19. Shane
Shane
Signing away a career takes about an hour and nobody in the room is unkind about it.
Dale’s people get the termination number down about nine percent, which they present to me as a win, and I suppose it is.
When it’s finished I own a house off Manor with a lemon tree, a truck, the Gibson and four other guitars, my own masters, and roughly what a decent orthodontist has.
Monica takes me for tacos on Airport, because she says I should mark the occasion and because she’s not paying for anything nicer for a man who just did that. She lets me get most of the way through a beer.
“So how long.”
“How long what?”
“Before she takes you back.”
“That’s not what this was.”
“Okay,” Monica says, and eats a chip, and waits.
That’s her entire technique. She’s been doing it since I was nine. She sits there being right until you get tired of holding the door shut.
“There’s a thought I have.”
“There we go.”
“It’s not a plan. It shows up around two in the morning and it isn’t even words, it’s more like a shape.” I turn the bottle around on the table. “Somebody’s going to tell her all of it one day. And when they do, she’ll look at me differently, and there’ll be a second where it lands.”
“And she takes you back.”
“Not even that.” This is harder to get out than I expected. “I want to be in the room when she understands the size of it. That’s the fantasy. That is what waits for me in the deepest part of the night.”
Monica puts the chip down.
“That’s a receipt.”
“Yeah.”
“You did an expensive thing this week and some part of you filed a receipt for it.”
“Yeah.”
“You want the ugly version?”
“No.”
“A man who gives up his career to protect a woman’s name and expects nothing has done something good,” she says. “A man who does it and waits to be seen doing it has bought an advertisement. Same money. Same afternoon. Completely different thing.”
I sit with that a while.
“How do I get rid of it?”
“You don’t. You just don’t let it drive.”
I go over on Sunday. Not during my usual visit.
I text and ask if I can come after Sadie is down, because this isn’t for her, and Tess writes back one word, which is fine, and I sit in the truck outside for a few minutes getting it in the right order.
She’s got the door open before I’m up the walk, in the sweatshirt with the paint on the cuff.
There’s a bag of frozen peas on the counter behind her because the tooth is still going.
“Everything okay.”
“Can I say a thing?”
“Sit down, you look like you’re about to fall over.”
I don’t sit down. I’ve learned that much about myself.
“I’ve been keeping a receipt.”
“A what.”
“On all of it. The tour, the house, the contract. I told myself it was for her, and mostly it was, but there’s a piece of me that’s been waiting for you to see it. Which means the whole time I’ve been standing in your kitchen saying I don’t want anything, I’ve been quietly running a tab.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“So I’m closing it. Here’s what I want you to have, and I’d like you to take it and not be polite about it.
” My hands are doing something so I put them in my pockets.
“You don’t owe me a relationship. You don’t owe me forgiveness.
You don’t owe me a conversation in two years about whether there’s a version of us, and you don’t have to keep a door cracked so I don’t fall apart.
If you marry somebody else when she’s four, I’ll be at it.
And I’ll be fine, because the job doesn’t change. ”
“What’s the job?”
“The evening visits,” I say. “The bottles. The medicine in the side of the cheek and not the middle. Being the guy who is still there in November. I’d be doing that whether you ever spoke to me again or not, so it’s not worth anything as a gift, and I’d like to stop trying to hand it to you like one. ”
Her eyes have gone bright and her chin is doing something and she’s furious about it.
“You practiced that in the truck.”
“For about four minutes.”
“It shows.”
“I know.”
“Shane.”
“I’m going to go, actually. Not because I’m upset.” I get my keys out. “Because if I stay I’ll sit down and start hoping, and I just told you I wasn’t going to, and I’d like to be a man who meant it for one entire evening.”
I get to the truck before she says my name from the doorway, and I don’t turn around, because I’m not sure I’d survive whatever’s on her face. Janelle finds me the following week in the Los Angeles storage unit, which is a job I could pay eight people to do and want to do with my hands.
She quit in June. She sent a two-line email and then turned up nine days later at the house off Manor with a bag of tacos and a spreadsheet of everything she thought I was about to get wrong.
“I need to say something and I need you not to be nice about it.”
“Go.”
“I wrote part of the denial.”
I put the cable down.
“I wrote the second half of that sentence. The apparently imagined part. That was me, at four in the afternoon, in a hotel suite.” She won’t look up from the tape gun.
“I did it because Mitch told me the claims had been disproved and I believed him, because believing him was easier than the other thing. I told you not to use it afterward. I still handed it to you.”
“Have you told her?”
“No.”
“Tell her.”
“She’ll never speak to me again.”
“Probably not.” I think about every person in this story who decided Tess was better off not knowing something. “Tell her anyway.”
She does, in August. Tess doesn’t scream at her and doesn’t forgive her either, and the two of them now have a careful strange thing that I’ve stopped trying to understand from the outside.
Alana Chu’s producer calls on a Wednesday.
The pitch is direct and unembarrassed, which I respect.
They want the follow-up, in the same studio, in the same chair, and they want to roll the original tape in the room while I sit there.
“She’ll be tough with you. I’ll be upfront about that. What she keeps saying internally is that she was the instrument.”
“She was.”
“So can I tell her you’re in.”
“One condition.”
I hear him pick up a pen.
“Tess and my daughter aren’t in it. Not shown, not described, no footage of the house, nothing from the article.
Nobody on your side contacts Tess before, during or after, not for a comment, not as a courtesy.
And if Alana asks me how Tess feels about me, I’m going to decline, and you can’t cut around the decline to make it look like I answered. ”
He’s quiet a second.
“That’s a lot of no. Can I ask what’s left?”
“Me,” I say. “That’s the offer. I’m the only one in this who signed up for the lights.”