Chapter 16 #2
"I've got one more and then Junie's going to make you all leave," she said. "I want to say something first and I'm going to say it plain, because I have spent about a year now learning what happens to a woman who leaves things to be understood."
The room went quiet.
"That's my husband in the fourth row," she said. "Deacon Holloway. He paid the ten dollars."
A laugh went through it.
"He's not on the poster because there isn't a poster, and he's not on that board because Junie won't put anybody's whole name on it including mine.
" She let that go. "He's sitting in the fourth row because that's where I put him tonight, and there is a piece of paper with a lawyer's name on it that says I'm the one who decides where he goes and whether our two names ever go on anything together again, and that paper doesn't expire, and I am never giving it up.
He signed it before he knew what it was going to cost him.
That's the part I'd want you to know if you only got one part. "
She found him in the dark. He was easy to find. He was the biggest thing in the fourth row and he had not moved in fifty minutes.
"I'm going to be married to this man for the rest of my life," Savannah said.
"That's not a hope and it's not a plan. I decided it in May and I'm not revisiting it.
I love him. I'm happy. I want somebody in this town to have heard me say it out loud in a room, and now four people standing at the back have, so it's done. "
She lifted her chin.
"Come up here."
He came up. There was no second stand and no second guitar and he did not need either one, and he stood on Savannah Holloway's left, at about two feet, on a rug in front of eighty people.
She looked at him and moved him six inches with the back of her hand.
"He drifts," she told the room.
They played "Two Chairs."
Nine years ago, two people had played that song in that room to thirty-one people and split forty-two dollars and gone to a Waffle House.
Tonight they played it to eighty, and the difference between those two numbers is nothing at all, and Savannah had known that in her hands since she was twenty-five and had spent a while being talked out of it.
On the last chorus he turned and sang it at her instead of at the room, the way he had every night for four years.
Then he did not step back.
He put his hand around the neck of the mic and looked at eighty people and said, "I'd like to answer her."
"Deacon."
"You said yours in a room. I'm saying mine in a room.
" He rubbed the back of his neck once and then took his hand down and left it down.
"I love this woman. I'm going to love her when I'm old and I'm going to be standing exactly where she puts me, and if she moves me I'll go, and I'll come back.
And there isn't a marquee anywhere in the world with my name on it that I want more than I want that. "
Junie Marsh said, "All right," in the flat voice she uses to end a round, and turned the house lights on, and Dahlia Prater cried for the third time and denied it for the third time.
They took twelve people to the Waffle House on Nolensville Pike at a quarter to eleven and put four tables together and made the whole place miserable.
Pearl had a waffle and a cup of coffee and told the story about Ray Dell Wicks and the ghost lily on the Econoline better than Deacon had ever told it, with timing, from a chair, to a table of grown adults, and finished with the Buick, and Silas Rourke laughed so hard he had to put his head down on the table.
Dahlia got the check and then found out Junie had already gotten the check out of the fanny pack, and there was an argument about it that lasted four minutes and that Junie won.
Somebody put money in the jukebox. Somebody put in "Ash Creek," which was either a very sweet thing to do or the meanest, and Savannah looked up at the ceiling and said, "Oh, come on," and Deacon put his arm around the back of her chair and let it play.
Under the table she had her hand on his knee the whole time, and she had not thought about it once, and that was the thing about the seven months. It had stopped being a decision she made forty times a day. It had gone back to being her hand.
They got home at half past midnight.
The kitchen light was on. He had left it on, because he always left it on, and there had never been anybody else in that house who did.
Savannah put the guitar down inside the door and boosted herself up onto the granite island in her coat, which she was not allowed to do and had been doing since she was twenty-five, and Deacon came and stood between her knees and put his hands on her hips.
"Your hands are freezing."
"That's the coat's fault."
"Everything's the coat's fault." She got her arms up around his neck. "Junie says the roof's going to need doing in about four years."
"Four years."
"That's what she says. We'll do the roof."
"We'll do the roof," Deacon said, and he said we like a man setting down something heavy in a place it was going to stay, and Savannah felt it go through her from the collarbone out.
There were two chairs on their own porch out there in the dark.
There had been for nine years. The second seat had gone through in the middle sometime in September, and she had caught him out there with a piece of lawn-chair webbing and a staple gun, patching it from underneath, exactly the way his mother's was patched, and he had looked up at her like a boy caught with a cigarette, and she had sat down in it anyway and made it worse.
"Say it plain," she said. "You know I like it plain."
"I love you," Deacon said. "I'm not going anywhere. Not for a night, not for a lunch in July, not for anything anybody ever puts in front of me. You're my wife and I'm going to be looking at you when I'm eighty and I am going to be so happy about it."
"That's cocky."
"It's December," he said. "I've earned a little."
She laughed and pulled him in by the front of his shirt.
"I love you," Savannah said. "I picked you twice. Nobody gets picked twice by me."
"No, ma'am."
"So you're stuck."
"I'm stuck," Deacon said.
She kissed him in the middle of her own kitchen with the light on over the stove and her ring cold against the back of his neck, and neither one of them let go for a long time, and there was nothing left in that house that had to be managed and nothing left in either of them that had to be careful.
Two names on one deed. Two chairs on the porch, both of them worn through now. A woman who had been written out of her own record and had gone and bought the room she started in.
They were happy — flat out, out loud, all the way down — and they were going to stay that way, and Savannah Holloway had decided that herself, on purpose, with both hands free.