Chapter 6
VIRGIL KILGORE: I've had the same manager thirty years. People find that strange. It isn't. Lonnie has never once made me look at anything I didn't want to look at. You try finding that in a person.
The second week of December there was a piece in a magazine.
It was a nice piece. That was the phrase everybody used about it. Such a nice piece. Sixteen hundred words about Virgil at home, in the barn doorway in a coat, with a photograph of him holding a reel he was holding wrong.
Amber read it at the kitchen table with her coffee.
There was a paragraph in the middle. It said that Kilgore's wife of fifteen years, Amber Galloway, is a former recording artist who has spent the last decade and a half building and maintaining the archive that made the documentary possible, and that friends describe her as the reason anyone knows where any of it came from.
She read that paragraph three times.
It was the best sentence anyone had ever written about her in print. It was accurate. It was generous. It had probably taken somebody four minutes.
And she sat there with her hands around a warm cup and thought, before she could stop herself: who called them.
She put the phone down.
Nobody had asked her. That was all. Somebody had gone to a magazine on her behalf and put a good paragraph in it, and nobody had asked her whether she wanted a paragraph, and it had been done to her the way you'd have a fence repaired.
She got up and rinsed the cup and went out to the barn.
It was a good six weeks. She is not going to let anybody take that from her.
They had the roof man out and stood in the yard arguing about flashing.
They drove to Clarksville on a Tuesday for no reason. It was his idea and it was a bad one — there is nothing in Clarksville — and they went anyway and ate at a place with a laminated menu and then walked around a hardware store for an hour because it was warm in there.
He bought a wreath.
"We have a wreath," Amber said.
"We have a wreath with a bird on it."
"It's a cardinal."
"It's got a bird on it, Amber, and it's been on that door since the Obama administration, and every year I look at that bird —"
"You have never once mentioned the bird."
"I have thought about the bird constantly."
She got the giggles in the aisle. Not laughing — the other thing, the stupid one, where it takes you at the knees and won't quit, and she had to go stand by a rack of extension cords and put her forehead against the shelf.
He came and stood behind her, delighted with himself, saying "fifteen years of that bird" in a low voice until she begged him to stop.
They bought the new wreath. They kept the cardinal.
That night in the truck she thought: this is what it's supposed to be.
And then she thought about the fact that they had driven ninety minutes each way, on purpose, to be somewhere neither of them knew anybody.
He came out to the barn most afternoons and sat on the crate by the door with his coat on and talked at her while she worked, and he was funny, and he was interested, and twice he asked her a question about her own life and then waited for the whole answer.
The voice memos kept coming. A dozen of them by the middle of the month. He'd started numbering them.
One night she woke up and he wasn't in bed, and she found him at the kitchen table at two in the morning with his reading glasses on and a legal pad, writing. He put his hand flat over it when she came in.
"Don't look."
"What is it?"
"It's nothing. It's for you. It's not ready."
"Virgil."
"Go to bed, Amber."
She went to bed. She lay there and listened to him not come up for another hour and felt something in her chest that she can only describe as young.
The dinner was the eighteenth of December, at a place off Twentieth with heavy drapes and a room in the back.
She had thought it was the two of them.
Lonnie was already at the table when they came in.
Nothing in her face moved. She was extremely good at this. She let Lonnie kiss her cheek and take her coat and hold her chair, and she sat down and put her napkin in her lap and said something pleasant about the weather, and inside her the temperature dropped about forty degrees.
They ate. It was fine. Lonnie told a long story about a steel player in 1994 that was genuinely funny and Virgil laughed so hard he had to put his fork down.
Then, over the plates, Lonnie sat back and said, "So. Tell her."
Virgil turned to her and his whole face was lit up.
"Okay," he said. "So. The streaming version's got room. They do extras — deleted stuff, extended pieces, whatever. Nobody watches it, mostly, but it's there forever."
"Okay."
"Northfield came back and said they'd carry a new segment.
Original material. Not cut-downs." He was watching her.
He wanted this so badly she could feel it coming off him.
"Twelve minutes. Sit-down interview, your own piece, in the barn if you want it, and Julia's not attached — they'd send somebody else, whoever you want, you can pick.
Twelve minutes about you. About the record, about the tour, all of it. "
The table waited.
"Twelve minutes," Amber said.
