Chapter 2
VIRGIL KILGORE: My sister let me sleep in her sunroom three winters. There was a space heater and a dog that hated me. I'd come in at three in the morning and that dog would stand up and look at me like I'd let everybody down.
(laughs)
He wasn't wrong.
She drove home alone.
That was normal. He had the car service on nights like this and she had the truck, and for fifteen years the arrangement had been that she left when she was done and he left when the room let him go.
It had never once felt like anything. Tonight she got into the truck on the third level of the garage and sat with her hands on the wheel and did not start it for a while.
Cheatham County is forty minutes from downtown if you don't hit anything.
She hit nothing. The road out past Ashland City was empty and black and she drove it the way she had a thousand times, and somewhere around the turn at the feed store she realized she had not thought a single sentence the whole way. Just the road. Just her hands.
The house was dark. She left the porch light off.
She hung the gray dress on the back of the bathroom door and put on jeans and one of his flannels, and then took the flannel off and put on her own sweater instead, and stood in the bedroom for a second wondering why she'd done that.
Then she went down to the kitchen and turned on the light over the stove and sat at the table and waited for her husband.
He came in at ten after one.
She heard the car first, then the door, then him — Virgil never came into a room quietly in his life.
Keys on the counter. The refrigerator. The sound of a big man getting a glass down out of a cabinet without looking at it, because he had been getting that glass out of that cabinet for fifteen years.
"You're up," he said.
"I'm up."
He filled the glass at the tap and drank the whole thing and set it down. He still had the jacket on. He looked wrecked and pleased, the way he looked after a show.
"That was a night," he said.
"It was."
"Jimmy Odom came up to me at the end and could not talk. Could not talk. He put his hand on my arm and stood there." He laughed. "Forty years I've known that man."
"Virgil."
"Hm?"
"Sit down."
He looked at her then. Really looked. She watched him do the thing he does, which is read a room in about a second and a half — she had seen him do it in arenas and in hospital hallways, and she had always found it beautiful, and tonight she watched him do it to her and felt something in her go cold.
He took the jacket off. He put it over the back of the chair. He sat.
"Okay," he said.
"Do you know what I'm going to say?"
"No."
And that was the first thing. He wasn't lying. She could see all the way into him and he was standing there with his hands empty.
"You cut the tour," she said.
He blinked. "What tour?"
"Mine."
For a second nothing happened in his face at all. She watched him go back through a hundred and eighteen minutes at speed, looking for it, and she watched the exact moment he found it, because his mouth opened slightly and stayed that way.
"Oh," he said.
"Bowling Green, and then the door opened, and then Fort Worth."
"Amber."
"Sixteen months. Two buses." Her voice came out level, which surprised her, because her hands under the table were not level at all. "My name over yours on the marquee at the Wilma. You have a picture of it in the footlocker. I put it in the box for her myself."
"I didn't cut anything," he said. "I don't cut it. That's not — she cuts it, I don't even see —"
"I know."
"Then what are we —"
"That's not the part," Amber said.
He stopped.
She had been sitting in this kitchen for three hours deciding how to say it, and every version she came up with had sounded like a woman complaining about a movie. She said it the flattest way she had.
"Sixty-four minutes in, you sat in a chair in my barn and told the whole country that the year I got dropped was the year you got hungry."
The clock over the stove was the loudest thing in the house.
"That's what you said. You said, I watched somebody I loved get taken apart by this business, and I decided I wasn't going to be that. And then you said, that's when it turned for me. And then it cut to a chart."
"That's not —" He stopped. He put both hands flat on the table. "Honey, that's not what that was."
"What was it?"
"She asked me about 2011. She asked me what changed.
And I —" He made a helpless motion with one hand.
"You sit in a room with a camera on you for two years and eventually you stop hearing it.
That's the whole trick of it. She's good at it.
She'd ask a thing and I'd be off somewhere and then it's an hour later. I don't remember saying it."
"You said it very well."
"Amber."
"You said it like you'd said it before."
He didn't answer that.
She let it sit. She was aware of being good at this, and of never having used it on him, not once in fifteen years, and of the fact that the reason she had never used it on him was that she had never needed to.
