Chapter 17 #2
Bess was against it in a way she had not been against anything all year, and she came at it hard on the phone that night and harder in person on the Saturday, standing in the kitchen on Marlin Avenue with her coat still on.
"You've handed him a test he can pass."
"That's the idea, Bess."
"That is not the idea." Bess put both hands on the back of a chair. "Honey, listen to me. That man has stood in front of ninety thousand people and made them cry on cue. You have asked him to be honest in public. That is his event. You've asked a swimmer to get wet."
"It's not the same."
"How is it not the same?"
"Because he's never done it about me," Amber said.
Bess stopped.
"Everything he's ever said out loud has been about him," Amber said.
"His daddy. His mother. His nineteen years.
He'll flay himself in front of a stadium and they'll love him for it, and he knows they'll love him for it, and that's why he can do it.
" She put her cup down. "I've asked him to go into a room with a stranger and say a true thing about me that makes him look small.
There's no applause in it, Bess. There's nothing in it for him at all. "
Bess looked at her for a long moment.
"And if he pulls it off," she said, "you're going to go back."
"I might."
"After all of it."
"I might," Amber said. "And I might not, and I don't know, and I'm not going to be talked into knowing by you or by him or by anybody."
Bess pulled the chair out and sat down heavily.
"I'm scared for you," she said.
"I know."
"I watched you in December. I had you on my couch." Bess's voice was not steady and she went on anyway. "I've known you since you were twenty-two and I have never seen you like that and I would like to not see it again."
Amber came around the table and put her hand on the back of her friend's neck.
"You might," she said.
Bess laughed, wetly. "Well, that's a hell of a comfort."
"I know it isn't. It's the truth, though, and you get the truth from me now. That's the new arrangement, and it goes both ways, and you're going to find it as annoying as he does."
The pressure came from every direction that spring and none of it was hostile, which made it worse.
Opal called on the twenty-ninth to say that if they were going to file it was better done before the summer, for reasons that were entirely sensible and that Amber did not retain.
Sara from Redbud wanted to know, gently and only once, whether there was anything coming that would put Amber's name in a headline for the wrong reason in the fall.
The trades had started sniffing. Signal ran a two-line item at the end of April noting that Amber Galloway had been at three separate industry events in six weeks without her husband and that neither camp was commenting, and Bess called it in and said "vultures," and Amber read it twice and found she did not care at all.
His sister called. Carly, carefully, did not.
And there was one afternoon at the end of April when Amber sat in her truck outside the studio and understood that every person in her life, without exception and without malice, wanted her to decide — that they were all being patient at her, and that patience is a thing with a bottom, and that some of them were getting close to it.
She thought about that for a while with her hands on the wheel.
Then she went home and did nothing at all.
That is the part she is proudest of, out of the whole year.
Not the session, not the showcase, not the tailgate.
That afternoon in a parking lot when eight people wanted an answer and one of them was her own lawyer and one of them was her best friend, and Amber Galloway went home and made a sandwich and did not decide.
Fifteen years of a calendar somebody else kept. Twenty-six years old in a room full of men waiting on a phone call.
Not this time.
He called on the thirtieth of April.
It was the first time his name had come up on her phone since January, and she looked at it for two rings.
"Virgil."
"I'm going to say a thing and then I'm going to get off the phone," he said. "It's Jonelle Crowder at Signal."
"Who is?"
"The reporter. You said it couldn't be anybody who owes me anything." A breath. "She's been trying to get the Barlow story since February and my people have been putting her off, and she wrote that thing about you at the events, and she is going to come in there wanting my head."
Amber stood in her kitchen.
"That's the one, then," she said.
"That's the one."
"When?"
"When you say."
"Virgil —"
"No, that's not me being — " He stopped and started again. "You said I tell you first. So I'm not going to sit down with her until you've heard it, and I'm not going to say the thing to you over a telephone. So it's when you say. That's the only part of it that's yours."
She looked out the window at somebody else's yard.
"Friday," she said.
"Friday."
"Come at three. Here. Not the barn."
"Okay," he said. "Amber —"
"Don't," she said. "Save it. That's the whole point of the thing. Save it and bring it Friday."
There was a pause on the line, and she could hear him breathing, and she could hear that he had about four hundred sentences in him and was holding every one.
"Okay," he said.
And hung up first, which he has never done in his life.