Chapter 10
VIRGIL KILGORE: My mother thought music was something you did on a Sunday and then quit. She never once asked me to play her anything. Not once in her life. I used to think that was cruelty. It wasn't. She just could not stand to want a thing for me and be wrong about it.
Nadine called on a Tuesday at four in the afternoon and did not say hello.
"I'm selling the house."
Amber was in the truck outside the studio. She put the phone against her other ear.
"Say again."
"You heard me. Iris says I can have the back half of her place in Whitesburg and it's got the one step instead of the seven, and I'm sixty-eight years old and I'm tired of the seven." A pause. "The Dillard boy is going to list it."
"Mama —"
"I'm telling you as a courtesy," Nadine said, "not to open a conversation."
"When?"
"He's coming Thursday to look at it."
"This Thursday."
"That's the one that's coming," her mother said.
Amber sat there in the parking lot with the engine off.
"I'll come up," she said.
"There's no need."
"I'll come up Wednesday."
"Amber."
"Mama, I've got nothing else to do," Amber said, which was the first entirely true sentence either of them had said, and there was a long silence on the line.
"Well," Nadine said. "The furnace is still doing that noise."
It is five hours from Nashville to Cane Hollow if you do it right, and she has done it maybe forty times in fifteen years, which is not very many.
She took 40 east and then got off it, and the world does that thing it does — the interstate lets go and the road narrows and then you are following a creek, and then the creek is following you, and the hills come up on both sides and stay up.
She stopped for gas outside Jellico and stood by the pump in the cold with her collar up.
Around Whitesburg the radio lost Nashville entirely.
She used to make this drive four times a year in a Corolla with a bad heater.
She had made it at twenty-four with a box of her own records in the trunk to give away at the store, and she had made it at twenty-six in February in a borrowed dress with a man she had known for sixteen months, and she had made it at thirty-one, alone, the week after her father died, and had turned around at the top of the hollow and driven all the way back to Nashville without going in, and has never told one living person that.
Nobody counts the drives. That is the thing about a place you are from. It is a fixed point on a map that does not move whether you come or not, and it does not keep score, and you do all the keeping score yourself.
She came down into the hollow at about two in the afternoon.
One road in. The dollar store, which came in 2014 and which everybody complains about and everybody uses.
Sowell's, which is a store the way a store was a hundred years ago, meaning it sells feed and bologna and boots and one kind of coffee.
The church up on its cut with the gravel lot.
And then the bridge, and then Bent Fork Road, and then the house.
It is a white house with a green roof and a porch across the front and it needs paint, and it has needed paint since 2019, and every time Amber has offered to have it painted her mother has said the same six words, which are I'll get to it, thank you.
She stopped at Sowell's first, because you do not arrive at Nadine Galloway's house without something in your hands.
The bell over that door has been going since before Amber was born.
Inside it is one aisle wide and smells like feed and floor wax, and there is a woman at the register named Loma who is somewhere past eighty and has never in her life indicated that she recognizes Amber, which Amber has always suspected is a decision.
She got coffee, and a loaf, and a box of the crackers her mother likes and will not buy.
Two men were talking at the back by the boots.
One of them said something about the mine road and the other one said something about the water, and neither of them turned around, and Amber stood in the middle of that store with a loaf of bread and felt the specific relief of being in the one place in America where Virgil Kilgore's name had not come up all week.
Loma rang it and said, "Cold."
"Yes ma'am."
"Tell your mother about that furnace."
"I will."
"She won't do a thing about it," Loma said, and put the change in her hand, and that was the whole conversation, and Amber went out to the truck feeling better than she had in a month.
Nadine was in the kitchen with her coat on.
"You'll want the light on in there," she said, instead of hello. "The bulb went in the front room and I'm not getting up on a chair."
"I'll get it."
"I didn't ask you to get it."
"I know," Amber said, and got it.
Then they sat down at the kitchen table with coffee, and it was the same table, and there was the same crack in the linoleum by the stove that Amber had been looking at since she was four years old.
They talked about Iris's back half. They talked about the one step. They talked about the man from Dillard's office who was coming Thursday, and about whether the shed went with it, and Nadine said things like he says people want the acreage in a voice that made it clear what she thought of people.
