Chapter 12
Saturday morning, Pearl Holloway had the back room pulled apart. Savannah could hear it through the phone — something heavy going across a floor, a long way off, out in the country.
"There's a box in here with your name on the side of it in my handwriting," she said. "I'm sixty-three years old and I'm not hauling it to the church."
"Can it wait till next week?"
"It could. Come at ten."
Savannah should have heard it. She thought about that later, at a stop sign, with her hands on the wheel. Pearl Holloway had never in nine years given anybody a time. She said come on out and then fed you whenever you got there.
Come at ten.
The truck was already in the drive when she pulled up. Dusty gray, the same one for six years, parked crooked the way he always parked, one wheel out of the gravel and into the grass.
Savannah sat at the end of the driveway with her foot on the brake for about four seconds.
Then Pearl came out onto the porch with a dish towel over her shoulder and stood there with her arms crossed, silver-haired, unhurried, looking straight down the drive at her, and Savannah understood that backing out was going to require doing it in front of a witness who was sixty-three years old and completely at peace.
She parked.
"Pearl."
"Come on in the house."
"Pearl."
"There's coffee."
"Did you call him at ten too?"
"I did," Pearl said. "I called him at seven forty. I told him the water heater was making a noise."
"Is the water heater making a noise?"
"It's been fine since 2011." She held the screen door open. "Wipe your feet."
The box was on the porch, open, and Savannah looked into it and then looked at Pearl.
"This is a coat and a cake pan."
"It's your cake pan."
"There's two Christmas ornaments in here and a church cookbook."
"Well, I didn't say it was a big box," Pearl said, and went inside.
Deacon was on his knees at the far end of the porch with the side panel off the water heater closet, a socket wrench in one hand and a flashlight in his teeth. He took the flashlight out when he heard her.
"Hey."
"Hey."
That was all of it, again. He went back into the closet.
Savannah sat down.
There were two chairs on that porch and there had been two chairs on that porch since before she met anybody in this family.
One of them was a good solid rocker with a cushion Pearl re-covered every few years.
The other one had a woven seat that had gone through in the middle and been patched from underneath with a piece of webbing off a lawn chair, because Deacon Holloway had been sitting in that exact chair since he was about four years old and had worn a hole in it with his own self.
She sat in his.
He came out of the closet after a minute and looked at her sitting in it and did not say a word about it, and went and sat in his mother's.
The peach tree in the side yard had four peaches on it, which was three more than the year it rained the whole of April.
They got through the small talk in about ninety seconds, because there was hardly any left.
"How's the room in Berry Hill."
"It's fine. Cobb's got four forks."
"Four."
"Four forks, two mugs, and a colander."
"That's a man who eats out."
"That's a man who's in Rotterdam."
Then nothing for a while. A dog going somewhere down the road. Deacon turning the socket wrench over in his hands.
He had his sleeves rolled past the elbow and a fresh scrape on the back of one wrist off the inside of a water heater closet. She looked at his forearms for a while, the way you look at whatever is in front of you, and then she looked at the peach tree instead.
"I've got to tell you something," he said, "and it's not about anything."
"All right."
"It was a lily."
Savannah looked at him.
"The van," he said. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the wrench. "It was a lily."
"Deacon."
"I went to Dickson."
"You went to Dickson."
"I went to Dickson in April and I found Ray Dell Wicks, who is eighty-one years old and who sold my daddy that Econoline in 2007, and I sat in his living room and I said, Mr. Wicks, do you remember what was painted on the side of that van before they peeled it off.
" He set the wrench down on the boards. "And he thought about it.
He thought about it a long time. His wife brought me a Coke. "
"Deacon."
"And then he said, 'Son, that was a lily.'"
Savannah did not say anything.
"Vernell's Flowers," Deacon said. "Out of business in '06. He had a picture of the van in a shoebox with the decal still on it, and he showed it to me, and I looked at it for a while, and then he tried to sell me a Buick."
She got about a quarter of a second's warning.
