Chapter 3 #2
Not physically — physically it was all still there. Her fingers went to a G without asking her. She could feel the calluses she doesn't have anymore, the ghost of them, the place they used to be.
She just couldn't make the other thing happen. The thing where you open your mouth.
She sat there with a chord shape under her hand and her mouth shut for about forty seconds, and it was one of the worst forty seconds of her life, and she did not make a sound.
Then she put the guitar back on the stand, exactly where it had been, at exactly the angle it had been at.
Bess came back in and looked at the stand and looked at her and said, "You want coffee?"
"Yeah."
"Okay," Bess said, and went and got it, and did not say one word about it, then or ever.
Bess had a session at two on Friday, so Amber walked up to Manning's on Gallatin Pike and sat in a booth by herself with a plate of food she didn't eat.
It was a good place to be nobody. Vinyl booths and a laminated menu and two men at the counter arguing about a truck. The waitress called her honey and did not know her from a hole in the wall.
Her phone buzzed. Not Virgil.
Hi — this is Carly Braswell, I got your number from Bess Hodge, I hope that's alright. I'm making a record in January and there's a song on it I can't get right and I've had a stupid idea about it for about six years. Would you call me back. Thanks. Sorry. This is Carly Braswell.
Amber listened to it twice, mostly because the woman said her own name three times.
Then she put the phone in her bag.
She was not going to call a stranger back this week. She was not going to do anything this week. She sat in the booth and pushed a piece of cornbread around with a fork and let herself think, for the first time in five days, about the church.
Cane Hollow Free Will Baptist, on a Saturday in February, three months after Sawtooth let her go.
It had been nineteen degrees. Her mother had made the cake and had not spoken to her all morning.
There were sixteen people in the pews and she had counted them from the front, twice, because she couldn't look at anything else.
She had been twenty-six years old and she had not felt like a woman losing anything. That was what she wanted somebody to understand. She had stood up there in a dress she bought in Hazard and looked at a man who had nothing, and she had thought: good. Let's go be nobody together.
They had eaten the cake in the fellowship hall off paper plates. Virgil had washed the coffee urn himself afterward, in his suit, with his sleeves rolled, because nobody else was going to. She had stood in the doorway and watched him do it and thought her chest was going to come apart.
He had told a woman with a camera about a sunroom and a dog.
He had never once told anybody about the urn.
She stopped at the co-op in Ashland City on the way out to get the dog food she wasn't going to need, because they don't have a dog, because she wanted a reason to be doing an errand.
The man at the register is named Dewey and has been there twenty years and calls everybody chief.
"Chief," he said.
"Hey, Dewey."
He rang it up. Then he stopped with his hand on the bag and said, "Hey — went and saw that picture."
Amber said, "Did you."
"Took Debbie Sunday." He shook his head slowly, the way men do when they've been moved and don't intend to discuss it. "Boy, that's a thing. That part with his mama."
"It's good, isn't it."
"Real good." He pushed the bag across. "You tell him. You tell him Dewey said it's the best thing he ever done."
"I'll tell him."
"That dog in the sunroom," Dewey said, and laughed to himself, and shook his head again, and moved on to the next person.
She got out to the truck and put the dog food in the bed and stood there in the cold for a minute with her hand on the tailgate.
You tell him.
That was going to be the rest of it. Not the gossip, not the Signal item. This. Two hundred people a week, kind as anything, handing her a message for her husband, forever, because that is what she is for.
She drove out to the farm at six, when she knew he'd be at the foundation dinner in town because it had been on the calendar for a year and Virgil Kilgore does not miss things that are on the calendar.
The house was warm and smelled like him. That was the ambush she hadn't planned for. She stood in the front hall with her keys in her hand and got hit with fifteen years of a smell.
She packed properly this time. Boots, the good coat, her reading glasses off the kitchen counter, the shoebox of receipts she kept meaning to deal with. She took her pillow. That felt like a large thing to take and she took it anyway.
On the way out she stopped on the porch.
It was full dark. The field ran down toward the barn, and the barn had its yard light on, the way it always did, because she was the one who left it on.
Fifteen years. Every day of them. She had gone down that slope in the rain and in ice and once with a hundred-and-two fever. She had gone down it on Christmas morning to get a box for a man from a magazine. There was a path worn in the grass because she was the only one who ever walked it.
There were six reels sitting on the bench in there right now waiting to be logged. She knew exactly where they were. She could see the bench in her head, and the index card box, and her handwriting on the top card, and the space heater she always meant to replace.
She stood on the porch with her pillow under her arm.
Then she put her things in the truck, and got in, and drove down the gravel past the barn without slowing down, and did not go in.
Nobody would ever know she had done it. That was the whole shape of it. There was no one on this earth who would notice that Amber Galloway had walked past that door for the first time in fifteen years, and no version of it would ever be in anybody's movie.
At the end of the drive she stopped with the blinker going and nothing coming either way on Dry Branch Road.
She got out her phone and called Opal Waller's office and left a message on the machine.
"It's Amber Galloway," she said. "You asked me what I wanted. I still don't know. But I'd like to see what it looks like on paper if I don't go home."