Chapter 7 #2
"— and Lonnie said you'd said no, and it made sense, and I thought, good.
I thought good, she doesn't have to. I was glad.
" He said it fast, like he could get it past her.
"I was glad you weren't going to have to sit there and get asked about the record.
That's the truth. That's the whole ugly truth of it. "
"And you never asked me."
"No."
"Not once. In two years."
"No."
"You could have said, honey, Julia wants to talk to you.
Six words." She was not crying. She noted that, distantly, the way you note that the power is out.
"You could have said it in the truck. You could have said it in bed.
You could have said it in October, in that lobby, when I asked you a direct question and you said Lonnie handled that. "
He shut his eyes.
"You said Lonnie handled that," Amber said, "and then you came home and you were so good to me."
"Don't."
"Six weeks."
"Amber."
"I want you to understand what you did," she said, "because I don't think you do, and I've stopped believing you're ever going to get there on your own. You didn't lie to me about a movie. You let me be happy on top of it."
"I was happy," he said. His voice had gone to pieces. "That was real. Every day of that was real, I swear to God —"
"I believe you," she said.
He looked up.
"That's the problem," she said. "I do believe you. And I'm never going to be able to tell the difference again, for the rest of my life, and neither will you."
He went and got his phone off the arm of the chair.
"I'm calling him."
"Don't."
"No, he's going to —" He was already scrolling. "He's going to explain this to you. He's going to tell you himself what he did, because I'm not — Amber, I read that and let it go, I never once called him on it, I would never have —"
"Put the phone down."
"He needs to —"
"Virgil." She said it once and he stopped. "If you call that man right now, this is about him. And then for the rest of my life the thing that happened to me is a thing Lonnie Barlow did."
He stood there with the phone in his hand.
"It isn't," she said. "He's a hired man. He's been doing exactly what you've paid him to do for thirty years, which is keep things off you, and he did it, and he did it well, and he'll do it tomorrow too."
"That's not fair to me."
"No," Amber said. "It's not. It's accurate."
He put the phone face down on the table.
"Ask me the thing you want to ask me," she said.
"What?"
"You've been standing there for ten minutes wanting to ask me something and not doing it. That's new. You've never wanted anything off me you didn't just say." She folded her arms. "Go on."
He looked at the fire for a second.
"Would you have done it," he said. "If I'd asked you. In March, if I'd come out to the barn and said, Julia wants to sit you down for two hours — would you have said yes?"
And there it was.
She actually considered it. That is the humiliating part, and she is honest enough to record it: she stood in that room and gave it real thought, because he had asked her a fair question and she is not a person who answers a fair question fast.
"I don't know," she said.
"Okay. So —"
"No," she said. "Don't. Don't you do that."
"I'm not —"
"You are. You're about to take I don't know and go to sleep on it.
" She heard her voice go and let it. "I might have said no.
I might have said no twice and then lain awake and said yes in April.
I might have said no and been glad you asked me for a year afterward.
You will never find out, Virgil, and neither will I, and the reason is that you decided in a hotel room what I could stand. "
He didn't answer.
"That's the whole thing," she said. "That's been the whole thing for fifteen years and I've only just this minute got the words for it. You are so sure you know what would hurt me that you have never once had to find out."
He tried for a long time after that. She'll give him that.
He did not once say it's not a big deal.
He did not say you're overreacting. He stood in the middle of his own good room and took it, and at one point he sat down on the arm of the chair with his elbows on his knees and said, "Tell me what to do," and she said, "That's the question you always ask," and he said, "Because I don't know," and she said, "I know you don't."
Around ten she went upstairs.
She wasn't packing. She wants to be honest about that. She went upstairs to be in a room by herself and she sat on the edge of the bed in her coat.
The legal pad was on the nightstand.
He must have brought it up sometime in the last few days. It was face down, under his reading glasses, the way he leaves things.
She should not have picked it up. She picked it up.
Three pages of his handwriting, which is terrible, which she can read better than anyone alive.
At the top of the first page, underlined twice:
AMBER — WHAT TO SAY
And then a list.
— the church basement, the demo, how old she was (23?
check) — the 11 days. the whole record live.
NOBODY does that — the man from the label crying in the hall (does she remember his name) — Bowling Green.
how she came across the room. TELL IT SLOW — what it cost her.
don't let her skip this part — she has to say the thing about the second single. people need to hear it
Then, at the bottom, in different ink, from a different night:
she won't say any of this unless somebody makes her. get her ready.
Amber sat on the edge of the bed in her coat with three pages of her husband's handwriting in her hands.
He had been up at two in the morning, four nights running, writing out the story of her life so she would tell it correctly in twelve minutes at the end of his movie.
He had gotten every single fact right.
He had put TELL IT SLOW next to Bowling Green.
She read the last line twice. She won't say any of this unless somebody makes her. Get her ready.
Downstairs a log fell over in the grate and he said something to himself, one word, she couldn't tell what.
Amber put the legal pad down on the bed. Then she picked it back up, because she was not going to leave it, and she went and got the duffel out of the closet.