Chapter 14 #2
Then she said, "Play that again, I'm rolling," and Amber said, "Bess, no," and Bess said, "Amber, yes," and that is how there is a recording of it.
Opal Waller has an office above a bakery and a way of not writing things down.
Amber went in on the seventeenth for nothing at all — there was a form, it took four minutes — and then sat in the chair with her coat on and did not leave.
Opal waited.
"I keep waiting to be angry again," Amber said.
"Are you not angry?"
"I was so angry in December I couldn't hold a cup.
" She looked at the pigeon. "And now it's February and I've got a song on the radio and a house I can afford and a friend who brings me barbecue, and I sat down last night and tried to be angry at him on purpose, like it was a chore I'd let go, and I couldn't get it lit. "
"That's usually good news."
"It doesn't feel like good news."
"No," Opal agreed. "It generally doesn't at this stage. The anger's doing a job for you. It's holding the door shut while you build something behind it, and when you don't need the door held anymore it quits, and then you have to decide what you actually want, which is much worse."
Amber sat there.
"I want to tell somebody about the radio," she said.
"Tell me about the radio."
"That's not — " She laughed at herself, badly. "That's the whole problem and you know it."
"I do know it," Opal said. "I've been doing this a long time and it's the thing nobody puts in the paperwork. Nobody leaves over the big thing. Half the women I've sat across from went back for a Tuesday."
Bess came over on the twenty-first with barbecue and a bad mood.
They ate it out of the containers at the kitchen table. Bess picked up the Whetstone letter, read it without asking, put it down.
"Well," she said. "About time."
"Mm."
"Fifteen years."
"I know."
"He knew the whole while," Bess said. "That's the thing I keep — he knew. He's not stupid. Every time that song got cut for a movie or whatever, he knew, and he took the check, and he knew."
"He offered in January," Amber said. "I turned it down."
"You what?"
"I turned it down. He came to the house and offered it and I said no."
Bess put her fork down. "Why in the hell —"
"Because he was buying something with it."
"So? Let him buy something. He's got it." Bess wiped her hands. "Honey, I'm going to say a thing and you're not going to like it. That man has spent four months throwing money at a hole, and the reason it doesn't work is not that his heart's in the wrong place, it's that he is a thick —"
"He fired Lonnie."
It came out of Amber's mouth in exactly the tone that stops a sentence.
Bess stopped.
"So?" she said.
"So he doesn't do that. He has never done that.
He kept Marty Bowden on the road for four years after Marty was any use because Marty's wife had cancer, and he paid for a man's boy to go to Middle Tennessee, and I have watched him sit in a room for two hours rather than tell somebody a hard thing.
" Her voice was going and she could hear it going.
"He does not end things with people. Something happened, Bess. He wouldn't do that unless —"
"Unless what."
"I don't know."
"Then why are you saying it?"
Amber stopped.
She sat there in her borrowed kitchen with a plastic fork in her hand and heard the last thirty seconds back the way you hear a take back.
She had been arguing his case.
Not defending him from an accusation. Building it — assembling the evidence, choosing the examples, doing the work of establishing that Virgil Kilgore is a good man who does not do a thing unless there is a reason.
She had done it fast and fluently, out of stock she keeps somewhere behind her teeth, and she had been doing it since she was twenty-six years old, and it had come out of her in a friend's kitchen without one second of thought.
"Oh," she said.
"There it is," said Bess.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You've got the face."
"I have got," Bess said, "the same face I have had since 2007, and I'll thank you to stop reading it."
Amber put the fork down and put both hands over her eyes.
"I hate this," she said.
"I know."
"I hate that I did that."
"Amber." Bess reached over and took her wrist, the way she had in the lobby of the Cranford, one squeeze, hard.
"You didn't do anything. He fired the man.
It's a strange thing and you noticed it and you're curious, and you're allowed to be curious about a man you've been married to for fifteen years. "
"That's not what I was doing."
"No," Bess agreed. "It wasn't."
They sat there.
"Are you going to ask him?" Bess said.
"No."
"Why not?"
And Amber said, "Because he'd tell me," and heard how strange that sounded, and did not have any way at all to explain it, and did not try.
She lay awake that night for a long time.
She had it laid out. She is good at laying things out; it is what fifteen years in a barn does to a person.
Since Christmas Eve he had done the following things, as far as she could determine.
He had not called. Not once, after the ninth of January. She had called him, about a photograph for a dead man's widow, and he had done what she asked and got off the phone. No texts, no letters, no flowers, no lawyers, nobody's cousin turning up at the studio with a message.
He had put her name on three songs and had not told her.
He had made a twelve-minute segment disappear from a streaming release seven weeks after fighting a distributor to get it, which she had not known was possible and which she was now nearly certain he had done, and had not told her.
He had ended a thirty-year friendship in a way that cost him something the whole of Music Row was still guessing about, and had not told anybody, including her.
He had lain eighteen inches away from her in a spare room in Logan County with the ice coming down and had said no, and had given her a reason for it that she has not been able to put down since, and had not mentioned it once in the three weeks after.
And there had been, since the middle of January, nothing about her anywhere.
No warm profiles. No item in Signal. Nobody's assistant leaking that Virgil Kilgore is heartbroken.
She had not registered its absence until she went looking, and when she went looking she found a silence with an edge on it, like a lawn where somebody has taken up a shed.
Every one of those things was a thing he had wanted credit for and had not taken.
Amber lay in the dark in a rented house in Inglewood and thought:
He's learning.
And then, right behind it, so fast the two of them were almost the same thought:
He was always going to be able to learn. That was never the question. He is the most capable man I have ever met.
The question was whether she was going to be there for it.
She turned over and put her face in a pillow that was hers, from her own bed, forty minutes west, and lay there with her heart going.