Chapter 7
Savannah
My mother opened the door before I finished knocking, still in her robe, hair pinned up the way she wore it before dawn, and she took one look at the suitcase in my hand and did not ask a single question before pulling me inside.
"Sit," Maeve said. "I'll put on coffee."
My father came down the stairs not long after, took in the suitcase by the door, and said nothing at all, which from Earl Grace spoke louder than words.
He rested a hand briefly on my shoulder and went out to check the porch light, though there was nothing wrong with the porch light and had not been in years.
It was his way of giving me room to fall apart without an audience, a habit I had watched him practice on my mother for thirty years of marriage.
I sat at the kitchen table while the coffee maker gurgled behind me, staring at the same chipped mug I'd been drinking out of since I was fourteen, and for a while nobody said anything at all, which was comfort enough.
Daisy showed up by eight the next morning, alerted by our mother's version of a text message, which amounted to three words and no punctuation.
She took one look at my face and demanded the whole story before I had finished my first cup of coffee, sitting across from me at the kitchen table with her elbows planted and her chin in her hands, the exact posture she'd used since we were kids whenever she wanted the full account of something.
I told her about the west door, and the reporter, and the two words Rhett had used to describe me to a national television audience. My sister's expression went from concerned to furious in the space of one sentence.
"Part of his team," Daisy repeated, flat, like she was testing whether the words would sound any less absurd said out loud a second time. "He said you were part of his team."
"He panicked," I said, before I had even decided to defend him, the words out of my mouth on pure reflex. "Kendra was standing right there, and Troy..."
"Savannah."
I stopped. Daisy was looking at me with an expression I recognized from every argument we'd ever had, the one that said she had caught me doing something and wanted me to catch myself doing it too.
"You just made an excuse for him before I even finished being angry on your behalf," she said. "How many times have you done that? Just in the last year, how many times have I heard you explain something away before I even got the chance to be mad about it myself?"
I opened my mouth to argue and found I didn't have anything ready, and the not having one told me everything.
Earl came in from the porch partway through and stood in the doorway listening, arms crossed, and when Daisy finally ran out of steam he spoke for the first time that morning.
"I liked that boy," he said, quiet, and something about the way he said it, past tense, careful, stopped both of us.
"I want you to know that before anybody says anything else in this kitchen.
I liked him before any of it, before the money, before the name on the tail of an airplane.
He used to help me fix that fence out back, remember, showed up on a Saturday without being asked because he heard me complaining about it at your mother's Sunday dinner. "
"I remember," I said.
"So when I tell you I'm angry at him," Earl said, "I want you to understand it's not the anger you feel at a stranger who never mattered. It's the anger you feel at somebody you thought you knew better than this. That's a different animal, and it doesn't heal the same way."
Maeve set a mug down in front of Daisy without being asked, her way of telling her younger daughter to sit and let her father finish.
"He didn't used to care what anybody thought of him," Earl went on. "Now I don't know that he remembers what that felt like. That's the part that worries me more than the hallway, if I'm honest. A man forgetting who he was before somebody started telling him who to be."
"You still think there's a version of him worth waiting for," I said, not quite a question.
"I think there was," Earl said. "Whether there still is, that's not for me to decide. That's yours."
Daisy looked like she wanted to argue the point, but Maeve caught her eye and something passed between them, an old habit of letting Earl have the last word when it mattered, though this time Daisy pushed through it anyway.
"I love you, Daddy, but I don't think you get to be the reasonable one here," Daisy said. "You're standing there defending a man who let a camera crew think your daughter worked for him."
"I'm not defending him," Earl said, a rare edge in his voice. "I'm telling you I understand how a good man ends up somewhere ugly, one step at a time, because I watched it happen with my own eyes and did nothing to stop it. That's not the same as saying it's alright."
"It sounds the same from here."
"It isn't," Earl said, "and your sister is the one who gets to decide which one it is, not you, and not me either, however much either of us might want to."
Maeve set her hand briefly on Daisy's shoulder, not quite a rebuke, just a reminder, and the two of them let the subject rest for the moment, though I could tell from Daisy's jaw that she hadn't fully let it go.
Over the next two days, sitting at that same table while Daisy scrolled through headlines on her phone and my father came and went checking things that didn't need checking, the story of my own marriage came back into focus in pieces I had not looked at directly in a long time.
