Chapter 5 #3
"He'd been telling people for about a year that I'd made it.
Which I had not. I want to be fair to him — he wasn't lying, he just — he'd say a thing and then it was true to him.
And I stood in that parking lot and I understood that he was never going to say it to me.
He'd say it to men at a counter. He'd say it to a woman at church.
And he'd stand at the back of a room with his hat on and go home. "
A truck went by on the other side.
"Anyway. That's Bristol. You held my coat."
She sat on the stool in the barn and listened to it with her hand over her mouth.
It was the single most naked thing he had ever handed her.
He never mentioned the movie in any of them. Not once. She noticed that too.
There was one that came at four in the afternoon on a Thursday and was twelve seconds long, and all it said was:
"I just went past that church in Pleasant View and thought about you in that dress. That's it. That's the whole message. Bye."
She played that one so many times that week she is surprised the file survived.
She saved every one. She has them still.
By the first week of December she was happier than she had been in five years.
That is a plain fact and she is not going to be ashamed of it.
She woke up early and did not dread anything.
She got three years of backlogged transfers properly sorted for the first time since 2021.
Virgil came out to the barn twice in one week and sat on the crate by the door and just talked to her while she worked, and she found herself telling him things — small things, studio gossip, Bess's opinions — the way she had at twenty-six.
They laughed a lot. They had sex more in three weeks than in the previous year. He put his hand at the base of her spine in a grocery store parking lot and she leaned into it without thinking about it at all.
One afternoon in the barn he picked up a cassette off the bench and turned it over.
"What's this."
"Don't touch that."
"I'm not touching it, I'm holding it."
"Those are the same thing with you." She took it out of his hand. "It's a board tape. Chattanooga, ninety-seven. Somebody's uncle mailed it to the office in a padded envelope with a note about his knee."
"Is it any good?"
"It's terrible. The vocal's off the room mic and there's a man three feet away having a whole conversation about a boat."
Virgil grinned. "Play it."
"Virgil."
"Play me the boat."
So she threaded it, because she cannot help herself, and they stood in a cold barn in December and listened to eight minutes of a bad tape of a man who was thirty-one years old and going nowhere, with a stranger talking about a boat right up against the microphone the whole time.
He listened with his hands in his coat pockets and his head down.
"God," he said. "Listen to me. I'm pushing so hard."
"You were."
"Nobody's listening at all."
"Nope."
He was quiet for a second. Then he said, "How many of these have you got?"
"Board tapes? Two hundred and some. Maybe two-forty."
"Have you listened to all of them?"
"Yes."
He looked up.
"All of them," he said.
"That's the job, Virgil."
"That's not —" He stopped. He looked around the barn: at the shelves, and the boxes, and the card file, and the four thousand index cards, and the woman standing at the machine with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. "That's not a job. Who does that?"
"I do," Amber said.
And he came across the barn and kissed her forehead and stood there holding onto her arms for a second with his eyes shut, and then let go and went back to his crate and told her a story about a man in Chattanooga with a boat.
She thought about that for a long time afterward. In February, mostly. Because he had meant it — that was never in question — and because standing in that barn he had come closer to it than he ever had, right up to the edge of the actual thing, and then he had told a story instead.
Bess said nothing. Bess called once a week and asked how she was and said good when Amber said fine, and did not push, and the not-pushing was so loud that Amber started letting the calls go to voicemail.
And Amber moved through the house very carefully.
She wouldn't have used that word for it then. She'd have said she was being kind, or that she was picking her battles, or that she was tired of being the one who made everything hard.
But it was carefulness. She did not go near the film.
When a friend of his mentioned Julia's name at a dinner, Amber changed the subject in half a second, smoothly, without deciding to, and afterward found that her hands had been shaking under the table.
When the streaming date got announced she saw it on her phone in the truck and put the phone face down and drove home and didn't mention it and neither did he.
There was a version of the kitchen she walked around.
She knew exactly where it was. She'd come down the stairs in the morning and there'd be a half second, right at the bottom step, where she'd see the chair — the one she'd held onto so she wouldn't go to him — and then she'd be past it and making coffee.
Every day she was happy in that house she put another thing down and stepped over it.
She was very good at it.
She has thought since about how good she was at it, and about where a woman learns that, and how long she had been practicing.