Chapter 17
JULIA NOVAK (off camera): Last one. What would you do differently?
VIRGIL KILGORE: (long pause) Ah, hell. Everybody says the same thing here and it's a lie. Nobody'd do it different. You'd have to want a whole other life.
JULIA NOVAK (off camera): Do you?
VIRGIL KILGORE: (pause) That's two questions.
It took her three weeks to work out what to ask him for.
She is a woman who makes lists, and she made lists, and every one of them was wrong. She had a legal pad by the middle of April with about nine things on it and she read them one morning at the kitchen table on Marlin Avenue and understood that she had written a list of punishments.
Sell the ranch. Say it at the Opry. Put me in the movie. Give the money away.
She tore the page off and put it in the trash and sat there with the empty pad.
Because every single item was a thing he would have done in a week, cheerfully, at enormous cost, without once being changed by it. That is his whole gift. You can ask Virgil Kilgore for anything that can be done and he will hand it to you before lunch.
She was not looking for a thing he could do.
Her birthday was the ninth and nothing happened, and she found out that day exactly how much of her was still a woman waiting on a man.
She got up. She went to the studio. Carly had a cake, the grocery-store kind, and Odell sang the song in a voice that ought to be illegal, and Bess gave her a set of index cards in a box, which is the funniest present Amber has ever received and which she has kept.
It was a good day.
And she checked her phone a dozen times before ten in the morning, and more than that before lunch, and at four in the afternoon she went and sat in her truck in the lot for a minute and looked at a blank screen, and she was so angry with herself she could have put a fist through the dash.
Because he was doing exactly what she had told him to do.
Nobody warns you about that either. You spend fifteen years wanting a man to stop managing you, and then he stops, and the silence is so clean and so complete that you find out what you were actually asking for — and some of it, it turns out, was manage me better.
She sat in that truck and made herself say it out loud, alone, with the windows up.
"You wanted the flowers," she said.
Then she went back inside and cut the cake.
She took a version of it to Opal Waller on the fifteenth, because Opal is the only person in her life with no stake in the answer.
She read it off the pad. It had five items on it by then. It was much better than the nine.
Opal listened without writing anything down, the way she does, and when it was finished she sat there for a moment.
"Can I tell you what I hear?"
"That's what I'm paying for."
"You're not paying me for this and we both know it." Opal folded her hands. "What I hear is a woman building a contract."
Amber looked up.
"Every line on that is enforceable," Opal said.
"Every one. You could put it in front of a judge.
And that is a perfectly reasonable thing to want from a man who has proved he'll go around you — but Amber, you told me in October that what you wanted was for him to have known.
" She tipped her head. "There's no clause for that.
I've looked. I've been looking for twenty-eight years. "
Amber sat in that chair above the bakery with the pad in her lap.
"So what's the point of me being here," she said.
"To hear yourself read it out," said Opal, "which you have now done."
She figured it out at the studio, of all places, on a Wednesday, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely.
Bess was talking about a singer they both know who had gone through something the year before.
"— and he told the whole world," Bess said, "on a podcast, before he told his own band. They found out driving to Tulsa."
Amber stopped with a cable in her hand.
"Say that again."
"What?"
"That last part."
"They found out driving to Tulsa," Bess said. "What?"
Amber stood in the middle of Cleves Street Studio with a quarter-inch cable in her hand and had the whole thing arrive at once, complete, like a sentence handed through a window.
He has never told me a hard thing first.
Not once. Not in fifteen years. Not the film, not the parking lot in Bristol, not the thing about the man everyone thinks they're looking at, not one single time — he had said all of it out loud, to rooms, to microphones, to a woman with a camera and a delivery date, and Amber Galloway had been the last to know every time.
And the reason was not cruelty and it was not carelessness and it was not another woman.
The reason was that she was the only audience that could get up and leave.
"Amber," said Bess. "You've gone a color."
"I have to go."
"You've got a session at four."
"Move it," Amber said, and got her coat.
She drove out on the Thursday and she did not text ahead.