"They wanted eight," Lonnie said. "He got them to twelve."
He got them to twelve.
She looked at Lonnie. Lonnie was buttering a piece of bread with total serenity, a sixty-six-year-old man in a beautiful jacket, and he did not look up, and she understood the whole thing in about a second and a half.
Somebody had gone to Northfield. Somebody had negotiated a number of minutes.
There had been a conversation with a distributor about how much of Amber Galloway would be acceptable, and it had started at eight, and a man had worked it up to twelve, and the two of them had come to dinner to give it to her.
"That's — " she said.
Virgil's face was so open it hurt to look at.
"Thank you," she said.
"You mean it?"
"Of course I mean it."
"Because if you hate it —"
"Virgil." She made herself smile and it came out fine, it came out warm, it came out exactly right. "It's a lovely thing to have done. Thank you."
He sat back like a man setting down a sack of feed.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Good. Good."
Lonnie ate his bread.
She heard herself say it in the car.
Not at the table — at the table she had been operating, and operating is easy. It was on the way home, on the dark stretch, with him happy in the passenger seat telling her they could shoot it in the spring when the light in the barn is good.
Thank you.
She heard it in her own voice, coming back at her like something on tape.
Twelve minutes at the end of a hundred and eighteen. Bonus material. The place they put the outtakes and the making-of. A room where nobody goes.
And she had said thank you.
"— and I told him, I said, if it's got to be somebody, get a woman, because she's not going to want to sit there and explain the tour to some kid from —"
"Virgil."
"Hm?"
She had it right there. It was fully formed. It was three sentences long and every word of it was true and she had it in her mouth.
I don't want twelve minutes. I wanted to be in the movie. And the reason you didn't think of that is that you don't actually know it's the same thing.
The road came at them. The heater fan ran.
"Nothing," she said. "It's good. It's a good idea."
He put his hand on her leg above the knee and left it there the whole rest of the way home.
Lonnie called her directly two days later, which he does about twice a year.
"Sweetheart. Am I catching you."
"I'm in the barn."
"Course you are." A chair moved somewhere. "I wanted to say — Tuesday. I hope that landed all right. He'd been at me about it since the first week of November and I want you to know I told him it was worth doing."
"That's good of you, Lonnie."
"It's not good of me, it's true." A pause. "He's been hard to be around. You know that. Since October he's been —" Another pause, and she could hear him choosing. "He's not sleeping and he's not good at it. So when he gets a thing like this that he can do, it settles him. That's all I'll say."
Amber stood in the middle of her barn with a reel in her hand.
"Lonnie."
"Mm."
"Whose idea was it?"
"The segment? His."
"The dinner."
"Ah." He laughed — a small, entirely comfortable laugh, a man conceding a point of no importance. "The dinner was mine. He'd have told you in the truck on a Wednesday and you'd have said something kind and it'd have been over in four minutes. He deserved to give it to you properly."
"He deserved to."
"You know what I mean."
"I do," Amber said.
"Alright. Merry Christmas, sweetheart. Tell him to eat something."
She stood there for a while after he hung up.
He deserved to give it to you properly.
She turned it over the way she'd turned over Lonnie handled that, and then made herself put it down, because it was a nothing sentence from a man who had been talking about people like they were weather for thirty years, and because she had a good six weeks going, and because she had gotten very fast at putting things down.
Bess called on a Thursday and Amber picked up.
"She lives," Bess said.
"Don't start."
"I'm not starting."
"You're starting."
"How is it," Bess said.
"It's good." Amber shifted the phone. She was in the barn with the heater going. "It's actually good, Bess. He's — I don't know how to say it without sounding like a fool."
"You don't sound like a fool."
"He's been telling me things."
There was a pause on the line.
"Good," Bess said. "That's good."
"You don't think it's good."
"I said it's good and I meant it's good." A door shut on Bess's end. "Can I ask you one thing and then I'll leave it."
"You're going to anyway."
"Have you two talked about it?"
Amber looked at the reel in her hands. Somebody's grease-pencil handwriting on the box, not hers, from before her.
"We're past it," she said.
"That's not an answer."
"Bess."
"That's not an answer, honey, that's a place to stand." Bess sighed. "Alright. That's my one. I love you. Come see me."
After she hung up, Amber sat on the stool for a while with the heater ticking.