Chapter 16
VIRGIL KILGORE: I don't think I've ever once in my life said a hard thing to somebody's face before I said it to a room. (pause) I hear that back and it sounds like a joke. It is not a joke.
There were two more Thursdays at the barn and they were both fine.
That is all she is going to say about them, because that is all they were.
They did the ninety-sixes and then the ninety-sevens.
He held things and read numbers off shelves.
Neither of them said one word about anything, and at four o'clock she left, and both times he came down to the truck and stood ten feet away and said drive safe.
The second Thursday she noticed that he had swept the barn floor.
She has been sweeping that floor for fifteen years.
There is a particular way you have to do it around the shelf feet or you just move the dust, and he had done it the wrong way, badly, and she stood there in the doorway looking at the fan-shaped marks a push broom leaves and felt something turn over in her chest like a cow in a stall.
She did not mention it. He did not mention it. They did the ninety-sevens.
The showcase was the twenty-eighth of March, at a room on the east side with a low stage and about two hundred people in it.
Carly closed. Amber went on fourth and did three songs.
She has been asked about that night a number of times since and she gives them a good version of it: the nerves, the room, the fact that she had not stood in front of a live audience in fifteen years and did not fall over.
Here is what she has never said.
She played the one she wrote in January, and it went well, and she came off the front of it into the applause the way you do, and in that half second where your eyes come up and go around the room —
— she looked for him.
She was not aware of doing it. She has since taken it apart the way she takes apart everything, and she is certain that at no point did she decide to look for Virgil Kilgore.
Her head simply went to the back left, where he stands.
He has stood at the back left of every room she has ever been in that had a back left.
He is a big man and he has never once sat down at a show in his life.
There was a folding table with a merch box on it and a young man in a beanie.
She did the second song.
Afterward she was very happy. That is true and she is not going to have it taken from her either.
Odell hugged her, which she did not know he did.
Sara had flown in from wherever Sara lives and shook her hand with both of hers and said one perfect sentence about the third song and then went and talked to somebody else about business, which was the exact correct amount.
Bess cried and then denied it in the same breath.
At about midnight Amber went out to the truck and sat in it in the lot with the engine off and understood that she had just had one of the best nights of her life and that she had spent four seconds of it looking at a merch table.
The radio thing happened three days later and it was nobody's fault.
She was driving back from the farm on a Sunday — she had not been to the barn on a Sunday before, and she had made up a reason — and she stopped for gas at the place on 12 outside Ashland City, the one with the two pumps and the ice machine and the wooden bench nobody sits on.
She had the radio on because the truck's radio comes on when the truck does.
She got out. She got the nozzle in. She stood there in the cold with her hand on it, looking at nothing, and through the open door of the cab a woman's voice came out onto the forecourt singing a third verse.
Amber turned her head.
It took her about two full seconds, which is the part she tells people, when she tells it at all, and it always gets a laugh: it took her two seconds to recognize her own voice, because it did not sound like the voice in her head, it sounded like a stranger who was pretty good.
Then the song ended and a man in Nashville said the two names, hers first, and back-announced the record.
She stood at a gas pump on a state road with her hand on the trigger and her chest cracked open like a green branch.
Her name. On the radio. Out of the door of her own truck, on a Sunday, in the middle of nowhere, to nobody — to a man in a Buick at the other pump who did not look up, and the woman inside behind the register, and a dog in the bed of somebody's truck.
Seventeen years since a radio had said her name.
And in the middle of it — inside the same second, not after it, she wants to be precise about this because the precision is the whole point — the first thing that came up in her, whole and unstoppable and articulate as a sentence:
I have to tell Virgil.
Not I wish I could. Not if things were different. Nothing so tidy.
Just the plain reflex of a woman who has had one particular person to tell things to since she was twenty-five years old, going off like a hand jerking back off a stove.
She got the pump out. She put the cap on. She got in the truck and sat there.
