Chapter 7
The Christmas show at the Wheelwright had run for sixteen years and Jenna had been at every one of them.
It started as a thing they did for free the December the second record came out — a hundred and forty people in a room downtown, no tickets, bring a coat for the drive.
Now it sold out in four minutes in September and there was a merch line around the block and the money went to the county school system, and it was, whatever else it had become, the only night of the year Shane Bishop played to people who had known him before.
This year a television network had bought it.
they're taping it hal sold it in october jenna he's going to say something i don't know what. he won't tell me. i asked twice
She read them in the truck with the engine running and the heat on her knees.
Then: come sit in the balcony. i'll get you in the side door. nobody has to see you
Jill's position was that this was the single stupidest thing she had ever heard.
"He has a camera crew," Jill said. "Jenna. He has bought a camera crew and he has told nobody what he's going to do and you want to be in the room."
"I want to see it happen."
"You want to see it happen or you want him to see you see it happen?"
Jenna stood at the window over Haywood Road and did not answer that, because it was a fair question and she did not have an answer she was willing to say out loud.
"Alright," Jill said, after a while. "Then here's what you do. You sit in the dark, you don't take the coat off, and when it's over you leave before the lights come up. You don't let one person put a microphone near you."
"Understood."
"And Jenna." A pause. "Whatever he says up there — he's saying it to two thousand people and a network. You're allowed to notice that."
She came in through the side door at ten past seven and Micah walked her up the back stairs himself.
The balcony at the Wheelwright was old and steep with brass rails and worn red seats, and Micah put her in the last row on the left, in the dark, behind a pillar.
"You okay?"
"Go play the drums, Micah."
He hesitated. He looked at her — at the coat, which she had not taken off, and which at nineteen weeks did a job it would not be doing much longer — and he did what he had done since September, which was decide not to ask.
"Whatever he does," Micah said, "he hasn't rehearsed it. I know that much. He didn't put it in the run sheet and Hal's been out there arguing about it for an hour."
Then he went down the stairs and Jenna sat in the dark above two thousand people in the town she had lived in for twenty years.
She knew the room. She had watched a hundred shows from a hundred wings. But she had never watched one from up here, from a stranger's seat, with a coat on, and it turned out the view was different, and not only in the obvious way.
From here you could see the whole shape of it.
The crowd came in loud and pleased with itself.
The lights went down at eight and the noise came up off the floor like weather, and the band walked out, and the man walked out, and two thousand people made a sound that Jenna felt in the brass rail under her hands.
She had made that. Not alone. But she had made that.
The first four songs were a wall.
He was good. He had always been good; the trouble with Shane Bishop had never once been that he could not do it.
He sang "Cane Fire" and the room sang the second verse back at him without being asked.
He sang the one from the fourth record that everybody's cousin got married to.
The band was tight and the room was hot and the cameras moved down the aisles on little cranes.
He did not say much between songs, which was wrong. He usually talked half the night. He usually told the story about the van breaking down in Sylva until Micah threw a stick at him.
And he did not look up at the balcony. Not once.
He worked the floor, he worked the cameras, he turned and grinned at Micah on the turnaround of the third song the way he had every year since they were kids — and in sixteen years of this show he had glanced up at the left-hand balcony maybe two hundred times, because that was where she stood.
She had forgotten she knew that. She had never once in her life said it out loud, or thought it in words, or considered that it was a thing that happened. It was just the shape of the night: a man looks up, a woman is there.
He didn't look, and the not-looking was so loud that for four songs she could not hear anything else.
He would have asked Micah. Of course he had asked Micah, the way he asked every year, and Micah would have said no, because that had been the arrangement since the side door.
And she understood, sitting in the dark, that whatever was coming next was not being done for her, because as far as Shane Bishop knew she was forty minutes down the mountain in a room over a bike shop.
At the end of the fourth song he stood there while the applause ran out.
Then it ran out further than it should have, and got strange, and the room went quiet in a way two thousand people go quiet, in pieces.
"I want to say something," Shane said, "and I'd rather do it before I lose my nerve, so I apologize to the people who came for a Christmas show."
Somebody in the crowd whooped, once, and got shushed.
He put the guitar on the stand. That was the thing that made Jenna's hands go cold — twenty years of watching that man use a guitar the way other people use a lawyer, and he set it down and stood there with nothing.
"I haven't written a song since I was thirty years old," he said.
Nothing. Two thousand people and nothing.
"Not one. Not a verse. I'm forty-five." He looked at the front of the stage, not the crowd.
"My wife wrote them. She wrote all of them.
She wrote every song on every record I have ever put my name on, and for the first eight years her name was on them too, and then it came off, and I let it come off, and then I got used to it. "
The sound the room made was not a gasp. It was a kind of low shift, the noise of two thousand people turning slightly in their seats.
"I've got a list," Shane said, and took a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket.
And then, on a stage he had built a career on, in front of a television crew, Shane Bishop stood alone and read out twenty years of credits.
He did it by record. He said the year, and then he said the songs, one at a time, and after each title he said Jenna Bishop, and he did not editorialize and he did not speed up.
The first record took two minutes.
By the third record the room had stopped being able to do anything with itself. Somebody near the front called out, "Shane — " in the voice people use to try to stop somebody hurting themselves, and he did not look up.
Jenna sat in the dark with both hands flat on the rail.
She had spent three months learning exactly how angry she was.
She had it organized. And what she had not been ready for was the arithmetic of hearing it — song after song after song, her own life read out loud in a list, twelve minutes of it, and the slow terrible understanding of how much there was.
She had written a hundred and nine songs.
She had never counted them. She had never once, in twenty years, sat down and looked at the size of it.
Somewhere in the fifth record she started crying, silently, furiously, with her jaw set, because she had told Jill she would not.
"That's it," Shane said, at the end. He folded the paper. "That's the list. It's on the records now. If you bought one before October, it was wrong."
He let the silence hold.
"I'm not going to talk about my marriage," he said. "That's hers, and I've taken enough that's hers."
And Jenna thought, with a violence that surprised her: you're doing it right now. You're standing on a stage doing it right now.
There were three people in the row in front of her and they had no idea who she was.
Two women in their fifties and a man with a program rolled up in his fist. They had been up here since seven. They had bought these seats in September, four minutes after they went on sale, the way people in this county had been doing for sixteen years.
"Well," one of the women said, into the noise. "Well."
"He didn't have to do that."
"He surely did not."
"Was that the wife's name? Bishop?"
"That's her," the second woman said. "You know her.
She's the little one. She's at the school thing every year, she does the — with the fifth graders, the songwriting thing.
" A rustle of the program. "She sat in front of me at the Christmas one about six years back and I never once knew who she was until somebody told me after. "
"Huh."
"I told her she had a nice coat."
The man said, "Sixteen of these shows."
"I know it."
"Sixteen of these damn shows and every one of them was her." He said it slowly, working it out in public, the way people do. "The one they play at the fairgrounds. That's her."
"That's her."
Nobody in that row said one word about a marriage, or a girl in a duet, or who had done what to whom. They were doing something else entirely, and it took Jenna a minute in the dark to understand what.
They were going back through sixteen years and putting her into it.
She sat behind three strangers and listened to them remember her, in real time, into a place where she had always been standing and had never once been seen, and she pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth and held on to the rail with the other hand.
That was the worst minute of the night, and she would not have traded it.
Then he picked up the guitar and played "The Quiet Part."
Alone. No band. Micah put his sticks down on the floor tom and sat with his hands in his lap.
He played it badly.