Chapter 9 #2
"It's the best writing you've done all year and it's not a song," Maxine said. "Put that in your pocket for later. That's all. Goodbye."
And she hung up, having never once used the word sorry, which was, Jenna thought afterward, precisely why the call worked.
At four in the afternoon on the sixth of January, a truck she had known for twenty years came down Haywood Road, past the vans, and stopped in the middle of the street.
Jenna watched from the window as three photographers got out of cars.
She went downstairs and out through the front door, because she was not going to have this conversation in a stairwell, and walked to the driver's side with her coat closed and her hands in her pockets and the shutters going behind her like a fence in a hailstorm.
He put the window down.
He looked like hell. Up close, in daylight, it was much worse than the barn had been.
"Jenna — "
"Did you read it?"
"What?"
"The statement. The one with my name on it. Did you read it before it went out."
He didn't answer for a second, and that second was the answer.
"He read it to me on the phone," Shane said.
"On the phone."
"I was in a stairwell in Nashville. He read it to me and I said fine." His hands were on the wheel. "Jenna, I found out in a room with fourteen people in it. I couldn't — I wasn't — "
"I know where you found out."
"Then you know I wasn't — "
"That's not the part," she said.
He stopped.
"That's not the part, Shane." Her voice was low and flat and did not carry past the truck, and she was distantly proud of that for the rest of her life.
"I'm sorry you found out from a screen. I am.
That's a horrible way to find out and I did not choose it and I'd have given a great deal to hand it to you myself. "
"Then let me — "
"You put my name on it."
He shut his mouth.
"You put my name on a thing about my own body and sent it to the entire country, and you didn't read it first, because a man you pay told you it was handled.
" She took one hand out of her pocket. "That's what you did in 2011.
That's what you did with Sadie Kaye. That is the only thing you have ever done to me, and you have done it three times, and every single time you were busy. "
Shane Bishop sat in a truck in the middle of Haywood Road and did not say anything at all.
"There's a girl," Jenna said.
His head came up.
"That's what I was going to tell you in about eight days, in a room, by myself, in my own words." She put her hand back in her pocket. "You got it off a phone in a conference room instead. And then you let Hal write my line."
"Jenna — " and his voice went completely, and he had to start it again. "Jenna, please."
"Don't come here again," she said. "And you don't get to speak for me. Not ever again. Not once. Not about the songs, not about the baby, not about the weather."
She stepped back from the truck.
He sat there for a moment with his hands on the wheel and the cameras going and his face open in a way she had not seen since he was twenty-five.
Then he said, "Okay."
And that was all. He put the window up and pulled off down Haywood Road, and Jenna went back up the stairs past a bike shop and shut the door and slid down it and sat on the floor of a one-room apartment with her arms around her knees as far as they would go.
She had won.
That was the thing that took her a while to understand, sitting on that floor. She had been entirely, unanswerably right, and she had said it perfectly, and she had watched it land.
And it had cost her the only thing she had left, which was the possibility.
She sat there for a long time.
The country decided about her that week, and what it decided was worse than being hated.
Her three sentences went everywhere. By Friday there were essays.
She was dignified. She was a woman finding her voice.
Somebody made the last line into a graphic with a serif font on a cream background and it went around until it stopped meaning anything at all.
A morning show ran a segment called Speaking For Herself and used the stairwell photograph while they did it, which nobody involved appeared to find strange.
Shane, meanwhile, went from remarkable to something else inside about nine hours. There were pieces by Friday afternoon that used the phrase elaborate rehabilitation campaign and treated the credits and the catalogue as a thing he had bought.
She read four of them and then made herself stop, because a fifth would have made her defend him, and she was not going to sit in a room over a bike shop and defend Shane Bishop to a website.
That was the trap of the whole week and it took her until Sunday to see it clearly.
Every single one of those people was on her side.
Not one of them had asked her anything. They had taken the true thing — that a man put his wife's name on a statement without reading it — and turned it into an episode, with a hero and a heel, and the hero was her, and the price of the part was that from now on she would be a woman who had a public thing that happened to her.
She had spent twenty years being nobody's story. Now she was one, and she had signed for it herself, in three sentences, in four minutes, and she did not regret it and she understood exactly what it had cost.
Angela put it more usefully.
"You did the right thing and you'll be paying rent on it for two years," she said. "That's not a criticism. That's just the bill."
Then she got up and turned the phone on, and there was nothing from him — no message, no apology, no six-page email at midnight — and there would be nothing from him for six weeks.