Chapter 8
VIRGIL KILGORE: I'm generous. Everybody'll tell you that and it's true and I want to be careful how I say this next part.
(pause)
Generous is cheap for me. Generous costs me nothing. You ought to be suspicious of a man who's only ever good at the free things.
She left on Christmas Eve, which she regrets, and would do again.
Not out of cruelty. There was simply no version of standing in that house through a holiday, doing the ham and the neighbors and his sister on speakerphone, that she was going to survive. She told him on the morning of the twenty-fourth and she was gone by two.
He carried a box out to the truck for her.
That is the detail. He did not argue and he did not stand in the doorway; he put on his coat and picked up the heaviest box and carried it down the porch steps and set it in the bed, and then he stood there with his hands hanging, in the cold, sixty feet from a barn with its light on.
"Where," he said.
"I'll tell you when I'm in it."
"Amber."
"I'm not hiding from you, Virgil. I just want to sleep one night in a house where nobody knows where I am."
He nodded. His eyes were terrible.
"Can I ask you for one thing," he said.
"No."
"Okay," he said.
She got in the truck. Then she rolled the window down, because she couldn't help it, because fifteen years.
"There's a ham in the second freezer," she said. "You don't have to do anything with it. I just don't want you to find it in March."
"Okay."
"Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas, honey," he said.
She got about six miles before it hit her, and she pulled into the lot at the church on the ridge and sat there with the heater running and cried like something coming apart, and she was not crying about the movie.
The house on Marlin Avenue is in Inglewood, on a street of small brick places with big trees, and it came furnished, which is the whole reason she took it.
She could not have furnished a house. She could not have stood in a store and chosen a chair.
So she got somebody else's chairs. Somebody else's curtains — heavy, floral, wrong for the window. A bed that was too soft, and a kitchen with the drawer pulls on the wrong side, and a smell in the hall closet she never did identify.
It was a strange, cold, useful little house and she was grateful to it.
She slept badly. She woke at four thirty every morning for the first two weeks, and lay there in the dark trying to work out what had woken her, and it was always the same thing: the hour her body had spent fifteen years getting up at.
There was a barn forty minutes west that needed the heater turned on and a machine that took nine minutes to warm.
Nobody was doing it. Nobody was going to do it. Somebody would call Ridgeway in March and be told, politely, that the transfers had all been logged by Mrs. Galloway and they'd have to ask her.
She lay in a stranger's bed in Inglewood and thought about six reels on a bench.
His sister called on the twenty-seventh. Amber let it ring and then called her back forty minutes later, because you do not do that to Hattie.
"I'm not going to ask you anything," Hattie said.
"Everybody keeps saying that."
"Well, it's the only sentence anybody's got." A pause. "He came for Christmas dinner."
"Good."
"He came at one and he was gone by three and he took the ham." Hattie sighed down the line. "He said you told him about it. He carried it in like it was a baby and put it on my counter and said, Amber says don't let it go to March."
Amber stood in a rented kitchen with her hand over her mouth.
"That's all," Hattie said. "That's the whole reason I called. I wanted you to know he did that."
"Thank you."
"I'm not on anybody's side," Hattie said. "I want you to know that too. I've known him fifty-one years and I'd have thrown him out a window."
Bess came on the twenty-eighth with a lamp.
"You don't need a lamp," Amber said, in the doorway.
"You need a lamp. This place has got two lamps and they're both in the wrong room and one of them's got a shade the color of a Band-Aid." Bess came past her with it. "Where's your coffee maker?"
"There's one here."
"There's a machine here." Bess held up a bag. "I brought you a Mr. Coffee. Don't argue with me, I've had a day."
They set the lamp up. Bess walked the whole house in about ninety seconds, opening things, the way she does, and stopped in the doorway of the second bedroom, which had a card table in it and nothing else.
"What's this for?"
"Nothing."
"It's for something."
"It's an empty room, Bess."
Bess looked at the card table for a second and did not say the thing.
They ate off the coffee table with the television on mute. Bess talked about a mandolin player who had shown up at the studio with a legal complaint about a session in 2019. Neither of them said Virgil's name for an hour and ten minutes, which Amber counted, which she is not proud of.
