Chapter 9
VIRGIL KILGORE: There's a thing that happens where you get big enough that people quit telling you no. And you think that's the prize. It is not the prize. It's the beginning of the part where you can't tell if anything you do is any good.
Carly Braswell talks the way some people drive, which is fast and completely under control.
They met at Manning's on a Tuesday. She came in out of the rain in a denim jacket, sat down across from Amber, put her phone face down on the table, and said, "Okay, so I'm going to say a lot of things and then I'm going to shut up."
"All right."
"I found Second Cutting in the used bin at a place in Bowling Green when I was nineteen, which I have to tell you and then never mention again.
" She said it in one breath. "I bought it for a dollar because the cover had a woman on it holding a hay hook and I thought that was funny.
I've played it probably four hundred times. "
Amber put her coffee down.
"There's a song on my record called 'The Deep End,'" Carly said.
"Second verse works, third verse doesn't. I've rewritten it fourteen times — no, I'm not exaggerating, it's fourteen — and about six years ago I figured out the problem, which is that it isn't my verse.
It's a second voice. It's somebody older answering.
And I have known for six years exactly whose voice it is, and I have been too chicken to ask, and then I saw a thing in a trade about you and thought, well, she's probably having a hell of a year, and called you anyway, which was a terrible thing to do and I'd like to apologize for it. "
"Don't."
"Okay." Carly picked up her water. "I have to say one more thing."
"Go ahead."
"I don't want you because of who you're married to." She said it flat, no apology in it at all. "I want to be really clear. If it turns out that's what this looks like I'll pull the whole song. I don't need a favor and I don't want a headline. I want that voice on that verse."
Amber sat in a vinyl booth at Manning's on Gallatin Pike and could not speak for a second.
"Can I ask you something," she said, finally.
"Sure."
"Why does it matter to you? The verse. You could write another one. You've written two records."
Carly turned her water glass around.
"My mother cleaned houses in Sparta till she was fifty-nine," she said.
"And she'd come home and put a record on and stand in the kitchen for four minutes not doing anything, and then she'd start supper.
Four minutes. Every day of my childhood.
" She shrugged. "That's it. That's the whole reason I do this.
I'm not trying to be a famous person, I'm trying to make the four minutes. "
"And the third verse."
"The third verse is the four minutes," Carly said. "It's the part where somebody older comes in and says, yeah, I know, I did that too, and it about killed me and here I am. You can't fake that with a nice singer." She looked up. "You've got to have somebody who did it."
Amber looked at the table.
"I'm not going to be good," she said.
"That's fine."
"I mean it. I haven't —"
"Amber." Carly leaned forward on both elbows. "I've been to a hundred sessions where everybody was good. Good is the cheapest thing in this town."
"I haven't sung with anybody in fifteen years," she said.
"Okay."
"I mean it. I don't know if it's there."
"It's there," Carly said.
"You don't know that."
"No," Carly agreed. "But I've got a room booked Thursday and it's paid for either way."
She threw up on Thursday morning.
She wants that recorded, because she has since been asked about that day in three interviews and has given a charming version every time, and the charming version leaves out that she was on her knees in a rented bathroom in Inglewood at seven in the morning with her hair in her hand.
Then she brushed her teeth and drove to Cleves Street.
Bess was already there with the coffee going and did not say one single word about any of it. She just handed Amber a cup and said, "Odell's bringing his upright, so if it sounds like a moose, that's the moose," and went back to patching.
The room filled up by ten. Odell Pate on bass, who is seventy and has played on records Amber grew up on and did not appear to know or care who she was.
A drummer of about twenty-five who never took his coat off.
Carly on acoustic. And a lean gray-headed man setting up a pedal steel by the far wall, who looked up once and nodded and said, "Reese. "
"Amber."
"I know," he said, and went back to his tuning.
They were cutting live. All of them in the room, no click, one take at a time, the way Bess has done it for thirty years and the way Second Cutting was done in eleven days in 2009.
Amber stood in the vocal spot with headphones on and her hands going numb.
Take one, she came in late and stopped.
"That's fine," Bess said in her ear. "That's what one is for."
