Chapter 19
FORTY STEPS — Amber Galloway (Redbud Records). Liner note, inside cover.
Everything else was cut live at Cleves Street in Nashville with the best band I have ever stood in a room with.
The title is about a bar in Bowling Green.
— A.G.
Fourteen months later
The first thing that is different is the mornings.
He gets up when she gets up now, which he never did in fifteen years, because there was no reason to and because a man who plays until midnight sleeps until nine.
Now there is coffee at five thirty and two people in a kitchen and the field still black out the window, and he goes down to the barn with her and turns the heater on while she gets the light, and then he goes back up and leaves her to it.
That is the whole ceremony and it takes four minutes and they have done it, by her count, about two hundred times.
The second thing is that he waits.
She noticed it in the spring and could not name it until the summer.
When she starts a sentence now he stops what he is doing.
He does not finish it for her and he does not start talking in the gap and he does not go get her something.
He stands there with a plate in his hand and waits until she is done, and it took a fifty-five-year-old man about six months of visible, ugly effort to learn to do that, and Amber has never once mentioned it to him.
The third thing is her.
She says it in the room now. That is the change and it is entirely hers and it cost her more than she expected.
When something is wrong she says it on the day, in the kitchen, in the flat voice, and about a third of the time it turns into an hour of the two of them being extremely uncomfortable on opposite ends of the porch swing, which is exactly what she asked for and which she does not enjoy in the slightest and which she would not trade for anything on this earth.
They have had, by her count, nine real fights since May.
Two of them were about the barn. One of them was about her mother.
One of them went on for three days and ended at two in the morning with both of them sitting on the kitchen floor, and he told her a thing about the year he turned fifty that she had never heard, and she got it first, and he got it out.
Forty Steps came out in September.
It has done better than anybody expected and worse than Carly Braswell predicted, which Carly maintains is a rounding error. There were nine songs. Three of them Amber wrote in a rented house in Inglewood with somebody else's curtains, and she has never once been sorry about where they came from.
The sleeve says:
AMBER GALLOWAY — FORTY STEPS Produced by Bess Hodge Odell Pate — bass. Reese Tanner — pedal steel. Virgil Kilgore — rhythm guitar.
Third on the list. In the same size type as the other two.
He asked for that. She had him second and he came into the barn with the proof in his hand and said, "Alphabetical or nothing," which is not a thing that exists, and she said "That's not a real rule," and he said "It is on this one," and put it down on the bench and walked out.
The trades made about a week of it and then found something else.
She mailed her mother a copy in the last week of August, three weeks before it came out, with no note in it.
That was deliberate. A note would have been an instruction.
Nadine called on a Thursday at four in the afternoon, which is when she calls, and did not say hello.
"I played it."
Amber sat down on the bench in the barn.
"Okay," she said.
"All of it. Twice." A pause on the line, and something moving in the background, and Amber could see that kitchen in Whitesburg exactly, the one step, the phone on the wall because her mother will not carry one. "Track one."
"Yes."
"You didn't clean it up."
"No, ma'am."
"There's a man coughing," Nadine said.
"That's Buck Sizemore. He coughed the whole four songs and I wasn't going to take him out."
There was a very long silence.
"I remember that dress," her mother said.
Amber put her hand over her eyes.
"Mama —"
"I'm not going to say anything about it," Nadine said, in the voice she uses, the flat one, the one that has never once in her life gone up. "I want you to know I played it and I'm not going to say anything about it, because I'd make a fool of myself and I've got Iris coming at five."
"Okay."
"It's a good record."
"Thank you."
"It's a good record, Amber," her mother said, "and I'd have said so in 2009 if anybody had asked me," and hung up.
Amber sat in the barn for about ten minutes after that.
They have a fight in October worth writing down, because it is the shape of the whole arrangement.
He gets an offer — two nights in Fort Worth in the spring, good money, the kind of thing he has said yes to for twelve years before anybody could finish the sentence. It lands on a Tuesday and he does not mention it.
