Chapter 14 #3
"I married the only person alive who knows what I actually am," he said, "and then I spent nine years quietly holding it against her, and I called that a marriage, and I was good at it.
I was so good at it that you never knew, and I'd have told you at gunpoint that I was a good husband, and I'd have passed a polygraph. "
"And Exhibit C."
"Exhibit C is the part I can't get around.
" He said it slower. "Because I didn't write it.
I didn't know. That's not a defense, that's the whole problem.
That thing ran every day for nine years, thirty-five cents on your dollar, out in the open, in a drawer, in a file, in a summary that came to me once a quarter — and it never one time hit up against anything in me that would have caught it.
There was no place in me for it to snag on. "
He stopped.
"A man who loved you the way I said I did would have snagged," he said. "That's it. That's the whole confession. I'm not going to dress it up any better than that, because I could, and you'd hear the craft in it."
The refrigerator kicked on. The same one that was under his voicemail greeting. The same one that was on the end of a dub in a paper sack.
"I'm not asking you for anything," Deacon said.
"I know."
"I mean it as a fact, not a position. I don't have a next sentence. I've always had a next sentence." He almost smiled and did not get there. "I'm not going to tell you I'm sorry again either. I've said it and it's gotten cheap and you deserve better currency than that."
Savannah picked her bag up off the counter and did not go anywhere with it.
"There's two mic stands on that stage," she said.
He didn't look surprised. He didn't ask who told her.
"Yes."
"Two feet apart."
"Twenty-four inches on the center."
"And eight bars with nothing written in them, on three songs, and a band that plays them empty every night while everybody stares at the floor."
"That's right."
"What is that, Deacon?"
"It's the arrangement," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the whole answer." He stood up. "That's what those songs are. That's what they were the whole time and I took it out with my own two hands and I put it back, and it's right now, and it's going to be right whether anybody ever sings it or not."
"You'll go out there with an empty stand."
"Yes."
"In front of fourteen hundred people."
"Yes."
"For thirty-one cities."
"If that's how it goes," Deacon said. "Savannah, if I use that stand to ask you for something, then it's a hand on your back, and you'd know it inside of four seconds, because you know everything inside of four seconds.
Then it's not an arrangement anymore. It's a move.
" He picked up the bowl and set it in the sink, and his hands were not steady, and she saw it, and he knew she saw it.
"It's the only thing I've built since March that isn't about you deciding something. I'd like to keep one."
Savannah stood in her own kitchen under her own light for a long moment.
"Six days," she said.
"Six days."
"Here's what happens between now and then.
Nothing goes out with my name in it. Not a poster, not a caption, not a seating chart, not a word to Trish Gormley, not a hint to a promoter, not one thing you let a person infer.
If anybody asks you a question with me in it you say I don't have anything for you. "
"Done."
"You don't announce anything."
"I wasn't going to."
"And you don't ask me," she said.
Deacon stood at the sink with his back half turned.
"No, ma'am," he said.
He had his hands braced on the edge of it, and the shirt across his shoulders was one she had bought him at a truck stop in Amarillo because he had gotten coffee down the other one, and she stood in her own kitchen and did not go anywhere for what she later worked out was about fifteen seconds.
Then she made her feet do it.
She went out the side door and did not say goodbye, and he did not follow her out to the truck, and the kitchen light stayed on behind her, which it would have done for a burglar.
She sat behind the wheel in the dark with her hands at ten and two.
They were perfectly steady. She noticed it with the same clinical surprise she had noticed it with in a storage closet at Cordelia Hall in March, sitting under a mirror screwed to a wall with nineteen notifications on a phone.
It was the same hands and the same steadiness and it meant the exact opposite thing.
She had left a man standing at a sink with his hands not steady, in a house she owned half of, with the light on and the door unlocked behind her, and she had made herself do it, and she could still feel the making in the backs of her legs.
The last time she came through that four-way she had stopped in it with the engine running and sat there working out how much of it she'd be willing to take down.
She was done with that piece of arithmetic.
She had the answer now. It was not a number, and she was not going to say it out loud in a truck by herself.
At the four-way by the church she did not stop.