Chapter 10 #2
Then Nadine got up, which took her a second longer than it used to, and went into the back bedroom and came out with a shoebox.
She set it on the table between them and sat back down and did not say anything at all.
Amber took the lid off.
Clippings. Not photocopies — the actual pages, cut out with scissors, some of them yellow, some of them creased where they'd been folded into an envelope.
The Courier-Journal. A magazine she'd never even known reviewed it. A paragraph from a paper in Chicago. A thing from Ireland, of all places, dated 2010, which she had never seen in her life and which said that Second Cutting was the best record nobody in America had bought that year.
A dozen of them. More. She stopped counting.
And underneath, in the bottom of the box, in a sandwich bag, a cassette with a strip of masking tape on the shell and AMBER — CHURCH — 4 SONGS on it in her mother's handwriting.
Amber put her hand over her mouth.
"Amos taped it off the board," Nadine said. "That little machine he had. He gave me the tape at the potluck after and I put it in that box and I've never played it."
"Never?"
"Not once."
"Why not?"
Her mother looked at the table.
"Because I'd have had to sit here in this kitchen and listen to it," she said, "and there wasn't a thing I could do about any of it from here."
Before she left she went and stood in her own room.
It has been a sewing room since 2004 and there is a machine in it and four boxes of fabric her mother is never going to use, and the bed is still in there under a quilt with things stacked on it.
The closet still has the mark on the door frame where the hinge dropped.
She had written her first song in that room when she was thirteen, on a guitar with a warped neck, sitting on the floor with her back against that bed because the bed was too soft to think on.
She could not now remember one word of it.
She remembered the floor, and the cold coming up through it, and the particular sound of her mother moving around downstairs and not coming up.
That was the thing about that house. Nobody ever came up.
You could sit on that floor for four hours making something and nobody would come up and nobody would ask and nobody would stop you either, and she had spent thirty years unable to decide whether that had been neglect or the greatest gift she was ever given.
She stood in the doorway with her coat on for about a minute.
Then she went back down.
Amber did not fix the furnace.
She thought about it. She stood in the doorway of the utility room for a good minute and looked at it and knew exactly who to call, and she did not call anybody.
She did not offer to buy the house. She did not offer to pay for the paint. She did not say one word about Iris's back half or the one step. She washed the two coffee cups and set them in the rack and put her coat on.
"Thursday's the man," her mother said, at the door.
"I know."
"You don't have to come back up for it."
"I know that too."
They looked at each other. They are not people who hug and they did not start.
"Amber," Nadine said.
"Mm."
"Is it over? With him."
"I don't know."
Her mother nodded slowly.
"Well," she said. "You know where I'll be. It's got one step."
She stopped at the church on the way out.
She didn't go in; it was locked, and anyway she didn't want in.
She stood in the gravel lot in the cold and looked at the little cut-block building with the aluminum steps, where she got married in nineteen degrees in front of sixteen people, and where she had gone down the outside stairs at twenty-two into a basement that smelled like a hymnal and sung four songs into a microphone Amos had borrowed.
That was the whole of it. That basement, and a man with a borrowed machine, and a dollar and a half of luck.
She stood there until her feet went cold.
Then she got in the truck with the shoebox on the passenger seat and drove out of Cane Hollow.
She got as far as the Tennessee line before she had to pull over.
It came the same way it had in the parking lot at Cleves Street, sideways and out of nowhere, and she sat on the shoulder with the flashers going and cried with both hands on the wheel.
I wanted you mad enough to prove me wrong.
It had not worked. Her mother had taken the one shot she had and it had missed by fifteen years, and there was nobody to be angry at about it, and that was so much worse than having somebody.
She got herself together. She pulled back out.
Somewhere around Cookeville, in the dark, she reached over and put her hand flat on the lid of the shoebox and left it there for about a mile, the way you'd put your hand on a dog.
She was thinking about two things and she made herself look at both of them.
The first was that a woman in a cold kitchen in Letcher County had kept every word anybody ever wrote about her daughter, in a box, for seventeen years, and had never once said so.
The second was that she had spent three months telling everyone — Opal, Bess, herself at four in the morning — that the thing she wanted was for Virgil to have known.
And her mother had known. Her mother had known everything, the whole time, exactly.
It had not been worth one single thing to either of them, because she had never said it out loud.