And that was worse than October. That was worse than the folder and worse than the theater and worse than any night she had spent on Bess's couch, and she could not for the life of her have told you why, except that grief you can put somewhere and this she could not.
She had a wonderful thing.
There was one person on this earth who would understand exactly what it was, and he was eight miles behind her.
She turned around at the church on the ridge.
She did not decide to. She has been honest about the other things and she will be honest about this: she got as far as the church, and she put the blinker on, and she did not know she was doing it until the truck was pointed the other way.
It was about four in the afternoon. The light was going long and yellow the way it does in the last week of March.
She came up the gravel and he was on the porch.
Not waiting. There is a difference and she could see it from the drive — he was on the porch with a beer and a paper plate doing nothing at all, in a coat, the way a man is who has been outside since two because the inside is worse.
He stood up when he saw the truck. Then he sat back down, deliberately, and she saw him do it, and she understood that he had made himself sit back down.
She stopped by the barn instead of at the house, and got out, and let the tailgate down.
Then she sat on it.
After about a minute he came down the yard with a second beer and stopped at the corner of the barn.
"Can I come the rest of the way?"
"Yes."
He came and put the beer on the tailgate beside her, and did not sit down until she moved over about four inches, which she did without meaning it as an invitation and which he correctly took as one.
They sat on the tailgate of her truck facing the barn.
"'The Deep End' was on the radio at the Shell," she said.
"I know," he said. "It's on the radio all the time."
"Is it?"
"Amber." He turned the beer around on the metal. "It's on twice a day. There's a station out of Bowling Green plays it every afternoon at four. I've been —"
He stopped.
"You've been what."
"I've been driving around a lot," Virgil said.
She looked at the barn.
"It's a hell of a verse," he said.
"Thank you."
"That thing you do on the last line, where you go up."
"I know."
"You've been doing that since you were twenty-four."
"I know," she said. "It's on track five."
"I know it's on track five," he said.
Something went through her, quick and low, and she let it go through and did not follow it.
They sat there for a while. The light went down the field. Somewhere across at the Meacham place the dog started and then quit.
"I looked for you at the showcase," Amber said.
He was very still.
"I didn't invite you," she said. "I want to be clear. Nobody invited you and you didn't come and that was right."
"I knew about it."
"I figured."
"I sat in the parking lot of the Kroger on Gallatin Pike for two hours," Virgil said, "and then I went home."
Amber put her face in her hands for a second, and it was not crying, and when she took them away she was almost laughing and it was not that either.
"God, we're a pair," she said.
"Yeah."
Here is the conversation, as near as she can put it down.
"I want to say something and I need you to just let me get through it," she said.
"Okay."
"And I don't want you to fix any of it. Not one word. If you fix something I'm getting in the truck."
"Okay."
She looked at the barn.
"I'm not afraid of you," she said. "I want you to hear that first because everything after it is going to sound like I am. You have never once in fifteen years frightened me and you never will. It isn't that."
"All right."
"I'm afraid of being a fool twice."
The beer was cold through her glove. She turned it around and did not drink any of it.
"In November I came home," she said, "and I was happier than I'd been in five years, and every one of those days was real, and I have been over them and over them and I cannot get them back.
That's what I keep — Virgil, that's the thing.
It isn't that you lied. It's that I can't have November.
It's gone. It's a room I can't go in anymore, and I liked it in there. "
He did not say anything.
"And if I came back," she said, "and it happened again — not the same way, it wouldn't be the same way, it'd be some new thing neither of us has thought of — I don't think I'd get up."
"Amber."
"I'm not being dramatic. I'm forty-one and I have just found out I can do the only thing I ever wanted, and I have got about a decade of good work in me and maybe more, and if I hand myself back over and get it wrong a second time then I have spent my whole life on it.
" She heard her voice thin out and let it.
"I'd survive it. I'd get up and go to a session.
But something would be finished and I'd know exactly when it happened. "
The sun went behind the ridge and the temperature dropped about five degrees in a minute, the way it does out there.