Chapter 2 #2
He blinked. "That's — Jenna, that's just a thing I say."
The house was very bright and very quiet.
That's just a thing I say.
She had believed it was theirs. She had believed it the way you believe the floor.
For thirteen years of marriage and seven before that, when he made that sound it had meant you did it again, you're the reason, there you are — and it had cost her nothing to believe, and she had never once examined it, and it turned out to be a thing he said.
She thought: he doesn't even know what he's just done.
That was the worst part, and she would carry it for months. He genuinely did not know.
She had it in her mouth.
That is the part she never told anyone, not Jill, not for a long time. It was there, formed, ready — I'm pregnant — and the shape of the whole rest of her life sat balanced on the next thing either of them said.
She wanted to say it. She wanted, even then, to hand it to him and watch his face change and let it be the thing that turned the night around, because she was thirty-eight years old and she loved him and she had wanted this for a long time.
She got as far as opening her mouth.
And Shane, looking at the floor, said, "That room was the only place in twenty years I felt like myself."
Jenna closed her mouth.
She sat very still, the way you sit when something inside you shuts a door and you feel the latch go.
"Say that again," she said.
He didn't. He had heard it on the way out. She watched him hear it. She watched him reach for it and find that it could not be taken back, and she felt nothing at all about that.
"Twenty years," she said.
"That's not — "
"No, that's fine." She stood up. "That's actually the first true thing you've said."
The notebooks were on the low shelf in the front room, where they had always been.
Twenty years of them. She had never counted and did not count now.
She took the milk crate from beside the woodstove and started putting them in, in order, oldest at the bottom, and Shane stood in the doorway and watched her do it.
"What are you doing."
"Taking my work."
"Jenna."
"You can have everything else." She fit the last of them in.
The crate was heavy in a way that surprised her, and she was careful lifting it, and she was aware of being careful, and he did not notice, because there was no reason on earth he should have.
"The house is yours. The barn is yours. The band is yours.
The songs were never yours but that's a thing for lawyers now. "
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"That. The lawyer voice. That's not — " He came off the doorframe. "You don't get to decide the whole thing tonight."
She stopped in the middle of her own front room with a crate of her own handwriting in her arms and looked at her husband.
"That's the second true thing," she said. "You really don't think I get to decide."
She went upstairs after that, and he did not follow her, which was the single most intelligent thing he did all night.
She packed like a woman leaving a motel.
Two bags. Clothes she could work in. The good boots.
Her grandmother's ring, which she wore, and nothing else out of the drawer — she opened it and looked at thirteen years of somebody else's taste laid out on velvet, bracelets and a watch and three necklaces, and she thought about how much it all came to and how little it had ever had to do with her, and she shut the drawer.
The bathroom took four minutes.
At the door of the bedroom she stopped and made herself look at it, because she had a feeling she would want to have looked.
The bed they had bought in a store in Charlotte when they finally had money and had lain down on together in the showroom until a salesman came over.
The window she opened every night from April.
His side, with three books on it he had not opened, and a phone charger, and a water glass from a week in the summer.
It was a good room and she had been happy in it about ninety percent of the days she had woken up there, which is a number most people never get anywhere near.
She turned off the light.
Downstairs, she stood in the front room with the crate on her hip and did one last sweep, and the only thing she took off a wall was a photograph from the wedding in which neither of them is looking at the camera.
She carried it out to the truck herself. He tried to take it from her at the porch steps and she turned her shoulder and he let go, and she got it into the bed and shut the tailgate and the sound went out flat across the dark yard.
He followed her to the door of the truck.
"Where are you going to go?"
"Down the mountain."
"It's midnight."
"Yes."
"Jenna." He had his hand on the top of the door. He was not holding it shut. He was just holding it. "Tell me what to say."
And there it was, the whole of him, the entire twenty years, standing in the gravel in his good jacket asking for the line.
"That's the problem," she said.
She backed the truck around and the headlights swung across the yard and the fence and the black shape of the barn down the hill. In the mirror he was still standing where she left him, lit up by the house behind him, every window blazing.
His mouth was open.
He didn't say anything at all — not one word, not to her back, not into the dark — and it was, by an enormous distance, the most honest thing he had done all night.