Chapter 14
VIRGIL KILGORE: The worst thing about it is you get good at being liked. That's a skill and I've got it and I'd give it back. You spend thirty years being liked by rooms and you come home and you don't know how to be — (pause) — you don't know how to be anything but liked.
February came in gray and stayed that way.
"The Deep End" went out on the third and did something. Amber does not know how to describe what it did without sounding either falsely modest or like a person who checks. She checked. She checked constantly, for about ten days, and then made herself stop.
It got played. It got written about in two places, and one of the two spent four paragraphs on the third verse, and the woman who wrote it used the phrase the best forty seconds of singing anybody has done this year, and Amber read that sentence in a rented kitchen at seven in the morning and had to put the phone down and walk into the other room.
Carly called it in that afternoon: "Told you."
"You did not tell me that."
"I told you some of that."
Redbud wanted a showcase in the spring. There was talk of Amber doing three songs of her own in it, which she said no to twice and then did not say no to a third time, which Carly correctly interpreted.
She was, by any reasonable measure, having the best month of her adult life.
The Barlow thing she heard from Bess, who heard it from a man who does floors.
"Lonnie's out."
"Out of what?"
"Out. Gone. Done." Bess had the phone under her chin and was doing something with cables. "Thirty years and it's over. It's all through the Row today."
Amber stood very still in her own kitchen.
"Who left who?"
"Nobody knows. That's the thing." Something clanked.
"There's no statement, there's no we thank Lonnie for his years, there's nothing.
Barlow's people won't say a word and Virgil's people are apparently not saying words to anybody about anything anymore, which is its own weird story.
The reporter at Signal has been trying for two days. "
"What's Lonnie saying?"
"Lonnie said, and I quote, I've had a wonderful thirty years and I'd like to talk about the weather."
Amber put her hand on the counter.
"You okay?" said Bess.
"Yeah."
"You don't sound —"
"I'm fine, Bess."
She was not fine. She was standing in a rented kitchen trying to make an arithmetic work, and it would not work, because the pieces were the wrong shape.
Virgil Kilgore does not fire people. In fifteen years she had watched that man keep on a road manager who cost him money for four straight years because the man's wife was sick.
He had paid for a bus driver's boy to go to school.
He is not a man who ends things; he is a man who lets things go on being true.
And Lonnie Barlow was not an employee. Lonnie was the person he called from the airport. Lonnie was at their wedding — one of the sixteen, in the third pew, in a beautiful coat.
She thought: something happened.
Then she thought: ask him.
Then she put the phone in the drawer and went to work.
The film went up on the sixth.
She knew the date. Everybody knew the date; it had been on a poster at the front of a grocery store in Inglewood since the middle of January, his face nine feet tall over the carts.
She waited until nine at night and got a glass of wine she didn't drink and put it on with the sound low.
She did not watch the film. She scrolled past it to the extras.
There was a making-of. There was twenty minutes of deleted material with a title card. There was a piece with the editor. There was a whole section of the Fort Worth show from 2021.
There was no twelve minutes.
She went through it three times. She backed out to the main page and came in again in case she'd missed a row. She sat on somebody else's sofa in Inglewood at nine fifteen at night and thumbed through a menu looking for herself.
It wasn't there.
And then she sat back, and understood that she had just spent ten minutes hunting for a thing she had privately and correctly called an insult in December, and that she had been looking forward to it, in some part of her she does not like, and that somebody had taken it away without telling her.
She could not work out what she felt about it. She still can't, entirely.
And underneath that, cold and clear: Lonnie has been gone three days.
She did not know what the two things had to do with each other. She only knew they were the same shape — a thing quietly taken out of the world, with nobody standing next to it explaining why.
She turned the television off and sat in the dark for a while.
The letter came on the eleventh, in an envelope, from Whetstone.
It was three paragraphs and it was written by a person who has written a thousand of them.
It said that the writer credits on three compositions had been corrected, and it listed them, and it said the corrections had been registered as of the twenty-ninth of January and applied retroactively, and it enclosed a statement.