Not for a bad reason. He does not mention it because he is going to say no, and he has decided he is going to say no, and he thinks that is the end of it.
She finds out on the Friday from Carly, who heard it at a bar.
And they have it out in the kitchen for an hour and a half, and it is not a nice fight, and at one point she says you don't get to decide what I can stand and he says I wasn't deciding, I was declining and she says those are the same thing when you don't tell me and he stops dead in the middle of the floor because she is right and he knows it in real time, which is new.
Then he says, "Okay. Fort Worth. Two nights, spring, they want a hundred and eighty minutes and Gaddis wants an answer by the fifteenth, and I want to say no because I'd be gone nine days and you're cutting in April."
"There," Amber said. "That's it. That's all of it."
"I know."
"Say no if you want to say no. I don't care about Fort Worth. I care that I found out at a bar."
He took two nights in Fort Worth in the spring. She is going.
They did the vows on the twelfth of December, at Cane Hollow Free Will Baptist, at eleven in the morning.
It was twenty-six degrees, which everybody agreed was practically tropical.
There were sixty-one people. Amber counted them from the front, twice, because she could not look at anything else, which is the only part of the day that was the same as the first one.
Bess stood up with her in a good coat and cried before the thing even started, and denied it, and was photographed doing it.
Hattie brought a ham.
Carly and Odell and Reese drove up in one truck and got lost twice and arrived twenty minutes late and came in the back like a band loading in.
Opal Waller sent a plant and a card that said I have been doing this twenty-nine years and this is the first one of these I've been glad about, which Amber has kept.
And in the second row, in a blue dress, with her hair set that morning by a woman in Whitesburg, sat Nadine Galloway.
She did not cry. Nobody expected her to. She sat with her hands in her lap and her chin up and looked at her daughter the entire way through, and at the end, when Amber came back down the aisle, her mother reached out and got her by the wrist as she went past and squeezed it once, hard, and let go.
That is the whole thing Nadine did. It is more than she has done in Amber's lifetime.
They ate in the fellowship hall off paper plates, because there is nowhere else, and Virgil Kilgore washed the coffee urn afterward in his good suit with his sleeves rolled, because nobody else was going to.
Amber stood in the doorway and watched him do it.
"You're going to do that every time, aren't you," she said.
"It's the same urn," he said.
They drove past the house on Bent Fork Road on the way out.
The Dillard boy sold it in June to a family from Isom with three children, and they have painted it — yellow, which Nadine says is a crime and which she brings up at every opportunity — and there is a swing set in the side yard where the shed used to be, and somebody has put lights up around the porch for Christmas.
Amber slowed down but did not stop.
"You all right?" Virgil said.
"Yes."
"You sure?"
"There's kids in it," she said. "It sat empty three months and now there's kids in it. That's about the best thing that could have happened to that house."
She drove on.
At the top of the hollow she pulled over anyway, for about a minute, and neither of them said anything, and then she put it back in gear.
The Opry was the eighteenth.
She had played it once in 2010 as a guest of somebody else and she has never talked about it, because it was four minutes and she was twenty-five and she thought there would be a hundred more.
This time she got the whole segment.
There is a wooden circle set into the middle of that stage — cut out of another floor, moved here, so that everybody who stands on it is standing where all of them stood.
Amber has known about that circle since she was six years old, sitting on a linoleum floor in Letcher County listening to a radio.
She stood on it on the eighteenth of December with a guitar and did three songs.
She did not think about the circle at all. Nobody tells you that either. She thought about the monitor mix, and about the fact that her second string was going flat, and about Odell, who cannot be relied upon to come in on the right bar of the third song and who did not.
And she did the ugly one, because Reese Tanner told her to, from six feet away, out of the side of his mouth, in the exact tone he has used on her since January.
Between the second and third she said one thing to the room.
"That's Virgil Kilgore back there on rhythm," she said, "and he wants everybody to know he's third on the sleeve."
The place came apart. He put a hand up, the way he does, trying to stop it, which never works.
And Amber Galloway stood in the middle of a wooden circle in front of four thousand people and turned around and looked at her husband, who was standing where the openers stand, at the back, off to the left, playing a G.
