Chapter 14
The pad by the sink still had the confirmation number on it and nothing else, and she had not torn the sheet off yet.
She still had the pen in her hand when Wade Pruitt picked up.
"I have been trying to figure out how to tell you this for nine days," he said.
"Then you're already caught up. Go."
"Where are you?"
"Standing in a kitchen with a phone in my hand, Wade."
"Sit down anyway."
She sat down on the floor with her back against the cabinet, which she had promised herself twice she was going to quit doing.
"The back half of that set is charted for two voices," Wade said.
Savannah did not say anything.
"Eight songs. It came to me three weeks ago in pencil, in his handwriting, which I have never once seen in fifteen years because that man does not write anything down.
" Wade's voice had the flat, careful sound of a man reading a gauge.
"There's a second line on all eight. It's not stacked and it's not a doubled part.
It's a real second voice and it's written low.
It sits under the melody instead of over it. "
"In what key."
"In your key," Wade said. "In the bottom of your key. In the part of your range you never used because there was always a baritone parked in it."
The refrigerator kicked on. Savannah put her hand over her eyes.
"Four of those songs never had a second voice on them at all," Wade said.
"Not on the record, not in the demo, not anywhere.
He wrote it in from scratch. And on three of them, right at the top of the third section, the lead drops out entirely and there's eight bars where there's nothing written in the box.
Nothing. He drew the bars and left them empty. "
"Who's singing them?"
"Nobody."
"Wade."
"Nobody, Savannah. That's what I've been sitting on.
We've run that set a dozen times and every single night the band plays those eight bars with no vocal on them, and everybody in that room looks at their shoes, and nobody has said one word about it out loud.
" A chair scraped. "I asked Corrigan. He said ask Deacon. So I asked Deacon."
"And?"
"He said leave it."
"That's all."
"That's all he said. Leave it." Wade let out a breath.
"There's two stands at the front of the riser.
He set them up himself and he measured. Twenty-four inches on the center.
There's a wedge under the second one and a channel open on my board that's been labeled since April, and I have not had one thing come up that channel in three weeks, and I test it every day like a fool. "
Savannah sat on a rented kitchen floor and looked at a wall.
"Did he ask you to tell me?" she said.
"No, ma'am."
"Did anybody?"
"No, ma'am. He told me not to." Wade said it flat, the way he laid things down.
"Standing right there at the board. He said if she hears about it from us it's a hand on her back and she'll know it and she'll be right.
And I said all right. And I have been sick about it for nine days, and I've got three kids and a bus payment and I already sat on one thing from you for four months, and I am not doing it twice. "
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. I'm two months late."
"Wade."
"What."
"Test the channel tomorrow too," Savannah said, and hung up before either one of them could make it into something.
The correction went out Thursday afternoon at two.
It did not come from Ridgeline. It did not come from a publicist and it did not come from a firm in Brentwood.
It went to five trades at the same minute from an email address at a business manager's office, and it was one page, and there was a signature scanned at the bottom of it, big and slanted and pressing too hard.
Savannah read it in the truck. Then she went into the coffee shop under Odette's office and read it again sitting down, because her legs had gone strange.
The publishing agreement covering the Holloways catalogue contains a definition I did not read nine years ago and did not read again until three weeks ago.
Whichever writer is listed first in a song's registration is deemed the primary contributor and takes sixty-five percent of the mechanical income, no matter what the printed credit says.
The printed credit on our records says fifty-fifty. The money underneath it did not.
I am listed first on all forty-one songs.
Savannah Holloway is listed first on none of them.
Neither of us chose that. It was set by a standing instruction sent two months after we signed.
I was not copied on it, and I did not go looking, and for nine years the statements that reached me were one line long and said "publishing" and a number, and I never once asked what was under the line.
I had the benefit of every dollar of it.
I am not going to name anyone else in this. It was done in my name and I took the money.
Corrections have been filed on all forty-one registrations reversing the writer order to reflect the work.
