Chapter 2 #2
And here was the thing she had not planned for and could not have planned for, the thing that came up out of the floor of her: she wanted to go to him.
Not a little. Not as an idea. Her body was already halfway across the kitchen. Fifteen years of this exact motion — of the fact that when this man was hurting, she went, and it had never had to be decided. She got as far as putting her hand on the back of the chair.
She stood there with her hand on the chair and made herself not do it.
That was the worst minute of the night. Worse than the sixty-four-minute mark. Worse than the crawl. Standing in her own kitchen holding onto a chair so she wouldn't go comfort the man who had done it.
"I'm sorry," he said, into his hands. "God. Amber. I'm so sorry."
"I know."
"I'll fix it."
"You can't fix it."
"I can fix it." He looked up. His face was wet and open and forty years younger than it had been an hour ago, and he was not performing, and that was exactly the problem.
"I'll call Lonnie. I'll call the distributor in the morning.
There's — you can do things. You can pull it, you can recut, people do it all the time, there's —"
"It played in a theater tonight."
"Then I'll —"
"It's in eight cities Friday."
"Then I'll buy the eight cities," he said.
And there it was. Fast, and completely sincere, and the most naked thing he'd said all night.
She sat down across from him.
They were quiet for a while. The refrigerator cycled. Out past the window the field went down toward the barn, and the barn was a black shape with a slightly blacker shape where the door was.
She had been going to leave it. That was the truth she never told anybody afterward. She had come home planning to say her piece and go to bed and be furious for a week and let it be a thing they got through, because that is what fifteen years buys you.
But she was looking at him across the table, and he was looking back at her with his whole face wide open, and she was thinking about twenty-two minutes at the end of that film.
A man alone in rooms saying things she had never heard.
The shed. The parking lot. I have never once felt like the person everybody in the room thought they were looking at.
He had never said that to her. In fifteen years. Not once.
He had said it to a woman with a camera and a bag on her shoulder, and then he had let a stranger cut it, and then he had sat next to his wife in the dark while three hundred people heard it before she did.
"Can I ask you something," Amber said.
"Anything."
"And I want you to just answer it."
"Okay."
"Did you touch her?"
The change in the room was immediate and total.
He sat back. His face closed like a hand.
"Wow," he said.
"Virgil."
"No. Wow." He wiped his face with the heel of his palm, once, hard, and when he took the hand away he was somebody else. "That's what we're doing."
"I asked a question."
"That's what you think of me."
"That is not an answer."
"I'm not going to answer that." He stood up. "I'm not going to sit in my own kitchen and — no. You've known me since I was thirty-eight years old. You know exactly who I am."
"I thought I did," she said.
She had not planned that either. It came out of her whole and quiet and it landed on him like a board.
"That's ugly," he said.
"Yes."
"I have never given you one reason —"
"You gave two years of yourself to somebody," Amber said, "and I found out about it in a theater with three hundred people."
"That's not the same thing."
"No," she said. "It might be worse."
He stared at her.
And she watched him not understand. That was the moment she would come back to later, more than the crying, more than the anger.
He genuinely did not understand what she had just said.
He was a man who had held one line his whole life — he had never touched anybody, he had never even been close, he had turned down what most men in his position take with both hands — and he had banked all of it, and he was standing there holding up a clean receipt and finding out it was for the wrong thing.
"I'm going to Bess's," she said.
"Amber."
"I'll get some things in the morning."
"Don't do this in the middle of the night."
"I'm not doing anything." She picked up her keys. "I just can't be in the house."
He didn't follow her. He stood in the middle of the kitchen with his jacket on the back of the chair, and he said her name one more time, and it wasn't loud, and she kept going.
At the door she stopped.
"Virgil."
He looked up so fast it hurt her.
"It's a good film," she said. "It's really good. I don't want you to think I don't know that."
Then she went out.
The gravel drive runs down past the barn before it meets the road.
She had driven it in the dark maybe four thousand times.
She could have done it with the lights off.
She drove it slow tonight, with the window down and the cold coming in, and the headlights went across the front of the barn the way they always did — across the sliding door and the padlock and the two windows they'd put in the year they redid the roof.
Thirty-five years in there. Every reel. Every notebook, every cassette, every session sheet, every scrap of paper that proved a man wrote a song on a particular night in a particular room.
She had built the whole thing. She had baked tapes in a countertop oven at two in the morning and dated them off her own index cards and driven them to town in a milk crate.
There was not one fact in that movie tonight that had not come out of that building, in her handwriting, in her order.
Amber stopped the truck at the bottom of the drive with her foot on the brake and the barn lit up in the mirrors behind her.
Then she pulled out onto Dry Branch Road and drove to Nashville, and she did not cry until she was past the feed store, and then she cried so hard she had to put the truck on the shoulder for a while with the flashers on.
Bess opened the door in a T-shirt at two forty in the morning, took one look at her, and stepped back to let her in without saying a word.