"You used my worst year," she said, "as the part of your story where the music swells."
"That is not what I meant."
"I know it's not what you meant." She heard her voice slip and pulled it back. "Virgil, I have never once thought you meant a bad thing. That's not — you don't mean bad things. That's not who you are and I know it."
He looked at her with something like hope.
"You just say them," she said, "to other people."
He looked at her like she'd slapped him.
"That's not fair."
"Twenty-two minutes," Amber said.
"What?"
"The last stretch of that movie. After the chart, before the credits.
It's about twenty-two minutes and it's just you in rooms." She had not planned to do this either, and it was coming out of her in order, the way things do when you have been sitting alone in a kitchen for three hours.
"The night you headlined the shed and threw up in the parking lot after.
I was in that parking lot, Virgil. I held your coat.
I have never in fourteen years heard you say the word afraid about it. "
"I've said —"
"You told a stranger you have never once felt like the man everybody in the room thinks they're looking at."
He didn't say anything.
"Is that true?"
"Yes."
"Since when?"
"Since always," he said. "Since I was nine years old."
"And I found that out tonight," Amber said, "at the same time as three hundred people, in a theater, sitting next to you."
"It's talking." He said it with his hands out, like she was refusing to see something obvious.
"That's all that is. I talk for a living.
You put me in a room with a microphone and I will tell you what I had for breakfast in 1986 and how I felt about it.
It doesn't mean anything. It's — honey, that's not intimacy, that's a trade. "
"Then trade with me."
"What?"
"You've got a whole two hours a day where you'll say anything to anybody," she said. "I've had fifteen years and a house and a bed, and I have gotten the version of you that's fine."
He opened his mouth.
"Don't say you're a private person," she said. "Don't you dare say that to me tonight."
He shut it.
He got up. He couldn't help it; he had never been able to take anything sitting down. He went to the sink and put both hands on the edge of it and stood with his back to her.
"They took two hundred hours," he said. "You know that? Two hundred, three hundred. I don't know. There's a version of that film where I talk about you for a week straight."
"Is there."
"Yes there is."
"Then why isn't any of it in the movie?"
"Because I don't make the movie."
"You made every other decision in your life," Amber said.
He turned around.
And that was where it went wrong — or right, she would think later.
That was where it stopped being the two of them working a problem and became something else.
Because he turned around and he was already hurt, and she watched him decide to be hurt out loud, and after fifteen years of a marriage in which he had never once raised his voice at her she understood that he was not going to raise his voice now either. That wasn't his weapon.
His weapon was that he was going to be devastated, beautifully, in front of her.
"I have spent two years," he said, "letting a woman go through every drawer I own."
"I know. I filled the drawers."
"And I did that because Lonnie said it'd be good for —" He stopped himself. "No. I did it because I wanted somebody to get it right for once. One time. Before I'm dead and they make it up."
"Then who's it?" she said.
"What?"
"Get what right." She was standing now. She didn't remember standing. "Because I watched it, and the thing that got made is the story of a man who came out of nowhere. Nobody found me. That's the first line of your movie, Virgil. That's the first thing out of your mouth."
"That's true."
"It is not true."
"Nineteen years —"
"I know about the nineteen years! I have the notebooks from the nineteen years, I have them alphabetized, I know what you were doing in March of every one of those years.
" Her voice was up now and she let it be up.
"And then I walked forty steps across an empty room in Bowling Green to tell a man nobody was listening to that I wanted him on my tour, and I put you in front of my audience for sixteen months, and I stood in the wings every night of it, and there is not one frame of that anywhere in a hundred and eighteen minutes. "
He had gone very still.
"I didn't find you," she said. "Is that what you want me to say? Fine. Nobody found you. But somebody opened the door, and it was me, and now there's a movie."
He sat back down.
He did it heavily, like his legs had quit, and he put his elbows on the table and his hands over his mouth, and after a moment she saw his shoulders go.
She had seen Virgil Kilgore cry twice in fifteen years. When his mother died. And once in a parking lot in Bristol for a reason he had never explained and she had never asked about.
This was the third.