Chapter 23: Credits

The new label president was a woman in her fifties with short silver hair and flat shoes.

She had been brought in on Sunday night, after the old president resigned.

She had read every one of Deirdre's forty-one emails by Monday noon.

Her office in Pittsburgh had a glass table long enough to land a plane on.

At ten on Tuesday morning there were nine of us around it.

Jude sat on my right with his hand wrapped around mine under the table.

Stevie sat on my left in a borrowed blazer.

She had taken out her nose ring for the occasion and put it back in the elevator.

Kit sat across from us, scrubbed pale, in jeans.

The lawyer from Philadelphia sat at the end, with the tie that didn't match.

My mother sat beside me in her church coat, with her purse on her lap and both feet flat on the carpet.

At five past ten, Hank came in.

He had put on a suit.

It was a brown suit, a little short at the wrist, and he'd combed his gray ponytail and tied it back with a leather cord.

He stopped dead in the doorway when he saw my mother.

"Mrs. Doyle," he said.

"You're the tour manager."

"Yes, ma'am. Hank Satterfield."

She looked him up and down.

She looked at the suit and the ponytail and the clipboard he'd brought out of habit.

"You're thin," my mother said.

"Ma'am?"

"You're a man who eats out of a gas station."

She opened her purse and took out a foil package the size of a brick.

"Banana bread. Sit."

Hank sat.

He took the foil package in both hands like a hymnal.

"Thank you," he said, in a voice I had never heard.

"You looked after my daughter."

"She looked after herself."

"I know that." My mother patted his arm. "I'm saying thank you."

Across the table, Kit put her hand over her mouth.