Chapter 15 #2
She does not know how it happened; she had gone in for a folder and he had gone in for the same folder, and they ended up bent over an open box with their shoulders touching and their forearms crossed, and she could feel the whole length of his arm through two coats.
Neither of them moved.
It went on for about three seconds, which is a very long time.
She could smell him. That is the whole indignity of it — fifteen years, and there is a smell that a man has, and it is not cologne and it is not soap, and her entire body sat up and turned toward it like a dog hearing a truck.
"Sorry," he said, and took his hand back.
"It's fine."
"I've got it — you take it."
"I've got it."
They both let go of the folder at the same time and it fell in the box.
Amber stood up and went and stood by the door with her back to him and looked out at the field for a second, and her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her ears, and behind her he did not say one single word, and she was grateful to him for that in a way she could not have said out loud.
"Three fifteen," she said, when she could.
"Yep."
"I want to do the cassette."
"I'll go on up."
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to," Virgil said.
He went up to the house.
She threaded the church tape at twenty to four.
It transferred clean. Two-track, mono really, a room mic and a board feed mixed badly by a man with a little machine, thirty seconds of somebody moving chairs at the front, and then a woman in the room saying are we going and somebody else saying we're going.
And then a guitar, badly tuned.
Amber sat on the stool with her hand on the fader.
She got about four bars in.
Then she reached up and stopped it, and sat there in the cold with her hand over her mouth, and after a minute she rewound it to the head and let the whole thing run through to tape without listening to a second of it, standing at the far end of the barn with her arms folded, watching the reels go around.
She was not ready. That is all. It is a girl of twenty-two in a church basement in Letcher County and Amber Galloway is forty-one years old and she was not ready to be in a room with her.
She labeled it. She carded it. She put the cassette back in the sandwich bag and the transfer on the shelf with the date.
Then she turned the heater off and the light off and slid the door.
He came down when he heard the door.
He came down slow, in the last of the light, and stopped about ten feet from the truck, which was exactly right.
"You get it?"
"I got it."
"Good," he said.
She put the bag on the passenger seat and stood with the door open and her hand on the top of it.
"Thank you for the deck," she said.
"It's your deck."
"Virgil."
"It's a machine in a building," he said. "Everything in that barn is yours. That's not a — I'm not doing a thing. It's a true sentence and I'm allowed to say true sentences now and then."
She almost smiled. She looked at the gravel instead.
"I'm going Thursday next week too," she said. "Same time. There's the ninety-sixes."
"Okay."
"I'll text you."
"You don't have to text me. Key's in the lock."
"I'll text you," Amber said.
"All right."
She got in the truck. She had the door half shut.
"Amber."
She stopped.
He was standing there in the gravel with his hands out of his pockets at last, and he looked at some point past her shoulder, and he said:
"No."
She did not move.
"You asked me a question in the kitchen in October," Virgil said. "And I never answered it, and I've thought about that about four thousand times. So. No. Nothing ever happened, nothing was ever close to happening, there was never a minute of it. That's the answer. Four months late."
Amber sat in the truck with her hands on the wheel.
"I know," she said.
"You — "
"I know. I asked her."
Something went across his face that she could not read and did not try to.
"When?"
"January."
"Where?"
"Doesn't matter."
He nodded slowly. He put one hand on the top of the truck door, not to stop her closing it, just to have something.
"Okay," he said. "Well. Then you've had it a while and I'm still late."
"Yes."
"I want to say one more thing and then I'm going to go inside."
"Say it."
And he said: "It wouldn't have been the worst thing I did."
The engine was running. The yard light came on at the barn behind him, on its timer, the way it does.
"What?" she said.
"If I had." He was not looking at her. "If I'd done that. It wouldn't have been the worst thing I did to you, and I've known that since about the fifteenth of December, and I would rather have got hit by a truck than said it out loud."
"Virgil —"
"That's it. That's the whole thing." He took his hand off the door. "I'm not going to explain it and I'm not asking you to say anything back and I'd appreciate it if you didn't. Go on. It's getting dark."
He stepped back.
Amber pulled the door shut and put it in gear and went down the gravel past the barn, and in the mirror he was still standing where he'd been standing, in the middle of the drive, in the cold, with his hands at his sides.
She got most of the way to Ashland City before she pulled over.
Not to cry. She did not cry.
She sat on the shoulder with the flashers on and the church tape in a bag on the seat beside her and thought about a sentence.
It wouldn't have been the worst thing I did.
Four months of a question, and a woman in an empty lecture hall, and a man in a driveway who had gotten there on his own, in the dark, with nobody helping him.
He had not asked her for anything. He had not asked her to be moved.
He had walked out into his own driveway and put down, on the gravel between them, the first thing in fifteen years he had never given to anybody else first.