Chapter 15
Rhett
Iwent back to the Nashville house alone that night, and for the first time I walked through it the way an outsider might, noticing what an outsider would notice.
The framed photographs in the main rooms were all of me, awards, album covers, magazine spreads, the walls telling a story about a single man's rise with no supporting cast at all.
Every photograph of Savannah lived down the east hall behind a door most guests never opened, tucked away like something to be protected or something to be hidden, and I was no longer sure I'd ever fully known which.
I had built a house that told the truth about where I kept my wife, and I hadn't noticed it doing so until tonight.
Birdie showed up unannounced an hour later, still spry at seventy-two, letting herself in with the key I had given her years ago and never taken back, her sensible shoes clicking against the hardwood with more purpose than I was prepared for.
"I heard," she said, without any preamble, settling herself at the kitchen table like she owned it. "The whole state's heard. I want you to know I am not here to comfort you."
"I didn't expect you to be."
"Good, because you don't deserve it yet." She folded her hands in front of her. "Sit down, Rhett. I mean it. I've got things to say and I'd rather not say them to the top of your head while you fuss with the coffee maker."
I took the chair across from her.
"That girl believed in you when you were nothing," Birdie said.
"When your own father wouldn't come to a single show, not one, not even the one forty minutes from his own house.
She believed in you enough to sleep in a car with you outside Chattanooga so you could make an open mic at six in the morning, and don't think I've forgotten that story, because I haven't. "
"I know what she did for me, Birdie."
"Do you." She said it exactly the way Maeve had said it in that yard, and I was starting to notice a pattern in the women who loved Savannah more than they were willing to spare my feelings about it.
"I remember the first time you brought her out to my place.
You were still driving that terrible truck with the door that didn't latch right, and she rode the whole way holding it shut with one hand because you told her it would be fine and it wasn't. I asked her afterward if she was scared, riding forty minutes down a highway holding a car door shut, and you know what she told me? "
"No."
"She said she wasn't worried about the door.
She said she trusted you'd get her there safe, and she was more interested in hearing the new song you'd been working on than in worrying about a truck door.
That was the trust you had from that girl before any of this started.
Before the money, before the house, before you learned to be afraid of what people thought. "
"I'm not afraid of what people think."
Birdie looked at me for several seconds, unimpressed.
"Then explain something to me. You can stand up in front of fifty thousand strangers and sing about love until half of them are crying into their beer.
But you couldn't say four words to one reporter in a hallway.
Explain that to me, because I've been trying to make sense of it since I heard and I can't."
I did not have an answer that would survive her looking at me the way she was looking at me right then, sharp and unimpressed and entirely without mercy.
"I think somewhere along the way," I said slowly, "it stopped feeling like something I was deciding and started feeling like just how things were done. I don't have a better explanation than that. I know it's not a good one."
"It's an honest one, at least," Birdie said. "That's a start. A small one, but a start."
"You knew her before any of this," I said. "Did she ever say anything to you? About wanting things different?"
"More than once," Birdie said. "She never complained to me the way you'd expect a woman to complain.
She'd just ask questions. When do you think Rhett will be ready to tell people.
Do you think it'll ever feel normal to be seen with him.
Small questions, said lightly, like she already suspected the answer and was hoping I'd tell her something different than what she feared. "
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her the truth, same as I'm telling you now," Birdie said. "That you loved her plenty. That love isn't always the same thing as courage, and a man can have one without the other for longer than anybody should have to wait."
"I don't just mean apologize," Birdie added, before I could take the moment as closed. "Apologizing is easy for a man with your money and your charm. I mean actually letting something cost you. If it doesn't cost you anything real, she'll know, and so will I."
"What would you consider real?"
"Something you can't buy back," Birdie said. "Time. Reputation. Pride. The things that don't come with a receipt."
"I've already lost the watch sponsorship. There's more coming, probably worse."
"Good," Birdie said, without a trace of sympathy. "Let it hurt. A man who's never lost anything for love doesn't know the weight of the word. You've been saying it for years without ever once paying for it. See how it feels to finally pay."
"That's a hard way to look at it."
"I'm seventy-two years old, Rhett. I've buried a husband and outlived two of my own children.
I don't have the years left to waste on soft words when hard ones would do more good.
" She reached across the table and took my hand, her grip surprisingly firm.
"I love you enough to tell you the truth nobody else in your life gets paid to tell you.
That's worth more than every publicist on your payroll combined, and I'll keep telling it to you as long as I've got breath left, whether you want to hear it or not. "
"I'm going to fix it."
"See that you do," Birdie said, and got up to make tea as though the conversation had cost her nothing, though her hands trembled slightly when she reached for the kettle, the only sign that any of this had actually gotten to her.
She stayed another hour, talking about my father, stories she'd never told me before, about how he'd been the same way once, good at loving people quietly and terrible at doing it where anybody could see, and how it had cost him nearly everything before he'd learned different, too late for some of what mattered most.
"There was a woman before your mother," Birdie said, quieter now.
"Nobody talks about her anymore. He loved her the same way you've loved Savannah, behind closed doors, terrified of what people would say about a boy from our family reaching that high.
He waited too long to tell her plainly, and she married somebody else before he found the nerve.
He spent the rest of his life telling himself it wouldn't have worked anyway.
I don't think he ever fully believed that. "
"I never knew any of this."
"Nobody was supposed to," Birdie said. "I'm only telling you now because I watched you make his exact mistake, and I'll be damned if I bury a second man in this family without at least trying to stop the pattern first."
"I'm not going to lose her the way he lost her."
"Then stop being so certain and start actually acting different," Birdie said. "Certainty is cheap, Rhett. I've heard plenty of it from men who ended up alone anyway."
"I'm not telling you that to excuse him," she said. "I'm telling you because you come from a long line of men who thought love was supposed to be private to be real. It isn't. It's supposed to be both, and if you can only manage one, you haven't actually managed either."
I started making changes that night, small ones, moving photographs from the east hall into the main hallway where anyone could see them, though I stopped myself twice from actually hanging them, unsure if I had any right to make that particular change before I knew whether Savannah was coming back at all.
I called the decorator in the morning anyway to ask about redoing the east hall entirely, opening it up, and left the photographs stacked on the hallway table where I would see them every time I passed, a small daily reminder of the thing I still had to earn.
Birdie called the next morning, before I'd finished my coffee, no greeting, straight to business the way she always did.
"I've been thinking about what I said last night.
About your father. I don't want you carrying that story around like an excuse.
He didn't get a second chance to fix what he broke.
You still might. Don't waste it feeling sorry for a dead man's mistakes instead of fixing your own. "
"I hear you."
"Good," she said. "Now go do something today that actually proves it, instead of just telling your grandmother you heard her."
"I called the decorator this morning. About the east hall."
"That's a start," Birdie said. "Small, but a start. Keep finding starts, Rhett. Eventually they add up to something bigger than any single grand gesture ever could."
"I'll try."
"Don't try," she said. "Do. Trying is what men say right before they don't."
She squeezed my shoulder on her way out, brisk and businesslike even in affection, the way she had greeted me my whole life. At the door she paused, hand on the frame.
"Whatever it means, I do believe you can fix this. I wouldn't have driven out here at my age to waste breath on a lost cause. I came because I think there's still something worth saving underneath all the mess you made of it."
"Thank you, Birdie."
"Don't thank me," she said. "Prove me right instead. That's the only thanks I want."