Chapter 6 #2
Jenna stood in a bad parking lot in the cold and felt something she had not felt in about fifteen years, which was the specific small warmth of being seen by a stranger who wanted nothing from her except her company.
She did not act on it. She did not even want to, exactly. That was not the point.
The point was that it was there, and that it had been there all along, in a world she had walked out of at eighteen and had not looked at since.
"I'm not free tonight," she said, which was true and was also not the answer to the question.
"Sure." He wasn't wounded. That was the other thing. "Well. Best song I've played on this year."
He went off across the lot with a case in each hand.
She got in the truck and sat there for a second before she started it, and she thought, with a kind of horror at herself: huh.
She did go to Lyle's, in the end. Not for Cal Hinsley, who she did not see there.
She went because Deanna Fife had texted her on Monday — heard you're in town. I know you're not doing anything. come anyway — and because Deanna Fife had played fiddle on the first two records and had been at Jenna's wedding and had not been in a room with her since a Christmas party six years ago.
That was the arithmetic Jenna did on the way over, and it was not a good one.
Six years. She had let it go. Not dramatically.
She had let it go the way you let go of a rope you're only holding with two fingers — the tour schedule, the house on the hill, the way the whole calendar bent around one man's year, and one afternoon you look up and everyone you used to know is a name in a phone.
Lyle's was loud and warm and had a bad string of Christmas lights over the bar. There were maybe a dozen of them at the long table in the back. Two people she'd played with. One she'd written with in 2009. A bass player who had been at that wedding and now had a daughter in college.
They were careful with her for about four minutes and then they stopped, thank God, and it turned into what it always turned into, which was three hours of shop talk and old grievances and people singing at a table in a bar without meaning to.
Nobody asked about Shane. She noticed that and understood it had been organized.
What they did ask about was work, relentlessly, the way musicians do — who's cutting, who's paying, who's impossible.
Somebody wanted to know what Maxine Gault was like in a room.
Somebody else had heard about the session already, that afternoon, because it is a small town pretending to be an industry.
"Is it true she cut it in one?"
"It's true."
"On a Thursday," the bass player said, with real outrage, and everybody laughed, and Jenna laughed too, and it went right through her — because it was the first joke in three months she had gotten from the inside.
Around eleven, Deanna leaned over.
"Can I say a thing that's none of my business?"
"Everybody's been saying things that are none of their business since September. You may as well."
"You used to be the funniest person in any room I was ever in." Deanna turned her glass. "And then about eight years ago you got quiet. Not sad. Quiet. Like you were saving it."
Jenna looked at the bad Christmas lights over the bar.
"I was," she said.
"For what?"
"For later. For the drive home." She heard herself say it and it landed strangely, out loud, in a bar. "I'd save the good stuff up all night and then give it to him in the truck."
Deanna didn't say anything for a second.
"Well," she said. "That's the saddest damn thing I've ever heard, and I play fiddle."
Jenna laughed so hard the table turned around.
Deanna walked her out to the truck at midnight, arms folded against the cold.
"You look good," Deanna said.
"I look enormous."
"You look — " Deanna stopped, and her eyes went, very briefly, to the coat. She did not ask. "You look like you're writing."
"I am."
"Yeah. You've got the thing on your face." Deanna leaned in and hugged her, hard and quick. "Six years, Jenna."
"I know it."
"I'm not blaming you."
"You can if you want," Jenna said. "It'd be fair."
She drove home in the dark and it took five hours.
Somewhere past the Tennessee line she caught herself singing along to the radio with her hand tapping the wheel, and she caught herself being — not happy, that would be too much — but fine.
Absolutely fine. Warm in a truck, tired in a good way, with a signed contract in a folder on the passenger seat and Maxine Gault's voice still in her head.
And then she noticed.
She had not thought about him.
Not since breakfast. Not once, all day, through the session and the parking lot and three hours in a bar. Fourteen hours of her life had gone by with her husband nowhere in them.
For twenty years there had been a second track running under everything she did.
He'd like this. Tell him that. He'd get the joke.
Wait till he hears it. Every good thing she had ever seen she had seen twice, once for herself and once to save for him, and she had never in her life thought of it as work.
It had stopped, apparently, at some point today, and she had not felt it stop.
Jenna put the blinker on and pulled onto the shoulder of I-40 with the trucks going by and shaking the cab, and she put her forehead on the wheel and cried for the first time since September.
Not for the marriage. She would have said that if anyone had asked and it would have been true.
She was crying because the thing that had come off her back was the best thing she had, and she was going to be lighter without it for the rest of her life.
It lasted about four minutes. Then she wiped her face on her sleeve, because that is what you do, and put the truck in gear.
Her phone lit up in the cup holder.
Not him. Micah.
you're going to hear about the christmas show
Then, before she could pick it up:
don't hear about it from a stranger