Chapter 15
Cordelia Hall smelled like floor wax and old coffee.
Fourteen hundred seats, and the first arena on the run was eleven days out in Fort Worth.
Deacon had put the Nashville date on the front of the tour himself, back in November, when Holt still had the pen — one small hometown night to knock the rust off a band before it walked into a building that seated twelve thousand.
It was the cheapest date on the routing and the only one nobody made money on.
Savannah came in the north door at two in the afternoon on the fourteenth of May with a guitar in one hand and a canvas bag on her shoulder with a shoelace where the zipper pull used to be.
The north door was the one Holt Sennett had walked a man out of in March while his wife was reading a trade alert in a storage closet forty feet away.
She had thought about that on the drive and had decided it was the door.
The kid on the door had a laminate and a clipboard and no idea.
"Ma'am, are you with production or—"
"Savannah Holloway."
He looked at the list. She watched him look at it twice, the way she had read a Tempo alert twice, and she felt for him.
"I'm not on there," she said. "Call Wade Pruitt at monitors. Tell him it's the channel he's been testing."
Wade came around the corner at a walk that turned into something faster and stopped four feet short of her, because Wade Pruitt did not hug people at work.
"Does he know?"
"No."
"Do you want him to?"
"Not for about two hours."
Wade rubbed his mouth and looked at the ceiling. "That channel's patched and EQ'd off a guess I made in April off nine years of memory. Give me eight minutes on it and I'll get it inside of two percent."
"Give me twenty and I'll give you eight."
"Yes ma'am," Wade said, and then, "Savannah," and she waited, and he did not say the thing, and she let him not say it.
The women's dressing room at Cordelia Hall was a storage closet with a mirror screwed to the wall.
They had put her name on a card in a brass frame two doors down from the stage, on a room with a couch and a fruit plate, and she found that out from the hallway and went and stood in the doorway of it for a second and did not go in.
Then she walked back down and opened the closet.
Chair. Light. Outlet. Mop sink in the corner. The same mirror with the same four screws in it, and the same water stain over the door in the shape of nothing at all.
She set her guitar down and sat in the chair and made herself sit there for a full minute in the room where it happened, because she had learned in April that you cannot mix a room you refuse to stand in.
Her phone buzzed on her knee.
Odette Callahan.
"It's done," Odette said.
Savannah sat up.
"Six weeks and four days, and it's on my desk under a CPA's signature, and I have read every page of it twice." Paper. "Eight hundred and twelve thousand dollars."
"Say it again."
"Eight hundred and twelve thousand dollars," Odette said.
"That's mechanicals only. That's the sixty-five over the fifty across forty-one songs across nine years, and it does not include one dollar of interest, which I will be asking for.
I'll sign my name to it, and I have never in my life put my name on a number I hadn't chewed twice. "
"He waived everything."
"He waived everything. There is no fight. It'll be in your account inside of thirty days and probably inside of ten, because his people have been calling my people asking how fast they can pay it, which is a phone call I have never received in twenty-six years."
Savannah looked at the mirror screwed to the wall.
Eight hundred and twelve thousand dollars.
It was a house and a half. It was a studio and a band and five years of doing exactly as she pleased.
It was every Tuesday she had ever spent building a harmony at a kitchen table while a man made the coffee, converted at thirty-five cents on the dollar and then paid back.
"Are you all right?" Odette said.
"I'm at Cordelia Hall."
The line went quiet in a way that had a lot in it.
"Then I'll give you one sentence and hang up on you like a Rourke," Odette said. "You've got the number now. You do not need one thing that is in that building. So if you take anything out of it tonight, take it because you want it."
She found him at ten past four in Room B.
That was where he was, of course. Forty feet down the hall from the storage closet, with the door open, alone, sitting on a folding chair with a guitar across his knee and his hat on the floor beside him, running the second verse of something to nobody.
She stood in the doorway.
He looked up and the guitar stopped mid-bar, one string still ringing, and Deacon Holloway went absolutely white.
"Don't stand up," Savannah said.
He did not stand up. He put both hands flat on the top of the guitar like a man steadying something on a truck bed.
