Chapter 12 #2
"Two months after we signed, somebody in Holt's office sent a standing instruction to the administrator about writer order, and there's a note in the margin in his handwriting that says keep DH first on everything, consistent across catalogue, avoids confusion later.
" She looked at her own hands. "Odette compared the writing against four documents.
She'll say in court it's his. She won't say what it's worth until the accounting comes back, and the accounting takes six weeks, and it's going to land somewhere between seven and nine hundred thousand dollars. "
The porch boards ticked as the sun came around.
"How long have you known," Deacon said.
There it was. She had known that question was coming since the second she opened her mouth, and she had come out here without an answer prepared, which was not like her at all.
"Since a Monday in Berry Hill," she said. "Three weeks."
"Three weeks."
"I had the certified copy on the counter and my thumb on your name.
I had the sentence built." She made herself say the rest of it, because a half-confession is worse than none, and because she was not going to sit on a porch and be careful.
"And then you called me about Silas Rourke, and you said the ugliest thing you've ever said to me, and I hung up on you and I put that page in a folder and I closed the folder.
And I want you to hear this part clean, Deacon.
I wasn't confused. I knew exactly what I was doing and I decided you didn't get to have it. "
She waited.
She had braced herself against the back of a chair with a hole in the seat for a man going through a roof. That was the thing she had run in her head at four in the morning for six weeks, and in every version of it he got up, and in most of them he got in a truck.
Deacon put his hand over his mouth and held it there a second and took it away.
"Does Odette have what she needs," he said.
Savannah blinked.
"She does now."
"Good," he said.
And that was all.
He did not ask how much. He did not ask when it started, or who else knew, or whether she was sure, or how a thing like that gets past a man for nine years.
He did not say the word Holt. He sat in his mother's rocker with a socket wrench on the boards by his boot and took it the way a man takes a receipt for something he has already paid for.
Savannah filed that.
She could not make it fit anywhere, and she filed it anyway, because filing things she could not place was how she had gotten through every room she had ever been in.
"You didn't tell me," Deacon said finally, "because you couldn't be sure what I'd do with it."
"No."
"That's fair."
"It isn't fair," Savannah said. "It's just true."
"I'd take true," he said. "I've had about all the fair I can use."
She noticed, then, what had been wrong with the whole hour.
His phone had not gone off. Not once. Not a call, not a buzz on the boards, not the flat double tick it made when Holt's office sent anything, which for nine years had happened about every eight minutes of Deacon Holloway's waking life, at dinner, in bed, at his own grandmother's funeral.
An hour on a porch and the phone had not made one sound.
She started to ask.
"Savannah," Pearl called through the screen. "Come carry this."
There was nothing to carry.
Pearl had a coffee pot in her hand and a chair pulled out at the kitchen table, and she pointed at it, and Savannah sat down in it.
"You want to know why he has to be the one on the poster," Pearl said.
Savannah did not answer.
"I've had this ready about two months." Pearl poured. "You never asked, which is why you're getting it."
"Pearl—"
"Carl ran a body shop out on the highway for thirty-one years.
" She sat down across from her. "He was the warmest man in any room he was ever in.
People would come get their bumper done and stay an hour.
He'd give a stranger the shirt off his back and mean every stitch of it.
And then he'd come in this house at six o'clock and read the paper, and that was him done. "
"Done."
"Done. He wasn't cruel. He never raised a hand in his life.
He just had it all out front, and there wasn't any left over for in here.
" Pearl turned her cup a quarter turn on the oilcloth.
"When Deacon was nine there was a singing contest at the fairgrounds in Ashland City.
Little bitty thing. Carl drove him out and stood in the back with his hat on and Deacon came in third. "
"Third."
"Third out of a dozen, and he would have told you it was second.
" Pearl's mouth moved. "Afterward there were three people came up to Carl in the grass and told him what a fine boy he had.
And Carl put his hand on the back of that child's neck and left it there the whole time they talked.
Whole time. And Deacon stood in it like a dog stands in a patch of sun. "
Savannah looked at the oilcloth.
