Chapter 4 #2
She counted to thirty. She washed her hands. She looked at herself in a mirror under a light designed by someone who hated women, and put her lipstick back on, and went out and worked the rest of the room.
Around eleven he found her by the window and said, "Six."
"What?"
"You're at a six. I'm calling it."
"I'm at a seven."
"You're at a six and you're lying because you don't want to be the reason we go."
"I am at," Amber said, "a solid six and a half."
"That's it. I'm getting my coat."
And she laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, and she saw him hear it, and she saw what it did to him, and she turned and looked out the window at Broadway so she wouldn't have to watch his face.
Her truck was on the fourth level of the garage, next to a concrete post with a scrape on it that had been there for six years.
"Send the car home," Virgil said.
"Don't."
"I'm asking you for a ride, that's all. It's twelve miles. You can put me out at the end of the drive."
She should have said no. She said, "Get in."
He folded himself into the passenger side the way he'd folded himself into it a thousand times, seat all the way back, knees still against the glovebox, and he did not turn the radio on and neither did she.
Briley Parkway at midnight is nothing. Orange lights and a river you can't see and twelve miles of no one.
They didn't talk for the first four of them.
Then he said, "Dinah Yancey asked me tonight how the girls were doing."
"We don't have any girls."
"I know we don't have any girls."
"What did you say?"
"I said they're great," Virgil said. "I said the oldest one's applying to schools."
Amber made a sound.
"She said time flies," he said.
And that did it. She laughed — the real one, the one that gets away from her and doesn't sound like anything, the one Bess calls the goose — and once it started she couldn't stop it, and she had to slow the truck down because she couldn't see.
He was laughing too, the big one, leaned back into the seat with his hand over his eyes, and for about ninety seconds the cab of that truck was the best place either of them had been in three weeks.
Then it wound down, the way laughing does.
And then it was very quiet.
She was aware of everything. The heater fan. His knee against the glovebox. The particular size he takes up in a small space, which is a thing she had stopped noticing sometime around 2016 and was noticing now like a hand on her throat.
"Amber," he said.
"Don't."
"I'm not going to."
"You are."
"I'm not." He was looking straight ahead. "I just wanted to say your name in a room where nobody's listening."
She kept both hands on the wheel.
Out past the exits, out where the lights quit, the road went dark and the fields came back.
She drove it. Twelve miles. Neither of them said one more word, and the not-saying filled the truck up to the roof, and by the time she made the turn onto Dry Branch Road she was breathing like she'd carried something up a hill.
She stopped at the end of the gravel like he'd said.
He didn't get out.
"You want to come up to the house," he said. Not a question, exactly. It was too flat to be a question, and too careful.
"No."
"Okay."
"Virgil."
"No, that's — okay." He got the door open. Cold came in. He sat there a second with one foot on the gravel. "Thank you for tonight. That's not — I know what it cost you. I know."
"You don't, actually," she said.
He looked back at her.
"But thank you for saying it," she said.
He nodded. He got out. He shut the door with two hands, softly, the way you do at midnight, and he went up the drive on foot, and she watched him go past the barn with its yard light on, and she did not drive away until the porch light came on at the top.
Bess was up when she got back to town, which meant Bess had waited up, which Bess would deny.
"Well," Bess said.
"Don't."
"I'm not saying anything."
"You've got your face on."
"This is my only face." Bess put a glass of water down in front of her. "How was it."
"Fine. Long."
"Did he behave."
"He was —" Amber stopped, because there was no honest end to that sentence that Bess would let go. "Yes."
Bess sat down across the table.
"Three weeks," she said.
"I know how long it's been."
"Three weeks, and he bought a photograph off you tonight for the price of one nice thing said on the radio, and honey, I watched that clip too and I'll grant you it was real. I think he meant every word. That's not the part I'd worry about."
"What's the part."
"That it took him three weeks to say one sentence about you out loud," Bess said, "and it's already the best thing anybody's done for you in a decade."
Amber looked at the glass of water.
"You're moving too fast," Bess said. "You're not even moving toward him, that's the thing. You're moving toward not having to feel like this anymore. Those look identical from the inside and they are not the same."
"I know."
"Do you."
"Bess," Amber said, "I'm on your couch. I'm not going anywhere."
"Alright," Bess said, and got up, and squeezed her shoulder on the way past, and went to bed.
Amber sat at the kitchen table for a while after that.
The house was quiet. Somewhere out on Gallatin Pike a truck went through a light.
She thought about a hand at the base of her spine, and about a man saying there's just a person that movie hurt into a microphone with his voice coming apart in the middle, and about twelve miles of not talking.
She thought about the fact that in three weeks she had not slept more than four hours in a row.
She thought: I could be home tomorrow.
And she sat with it, and turned it over, and looked at it honestly the way she looked at everything, and she knew — she knew, in the specific, sinking, entirely useless way you know a thing you are going to do anyway — that Bess was right, and that it was too early, and that nothing had been fixed, and that he still had not answered the question she'd asked him in the kitchen.
She got up and rinsed the glass and put it in the rack.
Then she went and got the duffel bag from beside the couch and put her two shirts back in it.