Chapter 8 #2
She was thinking about a kitchen table in a rented house in Madison in 2012, when they were still broke in the way you are broke when you have some money coming and none in the account.
She was thinking about the third verse of "Kitchen Light," which is hers, all of it, every word, and which he had sung on a stage in front of ninety thousand people in Australia while she watched on a phone in a barn.
She had never asked. That was the truth of it and she had never lied to herself about it either. Nobody had cheated her. She had sat at that table at twenty-seven with a man she was in love with and it had not occurred to her to ask, because you don't ask your husband for a receipt.
"No," she said.
He blinked. "What?"
"No, thank you."
"Amber —"
"Sit down," she said. "You're going to want to be sitting."
He sat on the edge of somebody else's sofa with his knees up too high.
"If you'd said that to me in November," Amber said, "I'd have cried. You know that, right? If you'd come into the barn any day in the last fifteen years and said, honey, your name ought to be on those, I'd have gone to pieces."
"Then let me —"
"You're not offering me the songs," she said. "You're offering me a settlement in the shape of a song. And I know you don't hear the difference and that is exactly the problem."
"That's not fair."
"Virgil." She sat down across from him. "You watched a movie in June that took my life and cut it into an anecdote.
In December you brought a man to dinner and gave me twelve minutes.
Now it's January and I've moved out and you've come here with three songs.
Do you see it? It's the same shape every time.
You find the thing that would fix it, you go get it, and you bring it to me.
You have never once come here empty-handed and asked me a question. "
He looked at his hands.
"What question," he said.
"I don't know," she said. "That's not my job."
"I don't know what you want me to do."
"There it is again."
"Then tell me!" It came out of him — not a shout, he doesn't shout, but louder than he had been in fifteen years.
"Tell me one time, plain, and I will do it.
I'd do anything. I'd sell the whole thing.
You want the ranch? Take the ranch. You want me to stand up at the Opry and say I'm a liar?
I'll do it tomorrow, I'll do it tonight —"
"That's a gift," Amber said.
"It's my life —"
"It's a gift. It's a big one. It's the biggest one anybody could give and you'd give it and you'd mean it, and in six months I'd still be a woman who had to find out what her husband was afraid of by watching a movie in a room with three hundred strangers."
He stopped.
"There's nothing you can hand me," she said. "That's what I'm trying to get you to hear. There is nothing on this earth you can go and get and bring back here."
"Then what's left."
"Being known," she said. "By you. First. Before anybody."
He sat on that sofa in that borrowed room and looked at her with his whole face open and she watched him try, honestly and with everything he had, to understand what she had just said.
He did not get there.
She saw it. She saw him reach the edge of it and stand there, and then she saw him do the thing he does, which is reach for something he can carry.
"I could —" he said.
"Don't."
He shut his mouth.
"Go home, Virgil," she said, and it was not cruel, and he heard that it wasn't, which only made it worse for both of them.
At the door he stopped with his hand on the frame.
"The songs stand," he said. "That's happening whether you take it or not. I'm not doing it to buy anything. I'm doing it because it's true and it's been untrue for fifteen years."
"Then do it quietly," she said, "and don't tell me when it's done."
He went.
She stood at the window with the ugly floral curtain in her fist and watched him go down the walk to the car and sit in it for a while before he started it.
She did not sleep that night either.
Around two she got up and sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the dishwasher — which is not a thing she does, which is a thing she has literally never done — and understood something that had been coming toward her since the twenty-third of December.
She had been thinking of herself as a woman waiting to find out what happened.
That was the error. She had been sitting in a rented house for three weeks with a lawyer on retainer and a phone that didn't ring, waiting to be told which way her life was going to go, exactly the way she had waited in 2011 for Sawtooth to call.
She had done this before. She had spent an entire year at twenty-six waiting for a room full of men to decide about her, and when they decided she had gone and got married and never done anything about it again.
Fifteen years.
She sat on the floor of that kitchen at two in the morning and thought: nobody is coming to tell you.
Then she got her phone off the counter and scrolled back and back, past all of it, to the twenty-first of October, and found the voicemail she'd never returned, and listened to a stranger say her own name three times.
She looked at the clock. It was ten past two.
She wrote: This is Amber Galloway. I'm sorry I'm twelve weeks late. If that song is still wrong, I'd like to hear it.
She sent it before she could look at it again, and then she put the phone face down on the floor beside her, and sat there in the dark with her heart going like she'd run up a hill.
Carly Braswell answered in four minutes.
oh THANK GOD are you up sorry. are you up right now I've been playing it wrong for six years, I have it right here can I call you
Amber looked at that for a second.
Then she picked up the phone and called her.