Chapter 5 #2
She got as far as dialing.
It was ten at night and she had been sitting on the floor for two hours and she got all the way to the last digit before she stopped, which was further than she had gotten in nine weeks.
What she wanted to say was not forgiveness.
She was clear about that, then and afterward.
What she wanted to say was: nine takes. I heard the nine takes.
You sounded like you were forty-four minutes into drowning and I have known that voice since I was eighteen and I did not know it could make that sound.
And under that, the thing she really wanted, which was worse: I want to tell you about a girl.
She put the phone down on the floorboards and pushed it away from her with two fingers.
Because here was the trouble, and she made herself write it down, actually write it, in the notebook, in pencil, at ten o'clock at night on the second of December:
He is sorry. He is not different.
Those were two separate items and the whole rest of her life ran through the gap between them.
Sorry was a thing a man could be in a barn for fifty-one minutes and still not be able to say out loud.
Different was Hal Fitch still on the payroll.
Different was a record coming out in March with a duet on it.
Different was a man who had not yet, in nine weeks, said one sentence about what he actually did — not the credit, the other thing, the thing he still did not know was the thing.
She looked at the two lines for a while.
Then she added, underneath, because she was accurate before she was anything else:
He gave you the knife and did not ask for anything. Write it down so you don't lie about it later.
Sadie Kaye did a radio interview that Friday.
Jenna didn't seek it out. It played in the bike shop while she was paying for a tire lever she did not need, because sometimes she went downstairs to be around a human being.
The host was gentle in the way that means the questions are coming. He asked about the record. He asked about the tour. Then he said, easily, "So — writing with Shane Bishop," and let it hang.
"Honestly?" Sadie's voice was young and a little bewildered and completely without malice. "He's the best writer I've ever been in a room with."
"Is that right."
"I mean it. It comes out of him. You'd have to see it." A laugh, small. "I'd sit there and think, how does anybody do that."
The host asked one more question, sideways, about the situation, and Sadie said, "I don't really know anything about that," and it had the particular flatness of a person telling the truth.
Jenna stood at the counter with a tire lever in her hand.
How does anybody do that, she thought. They don't. He carried it in a folder.
She was surprised to find that the thing rising in her chest was not, chiefly, aimed at the girl.
She called Jill that night and told her about the drive.
Jill was quiet a long time, which was not like her.
"Don't," Jill said finally.
"I didn't say anything."
"You said it in the way you told me. Jenna, I love you. That drive is the most effective thing that man has ever done and he may not even know it. Do you understand? He didn't send you flowers. He sent you the only thing that could hurt him."
"That's what I'm saying."
"I know it is." A breath. "I'm just saying, a man who hands you the knife is still the man who did the thing you'd stab him for."
That night Jenna lay on a mattress on the floor with her hand on the hard curve under her ribs, which had started, that week, to be a place she put her hand without deciding to.
Nine weeks of nothing. Then a filing on a Thursday with no photographer. Then a padded envelope with one word on it.
She made herself lay it out honestly, because being accurate was the only thing she had left that was entirely hers.
The money had been an insult. The gear had been a fence around a field. The statement had been Hal. Those were the things a rich man does, and she had known exactly what to do with each of them, and doing it had felt good.
This was not that. This one had cost him, and it had asked her for nothing at all, and there was no version of it that worked as a play — you cannot hand a woman four hundred hours of evidence and a recording of yourself saying you don't get to have the apology and call it strategy.
It was different in kind. Not bigger. Different.
She turned that over until the light started coming up over the roofline across the street, and then she got up, because it was four in the morning and that was when she wrote.
Before she sat down she went and got the drive off the folding table and put it in the bottom of the milk crate, underneath twenty years of notebooks, where she would have to take everything out to reach it.
That was not an accident and she knew it while she was doing it.
She had spent two days finding out that her husband was capable of one enormous, costing, unasked-for thing, and the correct response to that information was not to think about it for a while, and she did not trust herself to leave it on a table in a one-room apartment.
Angela had said don't decide anything on the day it lands.
Fine. She would decide nothing. She would put it at the bottom of the crate and go to Nashville and sign a contract with her own name on it, and if the thing was still true in January it would still be true in January.
She put her hand on the notebook and did not open it.
"No," she said, out loud, to an empty room. "Not yet."
And it wasn't a refusal, exactly. It was a woman putting something down on a high shelf where she would be able to reach it later.