She came in and shut the door and did not sit down.
"I'm going to say a list," she said. "It's a long one and I've had it in order since Tuesday, and if you interrupt me I'll start over from the top."
"All right."
"First thing. The accounting came back an hour ago. Eight hundred and twelve thousand dollars."
Deacon's jaw moved. "Okay."
"I'm not telling you that so you can react to it.
I'm telling you so it's on the table before anything else goes on the table.
" She set her feet. "I have a signed co-writing deal with Silas Rourke and ten songs to write this summer.
I have a song going on a record in June that's got a real shot.
I have a lawyer, and a house I pay the rent on out of my own money, and forty-one registrations with my name typed first on them as of Friday.
I do not need one thing in this building and I do not need one thing from you, and that is not a threat, it is arithmetic, and I want it said out loud in a room by me before I say the next part. "
"Savannah—"
"That's an interruption."
He shut his mouth.
"Second thing," she said. "I'm coming home. Not to talk about coming home. Not to see how it goes. I'm coming home Sunday and I'm bringing the drawer, and Cobb can have his four forks back."
Deacon did not move at all.
"Third thing, and this is the one I need you to actually hear, so look at me.
" She waited until he did. "I'm not putting you on probation.
There's no trial period. There's no thirty days and we'll see.
I thought about it for a week and I'm not doing it, and I want to tell you why, because the why is the whole thing. "
"Tell me."
"Because you'd be good at it," Savannah said.
"You'd be so good at it. You'd manage it.
You'd get up every day for a year and audition for your own wife and you'd never once slip, and at the end of it I'd have a husband who'd earned me, and I'd have a man who'd been performing at me for a year, and I have already had nine years of a man performing.
I'm not doing that again for a better reason. "
She took a breath.
"So here it is. I forgave you somewhere in the last two weeks.
I don't know what day. It happened while I was doing something else, which is how everything real has ever happened to me.
" Her voice did not shake and she was glad about that afterward.
"It's done. It's already done. I'm telling you so you don't spend the rest of your life trying to get it. "
Deacon put his hand over his eyes.
"Fourth thing," Savannah said. "The terms stand.
All three of them, forever, and they don't get softer because I'm in your kitchen.
The consent is mine. Not ours. Whether there's ever a marquee with both our names on it is a thing I decide, by myself, every single time, and I don't have to give you a reason, and if I say no you say all right and you don't ask me why.
Not ever. Not once. Not in twenty years. "
"All right."
"And the last one." She unhooked the bag off her shoulder and set it on a road case.
"I want you. That's not a conclusion I got to because I ran out of ground to stand on.
I've got more ground than I've ever had in my life.
I'm standing on all of it and I want you anyway, and that's the only version of this I was ever going to take. "
The room hummed. Room B had a fan in the ceiling that had never worked right.
Deacon took his hand down. His eyes were a wreck and he did not do anything about it.
"All right," he said.
Savannah waited.
"That's it?"
"You said it right the first time," Deacon said. "I'm not going to improve it."
She went out and made two phone calls from the hallway.
The first one was to the building. She got a man named Pete in operations who had been changing the letters on the front of Cordelia Hall for twenty-two years and who did not, at any point, ask her who she was, which told her Wade had already called him.
"How many letters have you got?"
"Two sets of everything and a case of spares."
"Take it all down," Savannah said. "Every letter. And put up THE HOLLOWAYS. Centered, nothing under it, nothing over it. That's the whole sign."
"Not the tour name?"
"Not the tour name."
"Not his?"
"His is in it," Savannah said.
She stood in the hallway afterward with the phone in her hand.
She had thought about the other version for three days. SAVANNAH HOLLOWAY across the top and his underneath in the same size type, hers first, on a marquee with cars going by. She had let herself have it at a kitchen table in Berry Hill at night with a pencil.
She could have had it. That was the part she was keeping. Nobody on earth could have stopped her, and she had sat with it and decided she'd rather have the one word.
His name came second on every piece of paper they would ever make again. Paper was where it counted. Paper was what had gotten her.
The sign could be a sign.
The second call was to Trish Gormley, and it took nine seconds.