The printed credits on every existing release are wrong.
I am paying to correct them, including the physical inventory, and the corrected credits will appear on the "Dry County" reissue before it ships.
The amount owed is being calculated by an independent accountant. I have instructed my counsel to waive every defense available to me, including any limitation defense, and to consent to whatever number comes back. There will be no dispute about it.
— Deacon Holloway
There was no second paragraph about the marriage. There was no my wife. There was no we, anywhere, one time.
There was no version of the sentence I hope.
Rennie from Tempo called at four twenty, and Savannah picked up, which she had done exactly once before.
"I'm not asking you to comment," Rennie said. "I want to check two numbers with somebody who'd know if they were wrong."
"Check them."
"The label offered to fix the credits on the next pressing, at their cost, going forward.
That's normal. That's what anybody would do.
" Papers. "He didn't take it. He bought the printed inventory himself.
Twenty-two thousand jackets, boxed in a warehouse in Jackson, plus the plates.
He's paying to pulp them, print it again, and hold the ship date, and he's paying the label for the street-date move on top of it. "
"How much."
"Two hundred sixty thousand dollars, and his business manager confirmed the invoice on the record, which nobody does.
" Rennie let that sit. "Second number. He's got no management, twenty-two guarantees repapered in eight days, and he ate a commission buyout and a piece of insurance getting out of Sennett paper.
Three people put that between six and nine hundred thousand.
This is a man spending everything he has this month on a credit line. "
"Is that your story?"
"My story is that a country act's publishing structure took sixty-five cents off one writer's dollar for nine years, and half the drawers in this town have one in them.
" Rennie's chair creaked. "That story doesn't need either one of you in it.
Which is why I'm going to ask you the same question I asked in March, and you're going to say the same thing. "
"I asked for the numbers," Savannah said. "That's all I've asked for."
"Word for word."
"It's still true."
"It is," Rennie said. "For about six more days."
Odette called at five thirty and did not say hello either. Nobody said hello to her anymore. She had started to like it.
"He filed an acknowledgment with the administrator on Friday," she said.
"On the record. The sixty-five percent was never earned, he consents to full recoupment, he waives limitations.
There was a defense in this that would have cut your number about in half.
A real one. I'd have worked a year to get around it.
He gave it up in a paragraph, before the accounting came back, without asking me what it was worth. "
"His lawyer let him?"
"His lawyer called me Friday night and asked, off the record, whether I had any idea how to make a grown man protect himself," Odette said. "I told her I have the same problem in the other direction."
Savannah stood in a parking lot in Berry Hill and worked it out with her hand on the warm hood of the truck.
Friday he had given away the only defense he had.
Wednesday, two days before, he had signed her three terms blind.
Which meant Wednesday had not cost him money.
Wednesday had cost him the one thing left on that page, which was the right to ever put both their names on anything again as long as he lived.
She drove out to the Harpeth House at seven.
She had not been in it since a night in March when she carried a drawer out to a truck. She had driven past the end of the road twice in seven weeks and had not turned, and she had been proud of that, and she was going to have to give that up now.
The kitchen light was on. It was always on. He was the one who left it on and there had never been anybody else in that house who did.
She let herself in the side door with her own key, because it was her house and she paid for half of it and she was not going to knock on it.
The door stuck at the top the way it had stuck since the year they bought it, and she lifted it with her shoulder without being told to, and she was standing in the room before she had decided anything at all.
Deacon was at the island with a bowl of cereal at seven o'clock at night and a phone face down beside it, and he stood up when the door opened the way a man stands up when he thinks it's somebody with a subpoena.
"Sit down," Savannah said.
He sat down.
She put her bag on the counter and stayed standing, which put her about a foot above him, and she had thought about that in the truck and had decided she did not care that she had thought about it.
It was the first time she had been alone in a room with him with a door shut since March. She had worked that out in the truck too, on the long part, past the church.