Then Nadine put her cup down and said, "Now. I want to say something to you about the taxes."
Amber's stomach went.
"I've known since the second year," her mother said.
"Mama —"
"Nine, ten years. Whatever it's been." Nadine's hands were folded on the table. "Wanda Hurley works at the courthouse and Wanda Hurley has never in her life kept a thing to herself and I knew inside of a month."
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"Because you'd have stopped, and then I'd have had to find it."
Amber sat there.
"I'm not ashamed of it," Nadine said, "and I'm not thanking you for it, because you didn't do it so I'd thank you, and if you say one word right now about how it was nothing I will put you out of this house."
"Okay."
"But I'm not going to be carried into a grave." Her mother looked straight at her. "That's what this is. I'd rather sell it standing up than have it kept for me. You'd feel the same. You do feel the same, or you wouldn't be sitting in my kitchen in January."
It came apart about an hour later and it came apart over nothing, which is how it always goes.
They had been talking about what to do with the good dishes. Nadine said she'd give them to Iris's granddaughter, and Amber said something perfectly ordinary about taking them herself, and her mother said:
"What would you want with them."
"They're Grandma's."
"You've got a house full of things."
"That's not —"
"You've got a whole other house," Nadine said, "up there, that you're not in. I'm not going to pretend I don't know that either."
And there it was, on the table, after three months.
Amber put both hands flat on the linoleum.
"Do you want to ask me about it," she said.
"No."
"You've been not asking me about it since October."
"That's right."
"Why?"
"Because it's not my business," Nadine said.
"It has never once stopped being your business before."
Her mother's chin came up.
"You want to have it out," she said.
"I think I do, yes."
"All right," said Nadine, and folded her hands again, and waited, which is the single most effective thing that woman has ever done to her.
So Amber said it. Fifteen years late, in a cold kitchen, with the furnace making that noise.
"You told me I'd made my bed."
Nadine did not move.
"I was twenty-six," Amber said. "It was three weeks after Sawtooth let me go.
I called you from a motel outside Memphis because I did not have anybody else to call and I told you I was going to marry him, and you were quiet for about a minute, and then you said well, you've made your bed.
And then you asked me about the weather. "
"I remember."
"You've never said one thing about it since."
"No."
"Fifteen years, Mama."
"I know how long it's been."
"Did you think he was wrong for me? Is that it? Because you could have said it. I'd have been furious and I'd have married him anyway, but you could have said it —"
"I didn't think he was wrong for you," Nadine said.
Amber stopped.
"I thought you were quitting," her mother said.
The furnace kicked off. The house went very quiet.
"You'd been singing since you were four years old," Nadine said.
"You sang at Willard Gentry's funeral when you were nine because there was nobody else and you got up there in a dress I made and you did it.
And then you were twenty-three and they signed you, and I told everybody in this hollow, everybody, at the store, at church — Amber's got a record deal.
" Her jaw worked once. "And then they let you go, and three weeks later you called me from a motel and told me you were marrying a man thirteen years older with nothing to his name, and you sounded so relieved, Amber.
That's what I heard. I heard my daughter sound relieved. "
"That's not —"
"And I thought, she's not going to do it again.
She's going to go be a wife and it'll be a fine life and she is never going to stand up in front of anybody again as long as she lives.
" Nadine's voice did not rise. It has never risen.
"So I said what I said. I said it to hurt you.
I wanted you mad enough to prove me wrong. "
Amber sat in her mother's kitchen with her hands flat on the table.
"You never told me that," she said.
"No."
"You could have told me that any day for fifteen years."
"And what would you have done with it," Nadine said. "Come home?"
"I don't know."
"No." Her mother looked at the window. "I said the worst thing I could think of to a girl who'd just been let go from the only thing she ever wanted, three weeks after, on a telephone.
And then it worked out exactly the way I said it would, and every year that went by I had less right to bring it up.
" She turned back. "That's not an apology.
You'll not get one out of me and you know it. "
"I know it."
"But that's what it was."
They sat there a while.