Chapter 3 #2
She sat there and looked at a man who had done the largest theft of her life with a pen, in an office, on an afternoon she could not name, and had filed it and forgotten it and slept extremely well ever since.
"Get out of my apartment," she said, pleasantly.
He got up. He was not offended. That was almost the most remarkable thing about him — in twenty-two years nobody had ever seen Hal Fitch take anything personally, because none of it was.
He gathered the folio and put his glasses down off his head and stopped at the door.
"Can I say one thing to you as a friend."
"You're not my friend, Hal."
"That's fair." He said it comfortably. "Here it is anyway. He's not going to fight you."
She didn't answer.
"I've told him to. That's my job and I've done it and I'll do it again on the plane." Hal shifted the folio under his arm. "He's not going to. He's going to give you everything you ask for and a good deal you don't, and he's going to do it fast, and the lawyers are going to tell you it's a tactic."
"Isn't it?"
"With most of them, honey, yes." Hal Fitch looked at her with what she would later be certain was real affection, the way a man looks fondly at a house he has just finished selling out from under somebody. "Not with him. That's the part I've never been able to fix."
He would call her Friday, he said. He left the coffee.
The wire hit Thursday morning while she was sitting in Angela Mackey's office in Charlotte.
Two million dollars, from an account she was on, into an account she was on, with no note, because there was no field for a note.
Twenty minutes later her phone rang and it was a freight company, cheerful, confirming a delivery window for Friday: two flight cases, a console, a pair of monitors, and a tape machine, to an address on Haywood Road that she had given to four people.
"He's furnishing you," Angela Mackey said. She was fifty-something, gray suit, reading glasses down her nose. "That's what that is. That's not generosity, that's a man putting a fence around a field."
"He thinks he's being kind."
"He can think whatever he wants. What matters is what the paper says." Angela wrote something down. "Send it back."
"All of it?"
"All of it, today, and in writing, and let me draft the writing.
" She looked over her glasses. "Mrs. Bishop.
I don't know your husband. But I've done this thirty times and I'll tell you the shape of it.
In four weeks he'll do something generous and enormous and it will land on you like weather.
Don't decide anything on the day it lands. "
Jenna sent the money back that afternoon.
She turned the truck around on Haywood on Friday morning and stood in the street in the rain and told two very apologetic men from a freight company that nothing was coming up the stairs, and watched a hundred and forty thousand dollars of studio gear go back into a box truck.
Then she went upstairs and wrote on a folding table with a pencil, which is what she had been doing since she was fourteen and which had, so far, produced six albums.
Angela called that afternoon to tell her that the money had gone back and that the other side had acknowledged receipt in nine minutes.
"They're not arguing," Angela said. "I want you to know how strange that is."
"Hal said he wouldn't fight me."
"Hal says a great many things." A pause; paper moving. "Can I ask you something that isn't legal?"
"Go ahead."
"Has he come to the door?"
Jenna looked out the window at Haywood Road, where a man was chaining a bike to a rack in the rain.
"No," she said.
"Has he called?"
"No."
"Okay," Angela said, and wrote something down, audibly, and did not say what she thought about it.
That was the shape of that whole first week, in the end. Not a siege. Not a man on her steps at two in the morning with a guitar, which was the version she had braced for and, if she was going to be accurate, the version some part of her had wanted so she could enjoy refusing it.
Nothing. A wire, a truck of gear, and then a silence so complete she started to check her phone to make sure it was working.
The release show was Friday night at a theater in Atlanta.
She knew about it because Hal had put it on a schedule and left the schedule on her table. She did not go. She had never in twenty years missed a first night, not once, not through pneumonia, not through her mother's surgery.
By Saturday a trade site had it in three lines under a photograph of the marquee. Notably absent. By Sunday it was on a gossip page with a shot of her truck outside the bike shop, taken from across the street, and a headline with the word split in it.
Jill called and started to talk her through it and Jenna said, "Read me the comments."
"No."
"Jill."
"Absolutely not."
So Jenna read them herself, standing at the window with the compressor going under the floor, and learned in about ninety seconds that she was a woman who had let herself go, that she had never contributed anything, that Sadie Kaye was clearly the real artist, and that she was probably about to take half of a catalogue she had nothing to do with.
She read it all the way to the bottom. Then she put the phone face down on the sill.
There was one thing in the room worth anything and it was a milk crate.
She thought about being thirty-eight years old with a folding table and a pencil and a due date in May, and about a man in a cardigan who had said that was a tax thing without blinking, and about how many people between here and Nashville had known for a decade and had all, every one of them, decided it was not their business.
Then she went and got her phone and scrolled back a long way, past this year and last year, into a run of messages she had never once answered.
Grady Ames. Five years of them. Call me. / Call me, Jenna. / You know what you've got. / Alright, I'll stop. (He had not stopped.) / Heard the record. You still in that barn?
She looked at it for a while.
Then she hit the number, and it rang twice, and a voice with no gloss on it at all said, "Well, God almighty."
"Grady," she said. "It's Jenna Bishop. Are you still buying?"