Chapter 8 #2
"I don't have a version of that where I come out okay," he said.
"No."
"I've been trying to find one since September." He looked out at the brown hill. "I've had four months and a lot of quiet and I can't build it. Every road I go down, at the end of it there's a man who took his wife's name off a record because it was easier and then let fifteen years go by."
Jenna put the coat on.
"That's the first accurate thing you've said," she said, and went back inside.
That night she nearly did not go back.
She sat on the mattress at ten with her boots still on and made a list, out loud, of what a sensible woman would do.
A sensible woman would call Angela in the morning and have the last day done by courier and a phone line.
A sensible woman would not spend nine more hours in a warm room with the only man alive who could finish her sentences.
She called Jill instead.
"How bad."
"He labeled the boxes for the fourth record in his own handwriting and I found it with my hands and he watched me find it."
"Oh, honey."
"And then we worked another six hours and it was — " Jenna stopped.
"Say it."
"It was the best four days I've had since August."
Jill did not say anything for a while, and when she did, her voice had nothing in it but care, which was somehow much worse than the anger would have been.
"I want to give you the speech," she said. "You know the speech. I've got it right here."
"Give me the speech."
"No," Jill said. "Because it isn't the day for it, and because you're a grown woman, and because there is one thing in this I keep coming back to and I hate it." A pause. "He hasn't asked you for anything. Not once. Three months. Not one ask."
"No."
"That's not a strategy, Jenna. I've been trying to make it one since October and I can't get it to work as one." Jill exhaled. "Go finish the tape. Don't stay past dark."
She stayed past dark.
Day four ran late, because the last of the live material was unlogged and there was no way to do it but in real time.
It got dark at five. By eight they were on the second-to-last reel with the stove down to coals and the barn very quiet, and both of them were past the point where anybody keeps up a guard.
She was tired in the specific bone-deep way of a woman five months along who has been on her feet in a cold building for four days, and she had stopped pretending otherwise around six.
He got up twice to put wood in the stove without being asked.
At half past nine she reached across him for the grease pencil on the far side of the bench, which was a reach she had made ten thousand times in that room, and he moved at the same moment to hand it to her.
His hand closed around her wrist.
It was not a grab. It was the accident of two people reaching for the same thing, and it lasted about a second and a half, and neither of them let go.
Jenna did not look up.
She could feel her own pulse going in her wrist under his thumb, and she knew he could feel it too, because that is how wrists work, and there was nothing on earth she could do about it.
"Jenna," he said.
The stove ticked.
If he had said anything else — if he had said I'm sorry or come home or please — she would have had somewhere to put it. She had answers ready for every one of those. She had been building them since September and they were good.
He didn't say any of them. He said her name, once, and then he let go of her wrist and put the grease pencil into her open hand and turned back to the log sheet.
She wrote the reel number down. Her handwriting was terrible.
They did the last reel in complete silence and it took forty minutes.
It was the encore from a night in Charlotte in 2013 and the crowd was so loud on the room mics that the tape distorted, and at the end of it, on the recording, a much younger Shane Bishop said into a microphone, "That one's my wife's," in a bored, offhand, entirely ordinary voice — the way you say a thing you have said a hundred times and expect to say a hundred more.
Neither of them had remembered that it was on there.
Jenna stopped the machine.
"Leave it in," she said.
"Jenna — "
"Leave it in. That's not for you and it's not for me. That's for the fifteen years in the middle." She wound the tape off. "Somebody's going to buy that box and get to disc four and hear you say it in 2013 like it's nothing, and then they can go count how many times you said it after."
"None," Shane said. "I said it none times after."
"I know," she said. "That's the point of leaving it in."
He wrote it on the sheet. His handwriting was worse than hers.
They finished at half past ten. She signed the approvals on the bench, all forty pages, and he signed under her, and she noticed that on the signature line the printed name said Bishop, Jenna and, underneath it, Bishop, Shane, in that order, because somebody at the label had put the writer first.
She drove down the mountain with the heat on and both hands on the wheel.
She got as far as the bottom of the drive before she understood what had happened to her in that room over four days, and it was not what she had braced for.
She had braced for grief, and for wanting him, and for the wound.
What she had not braced for was that she had been happy. Nine hours a day, for four days, doing the only work she had ever wanted to do, in the best room she had ever been in, with the only other person alive who could do it with her.
That was the thing that frightened her, sitting at the bottom of her own driveway with the engine running.
Not that she still loved him. She had known that since September and had never once lied to herself about it.
That she was still good with him. That the two of them were still, after everything, the best thing either of them had.