Afterward there were people, because there are always people.
They got out at about half past eleven and got in the truck — her truck, the same one, which he has stopped commenting on — and drove home out 12 with the heater going and nothing on the radio.
She was still wired the way you are. Her hands would not settle.
"Odell came in wrong," she said.
"He did."
"He has come in wrong on that song since March."
"He's seventy-one, honey."
"That is not a medical condition, Virgil, it's the third bar —"
And he laughed so hard he had to put his hand over his face, and she got the giggles, the stupid ones, the ones that take her at the knees, and she had to slow the truck down.
When it wound down it was quiet in the cab, and it was the good kind, and she reached over and put her hand on his leg above the knee and left it there.
"Hey," she said.
"Hm."
"Ask me how it was."
He turned in the seat to face her, all the way, the way he does now.
"How was it," he said.
And she told him. All of it, out loud, driving, for twenty-two miles — the circle, the monitor, the second string, the woman in the fourth row who mouthed every word of track one, the moment in the middle of the last song where she stopped being frightened and it turned into the best four minutes she has had since she was twenty-four years old.
He did not say one thing for twenty-two miles. He just turned toward her and listened, and asked two questions, and waited for the whole answer to both.
She had a wonderful thing, and there was somebody in the truck.
They got home at half past midnight and stood in the kitchen with their coats still on, and he got two glasses down out of the cabinet without looking at it.
"I want to say a thing," he said.
Amber leaned back against the counter.
"Say it."
"I'm not going to be careful with you again.
" He put the glasses down. "That's the whole thing.
That's what I've got. Whatever it is — if it's ugly, if it makes me small, if it's the worst thing I've ever thought — you get it first, and you get all of it, and you get it that day.
For the rest of my life. That's not a promise I'm making to be forgiven for something. It's just what I'm going to do now."
"I know," she said.
"I want to say it out loud anyway."
"Then say it out loud."
"I just did," said Virgil.
She looked at him for a second.
"My turn," she said. "I'm not going anywhere. Not this year and not in ten years. I'm not weighing it anymore, Virgil, I've stopped — there's no scale, there's no list. I'm home and I'm staying and I love you and I would do the whole thing again including the bad year."
"Amber —"
"I mean it. Including the bad year." She put her hand flat on his chest. "I got a voice back out of it and I got a mother back out of it and I got a husband who tells me things. I'd pay it again tomorrow."
He put his hand over hers and held it there.
"I love you," he said. "That's — I've said that ten thousand times and I've never once meant it the way I mean it standing here."
"I know."
"Say it again," he said.
"I love you," said Amber. "Come to bed."
The film is still out there.
It comes up. It came up in November when it won something, and it comes up every time anybody writes about either one of them, and there is a whole generation of people now who have seen a hundred and eighteen minutes about a man who came from nowhere.
Amber has never asked for it to be changed and never will.
It sits on a shelf and it is a beautiful piece of work and it has one enormous hole in the middle of it, and the hole has a name and a record and a house and a barn and a Tuesday night at the Opry, and anybody who wants the true version can go and buy it for twelve dollars.
Here is what she has, on a Thursday in January, which is not a special day and is the point.
She has a barn with her name over the door — he did that in the fall, a routed board over the sliding door, GALLOWAY, and did not tell her he was doing it, and she came down the path and stood there in the frost and laughed out loud with nobody to see her.
She has a cassette in a sandwich bag in a fireproof box, and a shoebox of clippings beside it.
She has a man who comes down at five thirty every morning to turn a heater on for her, and who waits when she starts a sentence, and who told a reporter the truth about the worst thing in him and never once asked her to be moved by it.
She has her own voice, at forty-two, with the break in it, going up on the last line where the melody wants to go down.
And she has fifteen more years of this, and then fifteen more if they're lucky, in a house at the end of a gravel drive he finally got fixed — a woman who walked forty steps across an empty room once, and got everything she went over there for, and is going to spend the rest of her life being told so.