the kitchen at the Harpeth House, because it was the same brand and there are only so many refrigerators.
"Listen to yourself," Savannah said. "Not to me. To yourself. Go back about forty seconds and listen."
Nothing on the line.
"You heard it from a bass player," she said.
"At a session. Third-hand, from somebody at a publisher, and it wasn't even accurate — it's not a done deal and there's no ten songs and there's no record.
And by the time it got to you, three people you work with already had it, and you had to sit there and let a man you barely know tell you what your wife's doing with the rest of her life. "
She heard him breathe out.
"Savannah."
"Now," she said, "hold that. Hold exactly what that felt like. Because that's Tuesday. That's a rumor about a thing that hasn't happened."
"Don't."
"I got mine in a trade alert at three forty-one in the afternoon on a road case with a guitar on my knee, and it had already been out for half an hour, and it was true.
" Her voice did not go up. That was the thing about the cold clear place — she could stand in it and be surgical.
"You have had thirty seconds of what I've had for five months, and it made you say the ugliest thing you have ever said to me. "
The silence went on long enough that she checked the screen to see if the call had dropped.
"I know what I just did," Deacon said.
"Yes."
"I heard it while I was saying it."
"Then you're doing better than you were in March."
"That's not—" He stopped. Started again, and his voice had come all the way down, and it was worse than the shouting.
It was the one he used in a dark room with the lights off.
He did not know he was doing it. He never had.
"I'm scared, Savannah. That's all that was.
Somebody said your name and his name in the same sentence and I—"
"I know exactly what you did," she said. "You made it about what it costs you. You've been doing it since October and you're doing it right now while you're apologizing for doing it."
"I'm not apologizing."
"No," she said. "You're not."
And she hung up.
She stood in the kitchen for a long time.
She was warm across the chest and up the back of the neck, the way you are after you run for a bus. She stood still and let it go down on its own and did not help it along.
The certified copy was still on the counter. Exhibit C, definitions, sixty-five percent, the whole nine years of it, and she had been four seconds from telling him. She'd had the shape of the sentence already. Sit down. There's something in the paper Holt wrote us.
He would have gone through the roof. She knew that with total certainty. Whatever else he was, he'd have gotten in a car.
She picked up the page and put it back in the folder and closed the folder, and understood that she had just made a decision about her marriage without saying one word out loud, and that she had made it in about four seconds, and that it had felt like nothing at all.
Dahlia called at six and Savannah told her all of it in nine sentences, flat, in order, the way you give somebody a set list.
"Say the number again," Dahlia said.
"Somewhere around eight hundred thousand. She won't sign her name to it yet."
"Savannah."
"I know."
"No, you don't. You're doing the voice." Dahlia's end went quiet — she'd walked outside somewhere. "You do a voice when it's real. You did it in March in my car and you did it in that lawyer's parking lot."
"I'm not doing a voice."
"Okay." Dahlia let it go, which she had gotten good at in a month. "You want me to come?"
"No."
"You want me to be mad on the phone for a minute?"
"Yes."
So Dahlia was, at length, at volume, about a man and a margin and a bowl of mints, and Savannah stood in a rented kitchen and let somebody else carry it for four minutes, and then said thank you and hung up.
Then she went and got the envelope out from under the salt shaker.
Odette's acknowledgment letter. One line, three inches long, above her printed name. It had been sitting under that shaker since the week the transfer landed. She had picked it up four times.
She uncapped the pen and signed it, and her ring caught on the underside of the counter edge on the downstroke and made the loop on the S come out wrong, and she looked at it and decided she did not care.
She put it in the envelope and licked it and set it by her keys.
Then she called Odette back.
"That was fast," Odette said.
"Write the letter."
A pause, the length of a woman putting down a cup.
"Which letter."
"The accounting. All nine years, every release, every registration, with the exhibits." Savannah looked at the folder on the counter. "Six weeks and it costs money. I've got both."
"All right." Paper moving. "I'll send it to Deacon's counsel and copy the label, and we'll—"
"No."
"No?"
"Send it to Sennett Media," Savannah said. "To Holt. His name on the envelope, not the firm's. He's a signatory on the touring account and he wrote the instruction in the margin and he's had the original in his cabinet for nine years. Let it come in on his desk."
Odette was quiet a second.
"Savannah," she said. "You understand what that is. If it goes to management instead of counsel, it's not a legal matter anymore, it's a business one. There's an assistant, and a file clerk, and somebody's brother-in-law at a label. It'll be in a trade inside a week."
"I know what a trade is," Savannah said. "I've read one."
"That's a bell you don't get to unring. He'll hear about this the same way—"
"Yes," she said. "He will."
She hung up and put the phone face down on the counter next to the envelope and the folder and the printout with her own name typed in the first box ten times, and outside somebody's dog got going at something, and in six weeks a number was going to come back with nine years in it.
She was not sorry. She stood in the kitchen and checked, honestly, the way she checked a tuning, and she was not sorry anywhere she could find.