Bent Nail. Kitchen Light. Sixteen People.
Her name, printed, second on all three.
She sat down on the stairs in her coat and looked at it for a long time.
There was no note from him. Nothing on the envelope, nothing folded in, no handwriting anywhere.
She had told him to do it quietly and not tell her when it was done, and he had done it quietly and not told her when it was done, and it had taken her nearly two weeks to find out, and she found out from an administrator.
She had asked for exactly this.
She put the letter on the kitchen table and it sat there for five days and every time she came in she saw it.
The rehearsals were three afternoons a week at Cleves Street, and they were the best hours of her life, and she has never once said that out loud to anybody in the family.
Four of them in a room with the heat up too high. Carly with her boots off. Odell on the couch doing a crossword between passes. Reese in the corner not talking.
They worked up her three. One of them she wrote in 2013 and never played to anybody.
One of them she wrote in about nine days in January, on a borrowed guitar, in a rented house, which is not a thing she had done since she was twenty-five.
The third is off Second Cutting and she cannot sing it in the same key anymore and does not intend to apologize for that.
Reese Tanner said maybe forty words a week to her and every one of them was about music.
"That turn," he'd say. "You're pushing it. Let it come to you."
Or: "Do the ugly one."
"It's not ugly."
"It's ugly," Reese said. "Do it."
He never once asked her a personal question.
Not one, in six weeks. She noticed it around the middle of February and she noticed that she was noticing, and she understood that he was doing it on purpose and that it was a courtesy and that it was costing him something, and that was more or less the most decent thing anybody had done for her all year.
She was aware, in a low and constant way, that if she wanted a different life she could probably have one.
She did not want it, and she will say so plainly. It was not temptation; nothing in her leaned. It was more like standing at a window in a house you're thinking about leaving and seeing that the street goes somewhere.
The part that hurts is not what people think.
She has tried to explain this exactly twice — once to Bess, badly, and once to Opal Waller, who wrote nothing down and understood immediately — and neither time did it come out right.
It is not missing him. She did miss him. She missed him in the mornings and in the truck and every single time something broke in that house, and that was ordinary and expected and survivable and she could put it down.
It is eleven o'clock at night.
That is the whole of it. It is coming in at eleven o'clock from a room where four people made a good thing, with your ears still ringing and the cold on your coat, into a house with somebody else's curtains — and there is nobody in it.
Nobody to stand in the kitchen doorway. Nobody to say how was it and mean it. Nobody who has known you for fifteen years to say play me the ugly one and sit down on the arm of a chair and listen to it on a phone speaker.
She had spent three months proving to herself that she could build a whole life.
She had built one. It was better than the last one. It had her name on the front of it.
And every night at eleven o'clock she came home to it and stood in a strange kitchen with her coat still on and had the best news of her life in her mouth and nowhere to put it.
That is the part that hurts. Not the wanting him. The having something to say.
The song she wrote in January she wrote in nine days and she has never been able to explain it to anybody.
It started at four thirty in the morning on the eighth, which is the day before he came to the house, on a borrowed guitar Bess had left with her in case, which Amber had resented and then not given back.
She woke up with a line in her head. That has happened to her maybe six times in her life and it had not happened since 2008.
She got up and sat on the floor of the second bedroom, the one with the card table in it, with her back against the wall because there was nothing to sit on, and worked on it until it got light.
It is not about Virgil. People have assumed that since and she lets them.
It is about a woman who takes a job she is overqualified for and is very good at it and stays fourteen years, and the last verse is from the point of view of the job.
She played it for nobody for three weeks.
Then one afternoon at Cleves Street, at the end of a session, when it was down to her and Bess and the heat ticking, she said, "Can I play you something," in a voice she did not recognize, and Bess said "Yep" and did not turn around from the console, which was the kindest possible thing, and Amber played it once with her eyes shut.
When she finished, Bess was quiet for a second.