Chapter 18 #2
She did not read it on her phone.
She got up and made coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with her reading glasses and read it on a laptop, slowly, all the way through, twice.
It is about four thousand words and it is not a puff piece.
Jonelle Crowder came in there wanting his head, exactly as advertised.
There are three questions in the middle of it about Lonnie Barlow that he answers badly, and a passage where she asks him point-blank whether he is doing this to get his wife back and he says no, and she does not believe him, and the piece says so.
And there is a stretch of about nine hundred words in the second half.
I was thirty-eight and I was finished. I'd said yes to a man in Bowling Green about a job driving a truck. And then a woman walked all the way across an empty room and told me I was better than it and put me on her tour.
She had a record out that I'd have crawled to be on. Sixteen months I stood in the wings of her show every night and thought two things at once, and I've never told anybody the second one.
Her label let her go in 2011. And underneath everything I felt about that, down where a man doesn't get spoken to, I was relieved. Because it meant there was only going to be one of us and I got to be the one.
Q: You understand how that sounds.
A: I do.
Q: Then why say it?
A: Because I've spent fifteen years letting people believe I came from nowhere. That's the part I'd like corrected. Nobody came from nowhere. There's a woman who did it and I let the story stand because the true version makes me small, and I'd rather be small and accurate at this point.
Amber read that and then read it again.
Word for word.
Not the sense of it. Not the gist. Word for word — the parking lot, the pools, the wings, the two things at once, the sentence about down where a man doesn't get spoken to.
He had said it in her kitchen on Friday afternoon with his hands flat on the table and then he had gone into a room with a stranger four days later and said the identical thing, in the same order, without a publicist, without a read-back, to a woman who was trying to take him apart.
He had not made it prettier for the paper. He had not made it uglier for her.
That was the proof. Not the confession — anybody can confess. The proof was that there was only one version of it.
At the bottom of the piece, Jonelle Crowder's last question was whether he had anything else he wanted to say.
A: No, ma'am. I've said it where it costs me.
Amber sat at the kitchen table in a rented house with her hand over her mouth.
He had put her sentence in it. He had put her own sentence in the paper, and nobody in America who read that piece would ever know it was hers.
She got out to the farm at about a quarter past nine.
She had not called. She had not showered. She had a coat on over the shirt she'd slept in and she drove out 12 with the windows down and the May morning coming in and she does not remember one thing about the drive.
He was in the kitchen. She could see him through the window from the drive — standing at the counter with a cup, doing nothing, the way a man stands when he has been awake since four.
He came out onto the porch when the truck stopped.
He did not come down the steps. Again. He stood up there with the cup in his hand and did not move, and she got out and came up the walk, and he was watching her the way you watch weather come across a field.
"I read it," she said.
"Okay."
"Every word of it."
"Okay."
She stopped at the bottom of the steps.
"You said it the same," she said. "To her. Exactly the same."
"That's the only way I know it," Virgil said.
And Amber went up the three steps and took the cup out of his hand and put it on the rail and got a fistful of his shirt and pulled him down and kissed him.
He made a sound she has never heard him make.
His arms came around her so hard it hurt her ribs and she did not care, and he had one hand up in her hair and the other flat between her shoulder blades and he was saying something into the side of her face that was not words.
"Inside," she said.
"Amber —"
"Inside, Virgil."
He got the door with his elbow.
They did not make it upstairs and they did not make it out of the front hall.
He had her back against the door before it was properly shut, and she got his jacket off his shoulders and heard it hit the floor, and he had both hands under her coat and around her waist and lifted her right off the boards.
"I'm heavy," she said.
"You're not."
"I am. Your back —"
"Woman, I will drop dead in this hallway," he said, and carried her into the good room.
They got as far as the rug in front of the cold fireplace.
There was nothing careful in it and nothing negotiated. Fifteen years of knowing exactly where, and five months of not, and the whole of it came out of both of them at once. She got his shirt open and put her hands flat on his chest and felt his heart going like something trying to get out.
"Look at me," she said.
He did. His face was wrecked and open and forty years younger than it had any right to be.
"Say it again," she said.
"Which one?"
"You know which one."
"I was thirty-eight and I was finished," he said, against her mouth, "and you came all the way across the room."
She got her jeans off and he went down after them, both hands on the insides of her thighs, and she had one fist in the rug and the other in his hair, and he took his time even now, even here, on a floor, with the door still half open behind them, because he has never once in his life hurried this.
She said his name. She said other things. When it broke over her it took her all the way under and she heard herself, loud, in an empty house on a Saturday morning, and did not care about that either.
She got her hands under his shirt and shoved it off his shoulders and he shrugged out of it without ever taking his mouth off her, and then she got her hand between them and got his belt, and heard him say something into her collarbone that was not language.
"Here," she said. "Not upstairs. Here."
"Amber, the floor —"
"I have wanted you on a floor since the ninth of January," she said, "and you can complain about your back for the rest of your life."
He laughed and it broke in the middle.
Then he stopped, with his hand flat on her hip, and looked at her.
"Amber."
"Don't you dare."
"I'm not stopping," he said. "I want to be sure, is all. Last time I —"
"Look at the window."
"What?"
"Look at it." She got a hand up into his hair and turned his head, because there was sun all the way across the boards and up the far wall, and a hawk on the fence post, and the whole field lit up green out there like it was showing off.
"It's ten in the morning. Nobody died. There's no ice on anything.
I got in a truck and drove twenty-two miles to get here with my whole head. "
She pulled his face back down to hers.
"Daylight," she said. "You asked for daylight."
And that took the last of him.
She got him out of everything, and put her hands on him, and watched his head go back — fifty-four years old and shaking, in his own house, at ten in the morning, over a woman he has been married to for fifteen years.
She took her time on purpose and she is not sorry.
"Honey," he said, ragged. "Amber. I'm not going to —"
"I know."
"I'm serious, it's been —"
"I know exactly how long it's been," she said, "because it's been the same for me," and let him go, and lay back on the rug and pulled him down after her.
He came up over her and she pulled him down.
"Now," she said.
"Amber —"
"Now."
He came into her slow and stopped, all the way in, and held there on his elbows and looked down at her.
"Hi," he said.