Chapter 5 #2
He stopped once, halfway, and pulled almost all the way out and held there, and she made a noise of genuine outrage and he laughed down at her, breathless, delighted.
"Say it."
"I'm not saying it."
"You used to say it."
"I was twenty-six," Amber said. "I had a whole different personality."
"Say it."
She got a hand in his hair and pulled his head down to hers and said it, into his ear, three words, and felt what it did to him go all the way through his body.
"There we go," he said, wrecked.
After that he stopped being careful for good.
He got her over onto her side and came in behind her with one arm under her and his hand splayed flat and heavy across her stomach, holding her back into him, and that was the one — that had always been the one — and she reached back and got a fistful of the sheet and let him take her apart with it.
His mouth on the back of her neck. His breath going ragged in her hair.
The bed complaining under both of them the way it had complained for fifteen years and would presumably complain until one of them died.
"Amber," he said, into her shoulder. "Honey. Honey."
"I know."
"I'm not going to last."
"You are."
"I'm really not."
"You are," she said, "because I'm not done," and heard him laugh and swear at the same time, which is a sound she has always been able to get out of him and has never once gotten out of anybody else.
He rolled her onto her back again and came up over her.
It built and built. He knew when she was close because he had always known, and he shifted his weight and got the angle and put his mouth beside her ear.
"Look at me," he said.
She didn't want to. She did.
And that was what did it — his face, wrecked and open, looking straight down into her from six inches away with nothing at all held back, the one place on this earth where Virgil Kilgore had never once been careful with her.
It went through her like the floor giving way.
She locked up around him and held on and heard him swear once, softly, and then he went too, hard, with his forehead down against hers.
They lay there a long time after.
The ceiling fan they never used. The dog barking somewhere across the field at the Meacham place. His weight on her, too much, exactly right.
"You're heavy," she said.
"Yeah."
"You're really heavy."
"Give me a minute," he said, and didn't move, and neither did she.
She woke at ten after four.
He was asleep on his stomach with one arm off the side of the bed. He had slept like that every night of their marriage.
Amber lay in the dark in her own bed in her own house and felt, for the first time in twenty-three days, warm all the way through.
She thought about a motel in Owensboro.
She hadn't thought about it in years. It was the second week of the tour, sixteen years ago — she'd had a room with two beds and a window unit, and he'd been sitting on the floor with his back against the second bed because he wouldn't sit on it, and they had talked until it got light.
She had done most of the talking. She had told him about being nine and singing at a funeral because nobody else would, and about the man from the label and what he had said in the hallway, and about how she was afraid the record was better than she was.
And at about four in the morning he had said, you know you're the real thing, don't you, and she had said something flip, and he had let her have it and then said it again anyway, and meant it.
She had married him partly for that. She could admit it, lying there. Not the guitar and not the shoulders. For a man on a motel floor at four in the morning saying it twice.
She wondered, in the dark, what he had told Julia Novak about Owensboro.
Then she wondered whether Owensboro was in the film at all, and knew that it wasn't, and pushed the whole thing away with both hands.
And under it, small and steady, the thing.
She lay there and let herself look at it, because she was awake and there was nothing else to do.
He still hasn't answered you.
She turned it over. She thought: it doesn't matter. She thought: I know the answer, I've always known the answer, he'd sooner die. She thought: what would it even fix.
She thought: you asked him a question in that kitchen and he stood up and left the room, and tonight he made love to you on the counter, and those two things are both true and you are choosing not to put them next to each other.
Then she thought, very clearly: I'm not going to ask him again.
And she noticed herself think it. She would come back to that in December. She caught herself in the act. She lay in the dark beside her sleeping husband and made a decision to stop asking, and she knew she was making it, and she made it anyway, and then she went to sleep.
In the morning he made eggs, badly, and burned his hand on the pan and swore at it, and she sat at the table in his flannel with her hair a disaster and watched him.
"Don't say it," he said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You've got the face."
"You've had that pan fifteen years."
"That pan is defective," Virgil said, "and I'll thank you to leave it out of this," and slid two eggs onto her plate that were, technically, cooked.
They ate. The light came up gray over the field. He read something on his phone and made a noise and didn't tell her what it was, and she didn't ask, and out the window a hawk sat on the fence post it always sits on.
"Fort Worth," he said, out of nowhere.
"What about it."
"June. You want to come out for it?"
She looked up.
He had not asked her to come to a show in — she did the arithmetic and did not like the answer. Four years? Five? It had stopped being a question at some point. She had stopped being someone you ask.
"Yes," she said.
"Yeah?"
"Yes, Virgil."
"Okay." He looked ridiculous. He looked about thirty. "Okay. Good. I'll tell them."
And she sat there eating a bad egg in a cold kitchen and thought that if somebody had told her three weeks ago that she'd be here, she would not have believed it, and that the not-believing would have been the sensible position, and that she did not care.
The first voice memo came on Wednesday.
She was in the barn with the space heater on, logging the six reels, when her phone buzzed on the bench. No text. Just a file, thirty-eight seconds long.
She put one earbud in.
Road noise. He was in the truck. He always recorded in the truck.
"Okay so — this is stupid. Hang on." A turn signal. "So I never told you about Bo Tatum's van. The reason I never told you is it makes me look bad and you'd have used it on me for twenty years, and I've decided I don't care anymore."
And then he told her about Bo Tatum's van. Thirty-eight seconds. It was a very stupid story. She laughed out loud in an empty barn in November with a reel in her hands.
Then she sat down on the stool and listened to it again.
There were two more that week. Then four the next.
They were never long. They were never planned; you could hear him remembering as he went, and losing the thread, and coming back. He told her about the night in the parking lot in Bristol, finally, after fourteen years. It took him three tries and two separate files.
"Okay. Bristol. You've never asked me about Bristol and I've always known you were not asking me about Bristol, which — I want you to know I noticed that. Fifteen years of you not asking. That's a thing you did for me."
Road noise. A blinker.
"My daddy was at that show. That's it. That's the whole thing. He drove up from Corbin and he stood at the back by the door with his hat on and he didn't come find me after."
Long pause. She thought it had ended and it hadn't.