Chapter 9 #2
"Three years ago I got into the Delmar." She said it the way people say the name of the hospital they were born in.
"Twelve slots. You can't apply. Somebody has to put your name in, and the nominations are unsigned — that's the whole point of the thing, so nobody's trading favors.
I was twenty-one and playing Tuesdays at a bar on Gallatin for tips and a chicken sandwich, and a woman called my phone in March and said you're in the Delmar, and I said in the what. "
"I know what the Delmar is."
"Everything I have came out of that one night.
Everything. My publisher was in that room.
" Kinsley pulled her phone over and started thumbing at it.
"I've spent three years trying to find out who wrote me in.
Nobody will say. Sherrill, who runs it, wouldn't tell me, and I asked her every single year, and two years ago she finally let me stand at her desk and take a picture of it. That was as far as she'd go."
She turned the phone around and slid it across the table.
"Somebody wrote a whole page about a girl they'd heard one time," Kinsley said. "I've never been able to thank them. I read it when it's bad."
Savannah looked at it.
The form was gray, photocopied crooked. Two hundred words, the box said. Blue ballpoint, small at the start and getting bigger toward the bottom, the way it always did when she stopped being careful.
Kinsley Wexler. I heard her at a Tuesday round. I don't know her and she doesn't know me.
She is not the best singer on that stage. She is the one who knows what her song is about. There's a difference, and a room can hear it even when a room can't say it.
I want to be plain about the reason. Most people can tell you a thing is wrong with a song. She can hear what it is.
I don't know if she's got another one in her. Nobody knows that about anybody. But she isn't waiting on anybody's permission, and I'd rather bet on that than on a good demo.
Somebody put her in a room.
The steam wand screamed again.
Savannah's hands were steady. She noticed it the way you notice a light left on in a room you're already walking out of.
Amarillo. A laundromat off the interstate with four dryers going.
Eight days into a run, the alternator two days from quitting, a nomination form printed at a copy counter because Dahlia had said do it or quit complaining about it.
A name copied off a sign-up sheet at a bar on Gallatin, because Savannah had never once asked the girl what her name was.
Twenty minutes between loads. She had never thought about it again.
She slid the phone back across the table.
"Whoever wrote that," Savannah said, "wasn't doing you a favor."
Kinsley's face did something complicated. "What do you mean?"
"They heard you. That's all that is. It isn't charity. It's a person doing the one thing this town almost never does." She picked up her keys. "Don't read it when it's bad. Read it when it's good. It'll do more for you."
She had come there with something to say, and she said it at the volume she used for giving the band a note in front of forty thousand people, which is to say quietly, and once.
"Nothing happened between you and my husband," Savannah said. "I knew that in March, in a dressing room, about four minutes after I found the lyric sheet. So we can set that down and neither one of us has to carry it around this table."
Kinsley opened her mouth and Savannah kept going.
"Here's what did happen. For nine years there was a kitchen table in a house on the Harpeth, and he'd sit down at it with something half-built, and he'd say it needs something, and I'd tell him what it needed.
That was the marriage. Not the stage. Not the records.
That." She turned her cup a quarter turn on the metal.
"In October he took that down the road and set it up in a room with you, and then he let a trade magazine tell me about it at three forty-one in the afternoon while I was tuning a guitar on a road case. "
That was the sentence she had built in the truck on the way over. It was true and it was not the whole of it, and she knew that while she was saying it.
The rest of the list did not belong on a metal table on Wedgewood.
A man's weight coming down on the other side of a mattress at two in the morning and the whole bed reporting it.
A hand arriving at the back of her neck while she was reading something and staying there.
Nine years of a jacket going over her shoulders before she had gotten around to saying she was cold.
She said the part about the kitchen table, because the kitchen table was the part with a paper trail on it.
"I didn't—"
"I know you didn't. That's the whole trouble." Savannah looked at her. "You did not take one thing from me. He handed it to you, and you said thank you, and you were right to say thank you. If you'd said no you'd be a fool, and I don't want to sit across from a fool."
Kinsley's eyes were going. She was holding it, and Savannah gave her the credit.
"I'm not going to ask you to walk away from that record. I'd think less of you if you did." Savannah stood up. "There's exactly one thing I want, and it's small, and you can do it in your sleep."
"Anything."
"Don't ever let anybody put it in print that he brought something out of you.
" Her voice did not rise. "That's Holt Sennett's sentence.
He put it in the release in March and it's been running loose around this town ever since.
You wrote nine songs on that record. You produced it.
When they ask you, say those two things, in that order, and put your own name in the sentence.
" She pushed her chair in. "Because if you let them keep saying he brought it out of you, then in about six years you'll be standing two feet to the left of somebody, and you won't be able to name what happened to you either. "
Kinsley sat with her hands flat on the table.
"What do you want me to do," she said. "For you. Tell me and I'll do it."
"Nothing."
"Savannah—"
"Nothing at all," Savannah said. "That's the part that's going to bother you, and I'm sorry about it, and it is still nothing." She looked down at the phone on the table. "Send me that picture. The form."
"You want it?"
"Yes."
She left first. She had decided in the truck on the way over that she was going to, no matter how the hour went, and it was the only part of it she had planned.
The photo came through before she got the truck out of the space.
She sat in the lot with the engine off and read the whole page again, all two hundred words of it, at the size a phone makes a thing.
She had helped hand her husband the tools. Three years before he ever picked one up. In a laundromat in Amarillo, for free, for a stranger, between loads, because her best friend had told her to do it or quit complaining.
She waited to feel it as a wound, because that was what it was supposed to be, and some of it was — a hot line straight down the middle.
But most of what came was quieter, and worse, and in a way she could not have explained to one living person, close to a relief.
There was nobody in this to hate. Not cleanly.
Not Kinsley, who had gone and gotten her cousin and made them take every mark.
Not Holt, who had written nine words in a margin to spare an office some trouble.
Not Deacon, who had said Savannah doesn't want to write anymore and had, God help him, believed it, because she had told him she had the vocals to do about a hundred times and he had taken her at her word.
And not the woman in a laundromat in Amarillo, who had written a whole page about a stranger and had never once written one about herself.
Dahlia called at noon.
"Well?"
"It's done."
"Did you cry?"
"No."
"Did she?"
"Nearly. She held it." Savannah put her elbow out the window. "She'll be all right. She's twenty-four, she's got a cousin for a lawyer, and she's better than they're going to let her be for about four years."
Dahlia was quiet a second. "You like her."
"I don't dislike her. That's as far as I go and you can't have any more of it."
"Savannah."
"What."
"You're doing the voice."
Savannah watched a man carry a bass rig out of the coffee place and load it into a Camry with the back seats down.
"Do you remember Amarillo," she said. "The laundromat. That October run, the one where the alternator went."
"I remember the alternator."
"You told me to put a girl's name in for the Delmar or quit complaining about the Delmar."
The line went long.
"Oh," Dahlia said. "Oh, honey."
"Yeah."
"You want me to be mad on the phone?"
"Not today."
She hung up and read the last two lines one more time.
She isn't waiting on anybody's permission.
Somebody put her in a room.
She was thirty-four years old. She had written that about a girl she heard one time on a Tuesday, and meant every word, and then walked out to a van in a parking lot in Amarillo and driven four hundred miles to stand two feet to the left of a man and sing the third above his melody.
Nine more years of it, waiting for somebody to write that page about her.
Nobody ever had.
Savannah put the truck in gear.
Nobody was ever going to.