Take two, she came in on time and made a sound that was not singing. It was a person saying words on a pitch. She heard it happen in the cans and she heard how thin it was and she felt her whole chest close down like a shop.
"Go again," Bess said.
Take three she didn't come in at all.
There was a silence in the room. Amber stood there with her eyes shut. Somewhere behind her the drummer coughed.
"Hey." Carly's voice, out in the room, not on the talkback. "Can I say a thing?"
"Please don't be nice to me," Amber said.
"I'm not going to be nice to you." Carly came around where Amber could see her, guitar still on. "You're singing it like you're auditioning for it."
"I am auditioning for it."
"You're not, though. It's your verse. I've been holding it for six years." She shrugged. "You're trying to sound like the record. Don't. That woman was twenty-four and she'd never had anything happen to her. Nobody wants that verse from her."
Amber looked at her.
"Sing it like you are," Carly said, "and if it's ugly it's ugly. It's a song about somebody who stayed too long."
Then she went back to her spot and said, "Four," and Bess rolled it.
Here is what happened, as near as she can tell it.
The band came in. Odell put the bass under it the way you'd put your hand under somebody's elbow. Reese laid a line in on the steel behind the second verse that had nothing showy about it at all, just a long low bend that went down under the words and held them up.
And when the third verse came around Amber opened her mouth and did not do anything to her voice.
She didn't reach. She didn't try to make it round. She sang it the way she talks — dry and a little back in the throat, with the break in it that has been in it since she was thirty-five and which she had spent fifteen years assuming was damage.
It is not damage. It turns out it is the whole thing.
She got four lines in and heard Odell go hah under his breath behind her, and she did not stop, and she went up on the last line where the melody wants to go down, which she had not planned and could not have planned, and the room came in behind her like a door opening.
They finished. Nobody moved.
Then the twenty-five-year-old drummer said, "Damn," at a volume he clearly did not intend, and everybody laughed, and Amber stood in the middle of Cleves Street Studio with headphones on and her hand over her mouth.
Bess's voice came into the cans, perfectly level, the way it had been level for twenty years.
"That's the one," Bess said. "You want another for safety."
"No," said Carly.
"I wasn't asking you."
They did two more anyway. The fourth was the one.
She went out to the parking lot at about one o'clock and stood between her truck and a dumpster and cried until she had to hold onto the mirror.
It came out of her sideways and without warning and she could not have told anyone what it was for. Not happiness. Not grief either, exactly.
The nearest she has ever gotten to describing it is this: she was forty-one years old, and she had just found out that the thing she stopped doing at twenty-six had gone on existing the entire time, in a box, in the dark, without her — the way a house you moved out of goes on standing.
Fifteen years. She could have done that any Thursday of fifteen years.
That was the part that took her legs out. Nobody had stopped her. Nobody had locked a door. There had been no villain and no moment and no decision — just a very long quiet stretch of afternoons where it had been easier to go out to the barn.
She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. There was a man across the lot loading a hand truck who very kindly pretended to be extremely interested in his own tailgate.
The door banged and Bess came out with a cigarette she does not smoke and stood about ten feet off, looking at the sky.
"Cold," Bess said.
"Yeah."
They stood there.
"You know what I kept thinking in there?" Bess said. "Oh-seven. That room on Douglas with the water in the basement. You were twenty-two and you had that awful red coat and you sang for me for an hour and I went home and told my husband I'd found somebody."
"Bess."
"I'm just saying it happened," Bess said. "That's all. I'm not making a speech, I've got a print to make."
She put the unlit cigarette back in her pocket and went inside.
Inside, Carly was in the control room with her boots on the desk, and Bess was making a mono print of the take, and there was a fourth person on speaker.
"— and I'm telling you, if this is what the record sounds like, I want to move it up," the speaker said.
"Sara runs Redbud," Carly said. "Sara, she's in the room."
"Mrs. Galloway. Hi."
"Amber's fine."
"Amber. Okay. I'm going to be blunt because Carly says you like blunt." A chair creaked six hundred miles away. "I want that as the first single off the record. And I want it billed as the two of you. Not featuring. Both names, same size, both on the front."
Amber looked at the console.
"That's not how that's done," she said.
