Chapter 13 #3
That was all he said about it. He did not ask what she thought the number was.
He did not ask about installments or a payment schedule or whether it was going to be net of anything.
He did not say the word Holt, or the word cabinet, or the word courier.
He did not mention a manager, or a mailer, or a certified copy that cost sixty dollars and took four days.
He stood up and put his hat on and thanked Odette by her first name.
At the door he stopped, and Savannah's heart did a thing she was going to be irritated about later, because she was sure he was going to ask her.
Come on the fourteenth. Some version of it. There's a seat. Just come and stand in the back.
"Y'all have a good evening," Deacon said, and went down the stairs.
She had the no built. She had had it built for six days, one word long, and she had been carrying it around in her mouth like a pick.
Her shoulders came down about an inch when the door shut, and then went straight back up, and she was going to be annoyed about that whole sequence for the rest of the week.
She listened to the truck start.
He had not asked her for one thing. Not one. Not a song, not a seat, not a sentence for Trish Gormley, not a single soft word she could have refused and felt clean about.
She called the administrator at nine the next morning to start the corrections herself, because she was not going to let a document with her name on it move through a building she had never spoken to.
The woman who picked up was named Charlene, and she had a voice like a church van.
"I've got the catalogue up," Charlene said. "You're wanting corrections on writer order, is that right, that's forty-some filings—"
"Forty-one."
"Forty-one. Well. Somebody's counted." Keys. "Now, do you want a certified copy of the underlying with the exhibits? That's four days and sixty dollars, and I only ask because it makes the corrections go smoother if you've got one in hand when the analyst calls you."
"My attorney has one."
"That'd be Ms. Callahan. April." More keys, and then a laugh, friendly, a woman making conversation with a stranger at nine in the morning.
"Y'all have kept me busy this spring. That'd be three off this one account since March, and I've had accounts sit twenty years without so much as a change of address. "
Savannah put her pen down.
"Three," she said.
"Ms. Callahan in April. And then Mr. Holloway."
The window unit kicked on.
"Mr. Holloway," Savannah said.
"Yes ma'am. He called it in himself, which about nobody does — it's always an office.
I could hardly hear him. He was in a hallway somewhere and there was a drum kit going.
" Charlene sounded pleased about it, the way you're pleased when a famous person turns out to be normal on the phone.
"Real nice fella. Took me three tries to get his card number. "
"When was that?"
"Let me — last Monday in April. Went out that Friday."
Savannah looked at the wall of a rented kitchen.
The last Monday in April. And the Friday of that week was the day a man walked out of a corner office in the Gulch for the last time, and the Saturday after that was a porch in the country with a peach tree on it and four peaches, and a socket wrench on the boards, and a woman sitting in a chair with a hole worn through the seat, saying Exhibit C, Definitions, laying it out flat like a set list, one fact at a time, waiting for a man to go through a roof.
How long have you known, he had said.
Three weeks, she had said, and braced.
And he had put his hand over his mouth and taken it away and asked her one question, which was whether her lawyer had what she needed, and then he had said good.
He had already read it. It had come in his hands on a Friday and she had handed it to him on a Saturday, and he had ordered it six days before she ever opened her mouth.
He had sat in his mother's rocker and let her hand him the worst thing she had, and let her watch him take it, and had not told her that he had gone and gotten it himself.
"Ma'am?" Charlene said. "You still with me?"
"I'm here."
"You want me to send you the correction forms or do you want them going to Ms. Callahan?"
"Send them to me," Savannah said. "Send everything to me from now on."
She wrote down a confirmation number in a hand that was not entirely her own, and thanked the woman, and hung up.
Then she stood in her kitchen and looked at the six signed pages on the table, the terms she had spent a week building to find out what a man would do when it cost him something real.
He had done it. He had done all of it, blind, in a rented office with a window unit rattling, and initialed the corners.
And he had started it in the last week of April, alone, in a hallway with a drum kit going, with a sixty-dollar charge on a credit card, and nobody watching, and nobody to tell.
Savannah picked up her phone.
She did not call him.
She scrolled past his name, and past Dahlia's, and past Odette's, and stopped on a number she had not dialed since March.
"Wade," she said, when he picked up. "It's Savannah. I need you to tell me straight, one more time. What's on that stage?"