Chapter 13 #2
"Three. Consent." She read it the way she read everything, flat, like a grocery list, which was the only way Savannah could stand to hear it.
"Any use in commerce of both parties' names together — including but not limited to the act name 'The Holloways,' any billing, marquee, poster, jacket, label copy, single, box set, broadcast, tour advertisement, or promotional material of any kind — shall require the prior written consent of Savannah Holloway, given specifically as to that use.
Consent may be withheld in her sole discretion, for any reason or no reason, without cure period, without arbitration, and without any obligation of good faith.
This right is personal to her, is not reciprocal, and may not be assigned, encumbered, or exercised by any other person.
It is perpetual and irrevocable. It survives the marriage, any dissolution thereof, and the death of either party, and binds the estate, successors, and assigns of Deacon Holloway. "
She set it down.
"That's a leash," she said.
"It's a definition."
"Savannah."
"Somebody sat in an office nine years ago and wrote a definition that said what my work was worth, and they wrote it in an exhibit, and nobody asked me one question about it, and it ran every day for nine years.
" Savannah put her finger on the page. "I'm not asking for a leash.
I'm asking to be the one who writes the definition this time.
That's the whole thing. That's all three of them. "
"He can't ever put both your names on anything again without you. Not a record. Not a poster. Not a T-shirt at a fair in Ada, Oklahoma."
"No, he can't."
"And he doesn't get the same right back."
"He does not."
Odette leaned back until the chair complained.
"You understand what you're really doing," she said. "That thing that made both of you money is a name with two people in it. You just made the name into something only one of you can turn on."
"Yes."
"For good."
"For good."
"Why?"
"Because the last nine years happened to me," Savannah said. "Whatever the next nine are, I'm going to be the one they came from."
Odette wrote for four minutes without talking.
"One more thing," Savannah said. "It goes in front of him before the accounting comes back."
"No."
"Before the number."
"Savannah, that is the single dumbest—" Odette stopped herself and started over, which she almost never did.
"I can get you the number in ten days. Eight hundred thousand dollars, give or take a hundred either way, on a page with a CPA's signature on it.
If he signs after he sees that, he's signing because his lawyer told him what it costs to fight it.
If he signs before, he's signing blind."
"Yes."
"That's not a term sheet. That's a test."
"It's a floor," Savannah said. "It's what I want to be true whether I ever speak to him again or not.
If he signs it and then drives his truck into the Cumberland, I still want it filed.
" She picked up the envelope, the first one, the one with her own handwriting on it, and folded it in half.
"But you can call it whatever you want."
He came Wednesday at four.
He came alone, in a clean shirt, with no lawyer, which Odette had told him twice on the phone was a bad idea. He sat down at the folding table in Odette's front room under the window unit and took the pages and did not skim them.
He read them.
He read all six pages, out loud in his head, moving his lips a little the way he did on a set list, and it took him twenty-two minutes, and nobody in that room said one word for twenty-two minutes. Odette answered email. Savannah sat with her hands in her lap and watched a man read.
Twenty-two minutes is a long time to have nothing to do.
She catalogued him the way she would catalogue anything that ran that long.
The shirt, ironed, which he had never learned to do, so a cleaner somewhere had done it.
Two gray hairs at the temple where there had been one in March.
His hands flat on the table on either side of the page, the left one with the thin scar across two knuckles off a bus door in Lubbock.
A vein up the inside of his forearm. The way he moved his lips.
Somewhere around minute fourteen she noticed that she had looked at one man for fourteen minutes and had not looked at Odette once, and she made herself look at Odette, and Odette was answering email.
Then she looked back.
She had done that exact thing in April, in that exact chair, with nine pages from a publisher in Eastland. Every line. Forty minutes. And she had told herself she was never going to not do it again as long as she lived.
Nobody had taught him that. He had just quit being the man who didn't.
At page four he stopped and went back a paragraph and read it again, and Savannah's whole body got ready for it, because page four was where the third term started and page four was where she had stopped reading, nine years ago, in a room with mints in a bowl.
He went on. Her body stayed ready about four seconds longer than it had any use for, and then quit, and she put her hands back the way they had been.
He got to the end. He squared the pages.
"Two questions," he said.
"Ask them," Odette said.
"Does 'both names' cover the act name."
"It does. Expressly. It's the first thing named."
"So there's no Holloways unless she says there's a Holloways."
"That is the effect of it, yes."
"All right." He nodded once. "Second one. If I'm dead."
Odette blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"If I'm dead and somebody at a label wants to put out a box set with the two of us on the front of it. Who do they have to ask."
"Her. Only her. Your estate is bound and your executor has no authority to grant it. If you'd like, I can also put a legend on the—"
"Put it on everything," Deacon said. "Whatever the biggest version of that is. Do that one."
Odette looked at Savannah. Savannah did not move.
"That'll take me an hour," Odette said.
"I'll wait."
He waited. He sat in a converted house in Berry Hill for an hour with a rattling window unit and a paper cup of water while a lawyer typed, and he did not take out his phone one time, and his phone did not make one sound, and Savannah sat six feet away and catalogued both of those facts and filed them with the others she could not place.
An hour is a good deal longer than twenty-two minutes. She got up twice and went and stood by the window unit for no reason she could have defended, and both times she came back and sat down in the same chair, which was the one with a view of him in it.
At ten after five Odette put the new page in front of him.
He read it. He signed it. He signed the other six too, and initialed the bottom right of every one, and his hand was steady, and it took no time at all.
Savannah watched him do it and felt the strangest thing she had felt all spring, which was disappointment, because some part of her had built a whole scene around him fighting for term three and had been looking forward to it.
"That's it," Odette said. "I'll file the corrections Friday."
"The accounting's still coming," Savannah said.
Deacon capped the pen and set it down parallel to the page, which was a thing he did.
"Send it to me when it comes," he said.