Chapter 10 #2
In April. On his knees, in a metal building, with his sleeves down against the fiberglass. She got a very clear picture of the back of his neck going red, and she set it down where she found it and left it there.
She went back outside, because she was not going to sit in a house wondering about a thing she could check.
There was no car at the curb and no car in the driveway across the street. The mail was still in the box, which meant the sack had come before three. She walked the length of the carport and there was nothing on the concrete, no boot print, no ring off a cup.
Ferne Dodd was on her porch two houses down with a hose in her hand, watering a pot of something that had died in April.
"Afternoon," Savannah said.
"You get your bag?"
"I got it."
"He stood there a while." Ferne shut the hose off with her thumb. "I thought he was a church."
"How long is a while."
"Long enough for me to decide he wasn't a church." She shrugged. "Big fellow, hat. Set it down and went and stood by his truck a minute and then got in it and went."
"Did he knock?"
"No, ma'am," Ferne said. "That's how I knew he knew you."
Savannah thanked her and walked back and stood in her own carport for a second with her hand on the truck's fender, which was warm, because April had finally quit being mean about it.
She looked at the step where the sack had been.
A big man in a hat had stood on that concrete long enough for a woman two houses down to rule out a church, and then had gone and stood by a truck a while longer, and Savannah could see the whole thing without any trouble at all — the shoulders on him, the weight on one leg, the hat coming off and going back on.
She quit looking at the step and went in the house.
Then she went in and called Dahlia.
"Did you give him this address," she said.
"Give who — no. No." Dahlia's end went quiet the way it does when somebody puts down whatever they were holding. "Savannah, I wouldn't. I'd tell you if I did, and I'd argue with you about it, but I'd tell you."
"I believe you."
"Is he there?"
"He's not here. He left something."
"What kind of something."
"A paper sack," Savannah said.
Dahlia waited.
"It's not that kind of thing," Savannah said. "There's no card on it. There's nothing on it. He didn't put his name anywhere near it."
"Then who—"
"Odette has the address. The Brentwood firm has it, off the transfer papers.
" She ran it in order, out loud, because that was how she found what was wrong.
"Cobb has it and Cobb's in Rotterdam. And Pearl has it, because I gave it to her myself in March so she'd know where to send a card, and she sent a card. "
"Pearl."
"Pearl."
"That woman is sixty-three years old and she is not sorry about one thing she has ever done."
"No," Savannah said, "she is not."
She hung up and stood at the counter looking at the row of objects on it, and understood that she had just spent nine minutes doing detective work in a carport to keep from putting the batteries in.
She put the batteries in the Walkman and it took her two tries because the little door was cracked, and she sat down on the floor with her back against the cabinet, which she had done twice now this spring, and both times had told herself she was going to quit doing it.
She played the dub.
The first song was a mess. She knew it was going to be and it was worse than she remembered.
Nineteen years old, playing too hard on the downbeats, singing flat on the third line of every verse because she was pushing air she did not have yet.
The guitar was out of tune with itself, the low E against the A, about six cents, all the way through.
A truck went by outside the hardware store and you could hear it come and go.
Her own voice, thin and unafraid, from before anybody had ever told her what she was for.
Then the second song.
"Pilot Light." A kitchen, a cold house, a woman checking a thing that had already gone out.
She had written it at nineteen about her grandmother's stove, and it was better than she had any business being at nineteen, and she had known it at the time, and it was the only thing on that tape she had ever cared about.
The middle section came around.
And she heard, in about six seconds, what was wrong with it.
It was not a lyric problem. She had spent a year at nineteen convinced it was a lyric problem.
It was that she had gone up on the third line where the whole shape of the thing wanted her to go down and sit under it, and at nineteen she had not had the low end to go down there, so she had gone up, and then written four more drafts of the words to fix a thing the words had never done.
She had needed to drop into the gap under her own melody.
Fifteen years. She could do it now in one take.
Savannah sat on a rented kitchen floor with a yellow Walkman in her hand and laughed once, out loud, at nobody, and it did not come out sounding like laughing.
Then the fourth song ended.
The tape did not stop. It ran on, hissing, the way a dub runs on when a man has left the deck rolling because he has forgotten it is rolling.
There was a chair. Somebody sitting down, all at once, the way a big man sits down in a wooden chair, and the chair complained about it.
She knew the weight. That was one hundred and ninety-some pounds going into oak all at once, which is a sound she had heard at that table about four thousand mornings and had never one time looked up at.
And then a refrigerator kicked on.
Savannah knew that refrigerator. She had listened to it a thousand times underneath a voicemail greeting, in hotel rooms, in vans, in a dressing room at Cordelia Hall in March while a man's recorded voice told her to leave it at the beep.
Four seconds. Then he had caught it, and the tape went dead.
She played it twice.
The second time she did not listen to the songs at all. She sat with her hand on the Walkman and let a nineteen-year-old with a cracked guitar neck get through four of them, and she waited for the chair.
It came. The wood took him and gave, and the box in the corner of a kitchen she had painted herself came on underneath it, and for four seconds there was a man in a room with his back to her.
She played it a third time. She did not count that one.
He had not written one letter on anything. Not on the label, not on the sack, not on a scrap. The only handwriting in the whole thing was hers, from before she met him.
She did not call him.
She thought about it for approximately as long as it takes to think about a thing, and then she got up off the floor, because calling him would have made it a transaction, and whatever else he had failed at in his life, he had not made this one a transaction.
He had put a bag inside a screen door and left.
She washed the two mugs. She put the groceries away.
She wrote Thursday 10 — eat first on the envelope under He read it.
He said nothing. Eight days, and then she looked at that line and drew one flat stroke through it, because it was no longer true and she had never been able to leave a wrong thing standing on a page.
Then she went and got her guitar case off the couch and opened it on the floor.
She had been wearing the ring since March on purpose.
In front of a mirror in April, with Dahlia standing in the doorway telling her not to, she had decided all the way down that taking it off was a sentence in eight-point type under a photograph, and that she was not going to write anybody's headline for free.
Nobody was watching now. There was no photograph. There was a rented kitchen, four forks, a paper sack that smelled like a shed, and a woman on the floor with a case open in front of her.
She took it off. It came over the knuckle harder than she expected, hard enough that she had to work it, and it left a white band that did not fill back in right away.
She put her thumb on the band and pressed. The skin went whiter and stayed that way a second and came back. Then it quit being interesting.
She put it in the little compartment with the picks and the spare strings and the folded thirty-cent receipt, and shut the lid.
Savannah sat back on her heels.
She had not done it because she had stopped loving him.
She had done it because for the first time in five months she could feel herself starting to, again, from the beginning, like a fool, over a paper bag and four seconds of a refrigerator — and she was going to need both hands free for what that was going to cost her.