Chapter 6
The contract had her name on it fourteen times.
She counted, sitting in the office above the tire place on a Tuesday in the middle of December, with the heat clanking and Grady Ames pretending to read something on the other side of the desk.
Jenna Bishop, hereinafter the Writer.
Not the spouse of. Not a member holding two percent of an entity named after a tree on somebody else's land. The Writer.
"Take your time," Grady said, without looking up, which was the only kind thing she had ever seen him do.
She signed it.
It was three seconds long, and she thought it would feel like something and it did not, and then about a minute later, while Grady was calling downstairs for the notary, it hit her sideways and she had to look out the window at the tire place for a while.
"The other one's still on the table," Grady said, when it was done.
"I know."
"I'm not going to work you about it."
"That's new."
"It's December and you're — " He stopped. Grady Ames, who said everything, stopped. "You've got a lot on."
They looked at each other. He knew. He had known since October, probably; he was a man who noticed inventory.
"Say what you want to say," Jenna said.
"That deal's worth what it's worth for about six more months," he said. "After that the story's cold and you're a songwriter with a great catalogue, which is a wonderful thing to be and worth a fifth as much." He shrugged. "That's not pressure. That's a calendar. I'd be cheating you not to say it."
"Understood."
"And Jenna." He capped his pen. "If you never make that record I'll still have done the best work of my life today. Both those things are true at once. I've made peace with being a man who wants something."
The notary came up from the tire place downstairs, stamped it, and went back to work.
Grady walked her out. In the stairwell, without turning around, he said, "Four songs went out Monday. Maxine Gault's people called about one of them inside a day."
Jenna stopped on the stairs.
"Which one?"
"Which do you think."
"He never cut it."
"I know he never cut it," Grady said. "That's why I sent it." He pushed the door open into the cold. "Session's Thursday if you want to stand in the back and pretend you're not there."
The session was Thursday, and it was for Maxine Gault, and Jenna nearly did not go.
Maxine Gault was seventy-four years old and had three Grammys and a voice like a door closing on a warm room. She had been cutting records since before Jenna was born, and she had heard "The Quiet Part" on a Tuesday night and had her people on the phone before Wednesday.
Nobody had ever recorded it. Shane had held it in his hands in a kitchen in August and picked her up off the floor and then made a different record.
She had nearly told Grady to pull it. She had gotten as far as the parking lot on Tuesday night with her phone in her hand, and what stopped her was not courage.
It was arithmetic. If she pulled it, the only reason would be that the song still belonged to a marriage, and she was not willing to say that out loud to a man in Nashville at nine o'clock at night.
So she let it go and did not sleep, and drove down on Thursday morning with her stomach in a knot, and told herself the whole way that a legend was going to sing four bars of it and say it's not for me.
Poplar Street Studio was a low brick building with a bad parking lot and the best room in the city. Jenna got there at ten and stood in the back with a coffee she wasn't drinking, in a coat she was not taking off, and told herself she was there as a courtesy.
The band ran it three times to learn it. Bass, drums, a pedal steel player who was maybe twenty-five, and a guitarist named Cal Hinsley who found the right part on the second pass and then did not play one extra note for the rest of the day, which is the hardest thing there is.
Then Maxine came in from the lounge with her reading glasses on a chain and said, "Alright, let me try it."
She sang it once.
Jenna had written the song in July over three days at the kitchen table. She knew every syllable of it. She had heard it in her own head about four hundred times and in her own voice on a phone demo maybe twenty.
She had never once heard what it was about.
Maxine sang the second verse — you keep the good plates for the people who don't come — and slowed down where Jenna had always sped up, and let the line sit there, and it stopped being a clever line and became a woman in a house.
Then the bridge. Then the last verse, which Jenna had written to be dry, and which Maxine Gault sang like it cost her money.
The room was completely silent afterward. Not the polite silence. The other one.
The engineer said, "That's the record," and nobody argued with him, and it was ten past eleven in the morning.
They did three more takes because that is what you do, and the first one was the record, and everybody in the building knew it and did the other three anyway out of superstition.