At the door Bess put her coat on and said, "I'm not going to ask you how you are."
"Thank you."
"I'm going to ask you something worse." She got her keys out. "What do you do all day?"
Amber opened her mouth.
"Because I've been trying to picture it," Bess said, "and I can't. In fifteen years I've never once called you and had you not be doing something.
You've always been in the barn or driving to the barn or on the phone about the barn.
And now you're not, and you've got a house with a card table in it, and I keep trying to picture Thursday afternoon and I can't do it. "
Amber stood there with her hand on the door.
"Neither can I," she said.
"Okay," Bess said. "That's all. That's the whole visit." She kissed her on the cheek, which she does about twice a decade. "Use the lamp."
She was alone on New Year's Eve, which she had assumed would be the worst night and which turned out to be nothing much.
She went to bed at ten past ten. She woke up at midnight because somebody on the next street was setting off fireworks, and lay there listening to them, and thought about the fact that in fifteen New Year's Eves she had been in a hotel for nine of them.
Her phone did not go off. She looked at it anyway, at seven minutes past midnight, and there was nothing, and she put it face down and went back to sleep.
He had not texted her.
She understood, lying there, that this was the first correct thing he had done since October, and she resented it so much she had to turn over.
Opal Waller's office, the second of January, with the bakery smell coming up through the floor.
"You've got two roads," Opal said. "You can file, or you can not file. There's no third one, whatever anybody tells you."
"What happens if I file?"
"You file, and then it's a matter, and matters have their own weather.
His lawyers will call my lawyers. Somebody will say something at a party.
It'll be in that trade of yours inside of a week.
" Opal folded her hands. "And it puts a clock on you.
That's the part I want you to hear. Once you file you'll be answering to a calendar instead of to yourself, and you have been answering to other people's calendars for fifteen years. "
"So don't file."
"I didn't say that either." Opal looked at her steadily.
"I've got no opinion about your marriage.
I've got an opinion about your December, which is that you were handled by two men who love you and one who's paid to, and you shouldn't make a large permanent decision inside of three weeks of finding that out. "
Amber sat with that.
"He hasn't touched a thing," Opal said. "You should know that.
There's been no letter, no freeze, nothing.
Nobody's moved a dollar. His people rang mine on the twenty-seventh to say — I'm going to read this because I wrote it down — whatever she wants is fine and Mr. Kilgore does not wish to be consulted about it. "
"That's a strange sentence."
"It's an extraordinary sentence," Opal said. "I've been doing this twenty-eight years. I have never had that call."
Amber looked at the pigeon on the sill.
"Don't file yet," she said.
"All right."
"That's not me softening."
"I didn't say a word," said Opal.
He came on the ninth of January.
He didn't ambush her. He texted at nine in the morning — can I come by. I'll leave when you say — and she looked at it for an hour and then said yes, because the alternative was three more days of looking at it.
He came at three. He didn't bring anything, which was correct, and he didn't comment on the house, which was more correct, and he stood in a stranger's living room in his coat looking enormous and out of place, like furniture delivered to the wrong address.
"You want to sit?" she said.
"No, ma'am."
"Virgil."
"If I sit down I'll be here two hours." He put his hands in his pockets. "I've got one thing and then I'll go."
"Okay."
"I want to put your name on the songs."
Amber didn't move.
"Three of them," he said. "'Bent Nail.' 'Kitchen Light.
' 'Sixteen People.' Those are yours as much as mine and we both know it and it has been fifteen years and I never once —" He stopped and started again.
"I talked to Whetstone. It's not simple but it's not hard either.
Fifty-fifty on all three, back to the start, and they'd have to go and register the corrections, and it's a whole thing, but they'll do it because I'm telling them to. "
The room was very quiet. Outside, somebody's dog.
"They'd have to reissue the statements," he said. "There'd be money. I don't know how much. It'd be real money, Amber."
She said, "Why now?"
"Because it's yours."
"It's been mine since 2012."
"Yes."
"So why now."
And he did the honest thing, which she has never once been able to hold against him, which is possibly the single most dangerous quality he has.
"Because I've got nothing else," he said. "That's why now. I sat up all night on the second and went through everything I've got and that's the only thing on the list I haven't already ruined."
She was quiet for a long time.