Chapter 14 #2
Neither one of them came off their mark for the next hour. Six feet of granite and a bowl of cereal between them, and she knew where he was the whole time without looking at him, the way you know where the drummer is without turning around.
"I'm going to say what I know," she said, "and you're going to tell me if any of it's wrong. Don't add to it. I'll ask."
"All right."
"You ordered your own certified copy of the agreement from the administrator on the last Monday in April. You called it in yourself from a hallway. It cost you sixty dollars and it came Friday."
"Yes."
"You read Exhibit C."
"Four times. I didn't get it. I had to call the Brentwood lawyer and have her put it in English."
"You fired Holt Sennett on that Friday."
"Yes."
"And you took the signed original out of his cabinet and you sent it to my lawyer from a counter on Charlotte Avenue with the sender line blank."
Deacon looked at the bowl.
"Yes," he said.
"And then on Saturday you drove out to your mother's house and sat in a rocker with a socket wrench in your hand and let me tell you about it.
" Her voice did not do anything. She was proud of that later and not at the time.
"Start to finish. Sixty-five percent. The margin note.
Seven to nine hundred thousand dollars. I told you I sat on it for three weeks and I told you I did it on purpose, and I sat there with both hands on the arms of that chair waiting for you to come apart, and you asked me does Odette have what she needs. "
"I remember."
"You already had it."
"I already had it."
"Why didn't you say so?"
He turned the bowl a quarter turn on the granite, which was a thing his mother did with a coffee cup on an oilcloth.
"Because there's no way to say it that isn't me handing you a receipt," he said.
"I sat in a parking lot on Charlotte Avenue for a good while with a mailer in my lap trying to write you a note, and every version of it was either an explanation or a request. There wasn't one that wasn't me asking to be seen doing it. "
"That's a very well-built sentence."
"It's the truest one I've got."
"It's still a decision you made about what I get to know," Savannah said. "That's the whole shape of the last nine years, Deacon. A man in another room deciding what I get to know. You did the right thing in the wrong direction and it is the same exact motion."
She watched that land.
He did not defend it. He did not say that's not fair and he did not say I was trying to and he did not rub the back of his neck.
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
"Say the rest of it."
"There isn't any rest of it. You're right. I'd do it the same way again and you'd still be right, and I don't know what to do with that, so I'm just going to agree with you."
He got up after a minute and went into the front room and came back with a laptop and a little gray speaker she recognized, the one that lived in a road case for twelve years and had been dropped off a riser in Amarillo.
"I want to play you something," he said. "It's about nine minutes. You can leave in the middle of it."
"Is this a thing you've been getting ready?"
"No. I've had this on here since July and I have not been able to make myself open it since March." He set the speaker on the island between them. "I'm going to say what it is first so you don't have to guess."
"Go ahead."
"Ridgeline sent a note on the album in July. Two sentences." He was not looking at her. He was looking at the laptop. "The stacked harmony reads as a duo. Recommend we thin it."
Savannah put one hand on the counter.
"I didn't fight it," Deacon said. "I want to be precise, because I have been very good my whole life at being approximately honest. I did not argue.
I did not ask a question. I did not sleep on it.
I read it in a parking lot and I typed back makes sense and then I sat in a room with an engineer for two afternoons and we pulled your line out of six songs. "
"My line."
"The third above. The one you sing without thinking about it. The one you put on 'Ash Creek' at the kitchen table in two days while I made coffee." He pressed something. "Nine hours. That's what it took. Nine hours to take you off a record."
He played it.
The first one was the July mix. Her voice, riding a third over the top of him, doing what it had done for nine years, holding a line she did not remember singing on that song because she had sung it on everything.
Then he played the other one.
The doubled lead. The pad underneath. Bigger. Wider. Absolutely correct. A wall of one man, filling every inch of the frequency where a woman used to be, and if you had never heard the first one you would not have known that anything was missing, because nothing sounded missing.
It sounded finished.
Savannah stood in her own kitchen with both hands on the granite and listened to herself get removed, and it was worse than the trade alert. It was so much worse than the trade alert. A trade alert is a thing a stranger does with a keyboard. This was hands.
"Turn it off," she said.
He turned it off.
He took his hand off the laptop and set it down flat on the granite, and it landed about four inches from hers, and for a second neither one of them moved either hand.
Then he took his back.
"That's six songs?"
"Six."
"And you thought it sounded bigger."
"I said it out loud in the room," Deacon said. "I said that's bigger. The engineer said yeah. We went and got barbecue."
He did not say anything for a while and she let him not say it.
"It was bigger," he said finally. "That's the thing. It wasn't a mistake and it wasn't a bad call, it was bigger, and what it sounded like was one man standing by himself in a field with everybody looking at him."
He put his palms flat on the granite.
"And I have wanted that sound since before I could tell you what year it started."
Savannah did not move.
"I have been trying for two months to find where it starts," he said.
"That's most of what I've done. I've driven to Dickson and I've sat up at two in the morning in a rented room and I have gone through my whole life looking for the year I turned into this, because if I could find it I could hand it to you.
I could say, here, this is the wound, it's from such-and-such, and then you'd have a decision to make about how gentle to be with me. "
He shook his head slowly.
"There isn't one," he said. "I looked hard, Savannah. I wanted there to be one. It's not a thing that happened to me. It's what I'm like."
She had a hand on the back of a nine-year-old's neck sitting behind her teeth. She had a truck and forty silent minutes and a woman turning a coffee cup a quarter turn on an oilcloth saying he'd make a reason out of it inside of a week.
Savannah kept her mouth shut.
It was the hardest thing she did that whole spring.
"Here's what I'm like," Deacon said. "Every room I have ever walked into, something happens to it.
It happens because I'm in it. I've known that since I was a kid and I have never once been bored of it, not one day, not at a fair, not at a funeral.
And there was exactly one room where I could never tell how much of it was me. " He looked up. "It had you in it."
"Deacon—"
"Let me get it out, because I've never said it and I might not be able to twice.
" His jaw worked. "They took me to lunch in July and they put a page in front of me with two numbers on it.
Three thousand seats with you. Twelve thousand without.
And what I felt was not greed and it wasn't even ambition.
It was relief. Because somebody had finally measured me by myself, and the number was bigger, and I have carried that page around in my head for a year like a letter from a girl. "
Savannah's eyes had gone hot and she did not do anything about it.