Then it came up out of her the way it used to, all the way down, head back, both hands off the arms of a chair with a hole in the seat, and it went on for a good deal longer than four seconds, and it hurt somewhere under her sternum, and she could not stop it.
Her body had gone ahead and done it without checking with her. She noted that the way she would note a channel coming up hot on a board — flatly, with the fader already gone — and there was nothing to be done about it from where she was sitting.
It was the first one all the way down since March.
"How long were you there," she managed.
"Two hours."
"Two hours."
"He's eighty-one," Deacon said. "He had a lot of pictures."
She put her face in her hands and laughed until it turned into breathing, and then she sat there breathing.
Her right hand had come off the arm of the chair somewhere in the middle of it and gotten about four inches toward his forearm, because that was where it had gone for nine years whenever she laughed like that. She put it on her own knee instead.
Bringing it back took more out of her than the laugh had. She could feel exactly where that cost was, too. It was in the shoulder.
Something that had been holding since March let go about an inch. She could feel exactly where it was. It was under the jaw and behind the eyes and it had been locked since a woman in a cold storage closet read a trade alert on a phone with a guitar on her knee.
"That's not fair," she said.
"No," Deacon said. "It isn't."
He did not push it. He picked the wrench back up and went and put the panel back on the closet and screwed it down, and came back, and sat, and let the porch be quiet for about two minutes.
Then he said, "Can I give you something true?"
"Is it going to cost me anything?"
"It's going to cost me."
"Then go ahead."
"Ridgeline took me to lunch last July." He was looking out at the peach tree.
"Before Kinsley. Before anything. Two of them and a woman from the touring side, and they had a page with numbers on it, and the numbers said the duo does about three thousand seats a night and one voice on that same marquee does twelve. "
"I know what the numbers say."
"I know you do. You've known since before they did.
" He rubbed his palm on his knee. "I want to tell you what I did at that lunch.
I didn't say yes. I want credit for that about as much as a man wants credit for not robbing a store.
I also didn't say no. I sat there and I let them talk and I felt something go warm in my chest, and I drove home and I walked in that kitchen and you asked me how lunch was, and I said fine. "
Savannah kept her eyes on the tree.
"The hold calls went out the second week of November," he said.
"Fort Worth, Tulsa, Wichita. That's a fact you already have out of a binder.
Here's the one you don't. Holt's office didn't go rogue on me.
He asked me in October if he could start putting paper under it, and I said start it, and I told myself I hadn't decided anything, because nobody had signed anything. "
"You'd decided."
"I'd decided in July at a lunch," Deacon said. "The rest was just paperwork catching up to a man who wouldn't say a sentence out loud."
The dog down the road quit.
"That's all I've got today," he said. "I'm not going to tell you what it means about me. I've got a version of that and it's about four minutes long and it's very well put together, and you'd hear the craft in it, and I'd rather hand you the fact and let you do what you want with it."
"That's the smartest thing you've said in nine years."
"It's the smartest thing my mother's said in nine years. I'm using it."
Savannah sat forward with her elbows on her knees.
She had come out here for a cake pan. She had two hours of clean air behind her and a laugh she was going to be paying for, and the sensible thing — the thing she had done four times since March, deliberately, each time with her eyes open — was to hold on to the one card she had left.
"I've got one," she said. "It's worse than yours."
Deacon turned his head.
"There's an exhibit in the publishing agreement.
The original, the one Holt drafted for us as a wedding present, that I signed in a conference room with a bowl of mints in it when I was twenty-five.
" She said it in order, flat, like reading a set list off the floor.
"Exhibit C. Definitions. It says that where a song's got two writers, whichever one is typed first in the registration is deemed to have made the primary contribution, and that writer gets sixty-five percent of the mechanicals.
The printed credit stays fifty-fifty. Everything on the record stays fifty-fifty.
It's only the money underneath that moves. "
He had gone completely still.
"How many of ours am I typed first on," she said. "That's the question. You want to guess?"
"No."
"None of them."
"Savannah."