"It's how I'd do it."
"You'd sell more records putting featuring on it."
"Yeah, probably," Sara said. "But it's a duet and I don't like lying on the front of things."
There was a pause, and Amber understood that everybody in three rooms was waiting on her, and that this was the first time in fifteen years that a decision had been hers alone.
"All right," she said.
"All right?"
"Put both names on it."
"Okay," Sara said, and hung up, because apparently that is how they do things at Redbud.
Carly took her boots off the desk. "You okay?"
"No."
"Yeah," said Carly. "Me either. Want a beer?"
"It's one thirty."
"Amber," Carly said, "we just cut it in four."
They went to Manning's, of course, because there is nowhere else, and the whole room came — Odell, the drummer, Bess, Reese, a girl who had been running cables.
It went on a long time. Somebody put money in the box. Odell told a story about a producer in 1986 that could not possibly have been true.
Around four, Reese Tanner came and sat down at the end of the booth with a plate of eggs.
"That was a hell of a thing," he said.
"Thank you."
"I mean it. The line at the end." He salted the eggs. "You did it three times and it was different every time and it was right every time. You can't teach that. My whole life I've watched people try to fake that."
Amber turned her glass on the table.
"Can I say something out of line," Reese said.
"Probably not."
"I'll do it anyway." He put the salt down.
"I don't know one thing about your business and I don't want to.
I know I sat in a room today with a woman who did something hard and did it well.
" He looked at her, plainly. "You've got a good face when you're working.
That's it. That's the whole thing I wanted to say. "
Amber laughed, and it came out surprised.
"You're not going to say anything back," Reese said, "and that's fine. I've said it. Eat something."
Then he went and put money in the jukebox and did not come back to the booth, and that was all it was, and she thought about it for the whole drive home and for a while after that.
She was not going to do anything about it. That was never a question, not for a second.
But she had been seen. Not looked after and not managed and not carried — seen, across a room, for something she had done herself in the last six hours, by a man who did not know or care whose wife she was.
She had forgotten what it was.
Bess sent her the rough at six, from the parking lot, before Amber had even left it.
She sat in her truck outside Manning's with her phone on the dash and listened to it once through the truck speakers, which are bad, which is the correct way to hear anything for the first time.
The first two verses are Carly's and they're good and they are not the thing.
Then there's a bar and a half where the band drops down to Odell and the brushes, and a woman comes in.
Amber sat in her truck on Gallatin Pike and listened to a stranger sing four lines she had sung six hours earlier, and it was awful and wonderful and completely disorienting, because that woman sounded like somebody's aunt who had been through it, and that woman had lived in her chest the entire time without her knowledge.
She played it again.
Then she played the last thirty seconds about nine times, which is a thing she has made fun of other people for.
She got back to Marlin Avenue at seven and put the heat on and sat down on the borrowed sofa without taking her coat off.
The house was very quiet.
She went to check her phone and found she had not looked at it since ten that morning, which had not happened in fifteen years — she is the person who has the phone, she is the person who knows where he is, she has answered it at three in the morning in four countries.
There was nothing on it. A message from Bess with a heart. Two from Carly. Somebody about the water bill.
And she sat there in a stranger's living room and did the arithmetic and understood that she had gone the entire day — nine hours, the best nine hours she'd had in a decade — without once thinking about Virgil Kilgore.
She waited to feel good about it.
What came instead was so much worse than she expected. It came up out of the floor and sat on her chest, and it took her a while to get it named, and when she got it named it was this:
If I can do that, I can do the rest of it.
She could have a life. That was the whole of it. Not a survival, not a settlement, not a sad rebuilt thing — a life, with rooms in it like the one she'd been in that morning, and people in it like the ones at that table, and she could have it starting now and she could probably be happy.
Amber sat on the sofa with her coat on.
She had spent three months certain of one thing, which was that she wanted her husband to understand what he had done to her.
And here, at the end of the best day she'd had in ten years, was a question she had not once let herself hold: and then what?
She turned the phone over in her hands.
Then she put it face down on the arm of the sofa, and got up, and went to run a bath in somebody else's tub, and did not answer it when it rang at nine.