He had told her he would not call her, and he had not called her — not in five weeks, not once, not on her birthday, which was the ninth of April and which he has never in fifteen years let go by without doing something enormous about.
He had sent nothing. She had checked her phone twenty times that day and had been furious with herself every single time.
The gravel drive had been fixed. New base, graded, the bend built up. Somebody had done a proper job of it.
He was in the yard with a hose when she came up, and he shut it off and stood there with it in his hand.
"Hey."
"I need an hour," Amber said, out the window. "Not in the house."
"Barn?"
"Barn."
They sat on two crates with the door open and the April light coming in on the floor.
She had written nothing down. That was deliberate. She had spent three weeks with a legal pad and she came out there with nothing in her hands at all, because she had finally understood that anything she could hand him was the wrong thing.
"I know what I want," she said.
"Okay."
"It's one thing and it's got two halves and I'm going to say the whole of it before you talk."
"Okay."
She looked at the floor for a second.
"You've never told me a hard thing first," she said. "In fifteen years. Not one."
He opened his mouth.
"I said the whole of it."
He shut it.
"I've been going back through it since Wednesday and I can't find one," Amber said.
"Not the movie. Not Bristol — you told a woman with a camera about your father before you told me and I have had a whole month with that.
Not the thing about never feeling like the man in the room.
Not the relief thing, whatever the relief thing is, because I know there's one, I've known since December that there's something you're carrying that you have not said to me and I do not know what it is and I am not going to guess. "
She could hear her own heart.
"You'll say anything to anybody," she said. "You're famous for it. It's why people love you and it is not generosity, Virgil. A room can't leave you. I can."
He sat on a crate in a barn with his hands hanging between his knees.
"So here's the two halves," Amber said. "The first one is a rule and it doesn't expire.
Whatever it is — for the rest of your life, whatever the hard thing is — I hear it first. Not first among the people who matter.
First. Before a friend, before a stage, before a microphone, before God.
If you cannot do that then there is no marriage here and we should both stop wasting the year. "
"Amber —"
"The second half is a thing you're going to do once."
He waited.
"You're going to sit down with a reporter," she said, "and you are going to tell the truth about the year I got dropped. All of it. Whatever the true version is. Not the version from the movie."
"I'll do it tomorrow."
"You didn't let me finish." She held up a hand.
"No publicist in the room. No questions in advance.
No approval on the copy — none, not a line, not a read-back.
You don't get to see it before it runs. And it can't be somebody who owes you anything, and it can't be a friendly outlet, and if they ask you something worse than what you came in to say, you answer it. "
She watched him take that in.
"And you tell me first," she said. "Before the recorder. That's the rule, and this is the first test of it, and if you do it the other way round — if I read it — then it doesn't count and I want you to understand right now that it will not count."
The barn was very quiet.
"That's it," she said. "That's everything I want."
He said, "Yes."
Just that. No breath, no consideration, no of course. One syllable, immediately.
And Amber said, "That's not good enough."
He blinked.
"I know you'd say yes," she said. "You'd say yes to anything I asked you sitting in this barn. You'd say yes if I asked you to walk to Memphis. Saying yes is the cheapest thing you own and it has never once cost you a dollar."
"Then what do you want me to say?"
"Nothing," Amber said. "That's the point. There's no sentence. I've spent three weeks looking for the sentence and there isn't one." She stood up. "You can't say your way out of this one. You have to go and do a thing that's going to hurt, in public, without me there, and then I'll know."
He sat there looking up at her.
"And if I do it?" he said.
"I don't know."
"Amber —"
"I'm not going to lie to you to make it easier," she said.
"I don't know. That's the honest answer and you're getting the honest answer because I'm not going to start doing the thing I'm asking you to stop.
" She got her keys out. "You could do all of it perfectly and I could still not come home.
You have to do it anyway. That's what makes it worth anything. "
He stood up.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay."
"Can I say one thing that isn't a promise?"
"Go ahead."
"I fixed the drive," he said.
She had to look at the wall for a second.
"I noticed," she said, and went out to the truck.
Bess was against it.