It was strange, how a story you'd lived through yourself could still surprise you when you finally laid all its parts out in order, one after another, like photographs spread across a table.
I had worked two jobs the first two years, waitressing during the day and doing the books for a feed store at night, so Rhett could quit the warehouse and put every hour into his music.
I had booked half his early gigs myself, cold-calling bar owners from a list I kept in a spiral notebook that I still had somewhere, its pages soft and curled from being carried in a purse for two straight years.
I had sold his merchandise out of the trunk of my car at county fairs while he was inside playing sets for crowds of forty people who mostly wanted to hear someone else's songs, counting cash under a folding table while my feet ached in shoes not meant for standing all day.
We had slept in a motel outside Chattanooga for six weeks once, the two of us and his guitar and nothing else, because it was the only way we could afford to be close enough to Nashville to chase every open mic that might matter.
I remembered the exact smell of that room, cigarette smoke that predated us by a decade, baked into the carpet no matter how many times we cracked the window, and the sound of the ice machine down the hall that ran all night like a small, persistent argument.
I had believed, the whole time, that we were building something together. I had never once stopped to ask when the building had turned into something I only got to see from the outside, when the plans had shifted from ours to his and mine had quietly become supporting his.
Daisy brought up an old photograph one afternoon, pulled from a box in the hall closet, the two of us at seventeen and twenty, standing in front of the trailer Rhett grew up in, all three of us squinting into the sun on a day Rhett had brought me home to meet his mother for the first time before she passed.
"You remember his mama liked you better than she liked him some days," Daisy said, laughing. "Said you were the only person who ever got him to sit still long enough to eat a proper meal."
"She used to make me promise to keep feeding him," I said. "Like it was my one job in the relationship."
"Did you ever tell Rhett that?"
"Once. Years ago. He cried, actually cried, right there in the kitchen, because he missed her so much and hearing that she'd said something like that about me undid him completely.
" I turned the photograph over in my hands.
"I don't think that man exists anymore. Or if he does, I haven't seen him in a long time. "
"Maybe he's still in there," Daisy said, more gently than she'd managed all week. "I'm not saying that to talk you into anything. I'm saying it because I remember him too, and I don't think a person disappears completely just because the world convinced him to hide half of himself."
My mother, refilling my coffee without being asked, set the pot down and looked at me for several seconds.
"You were the reason he made it," Maeve said. "You know that, don't you. Whatever he's telling himself now."
Earl came in from the porch then, settling into his chair with the particular heaviness of a man who'd been thinking hard about something he wasn't quite ready to say. "I called Birdie Callahan this morning."
I sat up straighter. "You did what?"
"Called her," Earl said, unbothered by my surprise. "We've known each other longer than you and Rhett have been married. I wanted her take on things, one old friend to another."
"What did she say?"
"That she's already told him plenty, and that the rest is between the two of you," Earl said.
"But she also said, and I'm quoting her directly here, that boy loved you before he had two nickels to rub together, and love like that doesn't just evaporate because a man got scared of losing what came after it. "
"I know," I said, and found, to my own surprise, that I actually did.
Daisy pulled her chair closer. "So what happens now?"
"I don't know," I said. "I haven't gotten past this morning."
"That's fair," Daisy said. "For what it's worth, whatever you decide, I'm not going to be the sister who tells you what to do and then acts wounded when you don't do it. I just want you to actually decide, instead of drifting back into whatever's easiest because deciding feels too hard right now."
"I'm not drifting."
"Not yet," she said. "You've got a long history of staying quiet until staying quiet becomes a decision all its own. I love you. I'm asking you to make sure that doesn't happen again."
Earl reappeared in the doorway at that, having apparently been listening from the hall. "Your sister's not wrong, though she could stand to say it kinder."
"I said it plenty kind," Daisy protested.
"You said it true," Earl said. "Kind and true aren't always the same delivery, but they can still both be right.
" He looked at me then, his expression softening.
"Whatever you decide, decide it because it's what you actually want.
Not what your sister thinks is best, not what your mother and I think is best. That's the only thing I'll ask of you in all this. "
"That's alright," Maeve said, from the stove, not turning around. "You don't have to know today. You just have to be somewhere safe while you figure it out, and this is that."