"And in the truck coming home," Pearl said, "it was forty minutes, and his daddy did not say one word to him. Not a mean word. Not any word. Because there wasn't anybody watching, and he didn't know what he was for when there wasn't anybody watching."
The clock over the stove was the loudest thing in the room.
"So my boy learned at nine years old at a fairgrounds," Pearl said, "that being looked at and being loved were the same transaction. And I let him learn it, because I was working at the plant and I thought it was sweet. I thought, well, look at Carl, proud of him."
"Does Deacon know that?"
"He does not, and he isn't going to hear it from me, and if you tell him I told you I'll say you're lying." Pearl set the pot down. "Because he'd take it and make a reason out of it inside of a week. He is very good at reasons. He gets that from me."
Savannah wrapped her hands around the cup.
"That explains him," Pearl said. "Now hear the rest of it, because I won't have you leaving here with half.
It don't excuse one solitary thing. He was thirty-six years old and had a whole grown head on his shoulders and he did what he did to you with all of it.
I told him so in this kitchen in March, standing right where you came in, and he sat in that chair and took it, and I'd say it again today. "
"I know you would."
"I'd say it at the funeral." She got up and put the pot back on the burner. "And I'll tell you the other thing while I've got you. I called the both of you at ten on purpose."
"I know you did."
"I'm not one bit sorry."
"I know you're not."
"I put your box in your truck," Pearl said, "while y'all were out there, so you wouldn't have any reason to come back through this kitchen and get away from me."
Savannah went out through the screen door and Deacon stood up out of his mother's rocker, because he had been raised by that woman, and there was a second where neither of them knew what the next part was.
She stepped around the box that was no longer on the porch. He stepped out of the way of a chair.
And then they were standing on Pearl Holloway's porch, facing each other, at about two feet.
Not four. Not six.
Two.
She had defended that distance against three directors.
She had said it out loud in a rehearsal room in March with a microphone down her shirt.
Nine years of walking out onto a stage and finding it in the dark without looking, and here it was on a porch with no lights and no room and nobody watching, and neither one of them had done it on purpose, and neither one of them moved.
She had explained that distance to three directors in terms of sight lines and had never once told any of them the actual reason, which was that at two feet she could hear him take the breath before a line and come in with him instead of after him.
He took one now. She heard it.
Deacon looked down at her left hand.
He didn't say anything about it. His jaw did something and stopped.
"Thursday I start with Silas," Savannah said.
"I heard. That's good. That's — he's the real thing."
"I know what he is."
"Yeah," Deacon said. "You always did."
She got in the truck.
She made it about two miles.
At the four-way by the church she caught herself twisting a ring that wasn't there, thumb and forefinger, around and around a bare white band of skin that hadn't filled back in yet.
She stopped and put both hands on the wheel.
It was not fear of him. She checked, honestly, the way she checked a tuning, going note by note through the whole hour — the wrench, the peaches, the man in Dickson with a shoebox, does Odette have what she needs, I'd take true — and there was not one place in it where she was afraid of Deacon Holloway.
That was the trouble.
She had spent five months building a floor.
She had a lawyer and a rental and ten songs registered in her own name and a co-writing deal with a definitions exhibit in it that she had asked for herself.
She had taken a ring off on a kitchen floor eight days ago and put it in with the picks.
She had built the whole thing out of not being able to stand him.
And she had sat on a porch for an hour and laughed with her head back and told him the worst thing she had and let him not go through the roof, and now she was at a four-way with the engine running, doing the one piece of arithmetic she had promised herself in March she would never do again.
She was working out how much of it she'd be willing to take down.
She had sat two feet from that man for an hour with her hand pinned to her own knee, and she had been in a truck for two miles since, and she was still warm from it.
A car came up behind her and waited, and then went around.
Savannah put her hand back on the gearshift and found that it was not entirely steady, which was new, and which she had not felt one time since a cold storage closet at Cordelia Hall.
She drove home the long way.