Chapter 18 #3
And this time she didn't tell him not to. This time she got a hand around the back of his neck and pulled his forehead down onto hers and said, "Hi," and felt him break apart at the sound of it.
It was not gentle after that. It was the two of them, the way they have always been, the thing they can find that neither of them has ever been able to find with anybody else — his hand under the small of her back lifting her into it, her heels locked around him, the rug burning her shoulder blades and both of them past caring.
She said don't stop and he said "no ma'am" in a voice like a man carrying something up a hill and she laughed and it turned into something else.
At the end he put his mouth beside her ear and said her name — just her name, Amber, plain, the way you'd say it across a kitchen — and that was the thing that finished her, and she took him with her.
They lay on the floor of the good room for a long time afterward, and the sun came around and got onto the boards, and neither of them said a word.
"Your back," she said, eventually.
"Yep."
"Can you get up?"
"No," said Virgil.
Bess called at one in the afternoon and Amber answered it lying on a rug in the good room in a flannel shirt that was not hers.
"Where are you," Bess said.
"Don't."
"I'm not saying a word."
"You're going to say several."
"I read it at six o'clock this morning in my kitchen," Bess said, "and I'll tell you exactly what I did. I got to the part about the wings and I put the phone down and went and stood at the sink."
Amber looked at the ceiling.
"He didn't have to say that part," Bess said. "That's the thing I keep coming back to. He could have done the whole confession and left out the wings. Nobody in the world knew about the wings but him."
"I know."
"That woman went at him hard, too. That's not a friendly piece."
"No."
There was a pause on the line, and then Bess said, in a completely different voice, "Are you all right?"
"Yes," said Amber, and found that she was, entirely, for the first time since the thirteenth of October.
"Okay." A breath. "Okay. Then I'm going to hang up and be furious about it for about a week, and then I'm going to come out there and be nice to him, and I want you to know both of those are real."
"I love you, Bess."
"Yeah, yeah," said Bess, and hung up.
They got up around noon and had eggs, which he burned.
She sat at the kitchen table in one of his flannels with her hair a disaster, and this time she said the thing she had not said in November.
"I want to tell you what this is," she said. "And I want to say all of it before you talk, and this time it's good news, so try to hold still."
He put the pan down and sat.
"I'm coming home," she said.
He shut his eyes.
"Not on a trial. Not to see how it goes.
I've had five months and I know exactly what I'd be walking away from and I know exactly what I'd be keeping, and I've been to the other life, Virgil — I've stood in it.
I've got a record coming and people who want me in rooms and a house I could afford on my own for the rest of my life.
" She put her hand flat on the table. "I'm not coming back because I ran out of road.
I'm choosing it. It's a decision and it's mine and it's the last one I intend to make about this. "
"Amber," he said, and stopped, because his voice had quit on him.
"There are terms," she said, "and they aren't punishments and they aren't a probation. They're just what it is now."
"Say them."
"I hear the hard thing first. Always. Every time, forever, and if you ever have to think about whether something counts, it counts and you tell me.
" She held up a finger. "Two. I go back to work in that barn because I love it and it's mine, and I'm also gone three days a week to Cleves Street and some weeks more than that, and when I'm on a road you are not going to be the reason I come off it. "
"No."
"Three." She looked at him steadily. "When I've got good news you're the first call. That's not a rule for you, that's a rule for me, and it took me until March to work out that I'd stopped."
He put his hand over hers on the table.
"And four," Amber said, "and this is the actual one.
You don't get to fix things anymore. Not with money and not with a gesture and not with twelve minutes at the end of anything.
If something's broken you come and sit in the room with me and we're both uncomfortable until it isn't. That's the whole job now. That's the marriage."
Virgil Kilgore sat at his own kitchen table and looked at his wife.
"I can do that," he said.
"You can learn to do that."
"I can learn to do that," he said.
"Good," said Amber. "Because I'm going to be extremely annoying about it."
And he laughed — the big one, the one that goes all the way back into his chest — and reached over and got her out of her chair and into his lap, and she let him, and the eggs went cold on the stove and neither of them cared.
Out the window the field went down to the barn with its door standing open, where somebody had been in that morning before six, turning the heater on.