On the second of them the pedal steel player put a bend into the turnaround that was wrong, and beautiful, and Maxine stopped in the middle of a line and said, into the talkback, "Do that again but don't be proud of it," and he did, and it was perfect.
Jenna laughed out loud in the back of the room and then put her hand over her mouth.
It had been three months since she had been in a room where people were making something.
She had forgotten what it did to the air.
She had forgotten that it was the only place she had ever felt entirely at home, including in her own house, and that she had walked out of it at some point without a decision ever being made.
She was not, in that control room, the wife of anybody. Nobody there knew or cared. The engineer asked her twice about the second chorus because she was the writer and that was the whole of her identity in the building.
Maxine came out of the booth and put her glasses up on her head and looked around the control room until she found the woman in the coat standing by the door.
"You wrote this."
"Yes ma'am."
"In July."
"Yes ma'am."
Maxine looked at her for a good three seconds.
"You wrote it before you knew," she said.
Jenna didn't answer, because she couldn't.
"Yeah," Maxine said. "You always do. That's the miserable part of the job." She patted Jenna twice on the arm, hard, the way you'd knock dust off a coat. "I'm putting it out as a single. I'm seventy-four, I don't have time to be tasteful about it."
Here is what Jenna Bishop understood, standing in a control room on Poplar Street at eleven in the morning:
She had written a song in July about a woman keeping good plates for people who don't come, and she had thought it was an idea. She had thought she was being observant.
She had been writing the report from inside the house.
And every person in that room had heard it in ninety seconds — the drummer had heard it, the twenty-five-year-old on pedal steel had heard it — because it was on the page, plain as a road sign, and had been since July.
She had been the last one to know. She had been the last one to know about the record, about the room, about the girl, about her own credits, about her own life, and now it turned out she had also been the last one to know about her own song.
She stood there with her hand around a paper cup and made herself finish the thought, because being accurate was still the only thing she had that was entirely hers:
He is not the only person who wasn't looking.
Maxine found her again in the lounge an hour later, eating a sandwich off a paper plate.
"Sit," Maxine said, and sat first.
Jenna sat.
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-eight."
"Good. You've got about four years where everybody's going to want the sad one and then you'll have to be interesting instead." Maxine peeled the lid off a coffee. "You know who I am."
"Yes ma'am."
"Then you know I did the same thing you did. I wrote for a man for nine years and put his name on it because he was easier to sell." She said it the way you'd read a grocery list. "Everybody knows now. Nobody knew then. He's dead and I'm not, which is my whole revenge and I recommend it."
Jenna put the sandwich down.
"Can I ask you something."
"You're going to ask me if I went back."
"Yes ma'am."
"I did not," Maxine said. "And I'll tell you the honest thing, because you look like a woman who's had a lot of people be careful with her lately.
I don't know if that was right. I've had a good life and I have never once been sure about that particular part of it.
" She drank some coffee. "What I know is I didn't go back for the reason people go back, which is that it's late and you're tired and the house is warm. If you go back, don't do it tired."
"And if I don't go back?"
"Then don't do that tired either." Maxine got up, patted her twice on the arm, hard. "Either way you'd better be rested, honey. That's all I've got. Nobody gives you the other half of it."
Cal Hinsley caught up with her in the parking lot while she was digging for her keys.
"Hey. Sorry. Hi." He had a guitar case in each hand, which made it awkward, which made it better. "I just wanted to say that's the best song I've played on this year and I've played on ninety of them."
"Thank you."
"I mean it. The turn in the last verse — " He stopped himself, laughed. "Okay. I'm doing the thing."
"You're allowed."
He set one case down. He was maybe forty, with the good-natured beat-up look of a man who had made a living inside other people's records.
She was aware, distantly, that he was nice-looking, and more aware that he had been talking to her for a minute and had not said one word about anybody's marriage.
"There's a thing at Lyle's tonight," he said. "Bunch of us. If you're in town."
"I'm not really — "
"It's not a thing." He picked the case back up. "Okay, it's a thing. I'd buy you a drink. I'd probably ask you about the second verse the whole time, which is a warning."