Chapter 10
Six weeks went by and the vans left, exactly the way Maxine Gault said they would.
By the second week of February there was nobody on Haywood Road but the bike shop and the weather.
Jenna went to the grocery store like a person.
Twice, someone stopped her and said something kind and awkward and moved on.
A man at the hardware store told her he'd bought the box set for his brother and then went red, because it was February and the box set shipped in April, which meant he had preordered it, which meant he had thought about her on purpose.
She was twenty-seven weeks.
"The Quiet Part" had been out since the middle of January and had done the thing that happens maybe twice in a writer's life.
Country radio took it. Then the other stations took it.
Maxine Gault, at seventy-four, had the biggest record of her career, and every single time it got played, somewhere at the end of it, a voice said written by Jenna Bishop.
Grady called it "the good kind of week, five weeks running," and then apologized for saying it out loud.
She had money of her own now, which was different from having money. She had a room in Nashville two days a week and a stack of holds from artists she had grown up listening to. She had a birth plan, a hospital bag half packed since the twentieth, and a name she had not said out loud to anybody.
She had not heard one word from Shane Bishop since a truck window on the sixth of January.
That was the shape of her life, and it was, by any measure she could apply, a good one. She told Jill so. She told Angela so. She believed it about eighty percent of the time, which is a number most people never get anywhere near.
The message came on a Wednesday.
Mrs Bishop — this is Sadie Kaye. I got your number from someone at Marbury and I know that's not okay.
I'm not going to ask you for anything and I'm not going to sell anything to anybody, ever.
I have something that belongs to you. I would like twenty minutes.
I'll come to you, anywhere, and if you say no I'll never contact you again.
Jenna read it about twenty times over two days.
She told nobody. Not Jill, who would have driven up from Nashville to sit in the parking lot. Not Angela, who would have used the word inadvisable and been right. Not Micah.
She thought about the reasons, later, and the honest one was this: for five months, every single thing that happened in her life had been handled by somebody — managed, drafted, advised, warned, printed. This was the one room she could walk into by herself.
She wrote back: Thursday, 2pm. There's a diner on the main street in Black Mountain.
Jenna got there twenty minutes early on purpose and took the booth at the back facing the door, which she recognized as a thing she had learned from television.
The diner had eight tables and a window full of February and a woman behind the counter who had worked there since Jenna was in her twenties and who said, "Well, look at you," about the belly, and then, thankfully, nothing else at all.
Sadie Kaye came in at two on the dot in a parka with the hood up.
Without the parka she was smaller than she looked in photographs, and she had a manila folder held against her chest with both arms, and she stood at the end of the booth for a second like a person who had rehearsed the walk and not the arrival.
"Mrs. Bishop."
"Sit down."
She sat.
Up close she was twenty-seven and looked about twenty-two and had the specific gray under the eyes of a person who had stopped sleeping in December. Her hands were not steady. She put the folder on the table and both hands flat on top of it.
"I want to say the first thing before anything else," Sadie said. "I'm not going to say I'm sorry, because I don't think I'm allowed to be sorry for something I didn't know I was doing, and I think if I said it you'd know it was for me and not for you."
Jenna looked at her.
"That's the smartest thing anybody's said to me since September," she said. "Order something. I'm not doing this while you're hungry."
The waitress came and went.
"Before you open that," Jenna said, "I'm going to say some things, and then I'll listen for as long as you want."
"Okay."
"You sang my line."
Sadie's face did something.
"The bridge of that song is mine. I wrote it in February at my kitchen table and I never played it for one living person.
" Jenna kept her voice at exactly the volume of the room, which was the hardest work she did all winter.
"You sang it on a record. It's the title.
When people hear that line for the rest of my life, they'll hear your voice on it and mine nowhere. "
"I know."
"Let me finish. You did eight months of three-in-the-morning phone calls with a married man, and whatever you think that was, I've heard four hundred hours of it, because he mailed them to me.
" Jenna's hands were folded on the table.
"Nobody made you not ask. In eight months, you never once asked where the pages came from. "
Sadie Kaye sat very still and did not cry, which Jenna had not expected and would respect for the rest of her life.
"No," she said. "I never asked."
"Why not."
"Because I was twenty-six and Shane Bishop told me I was the best writer he'd ever been in a room with," Sadie said, "and I wanted it to be true so bad that I'd have agreed to anything to keep the room."
Jenna sat back.
There it was. There was the whole thing, in one sentence, from a stranger, said plainly in a diner in Black Mountain.
I wanted it to be true so bad that I'd have agreed to anything to keep the room.
She thought about a woman of thirty-one taking her own name off a set of credits because a man in a cardigan said it was a tax thing and her husband looked tired, and she thought: there are two of us at this table.
"Alright," she said. "Open the folder."
There were forty-one pages in it, and they were photocopies, and they were in Jenna's handwriting.
Not the phone photographs. Paper. Somebody had gone to a copy shop.
"He brought them in," Sadie said. "Every week, from February. He'd have three or four pages folded in his back pocket. He'd put them on the piano and say — " she stopped, and made herself do it — "he'd say, 'I've got a start.'"
Jenna turned them over one at a time.
Page three of the water-stained notebook. The one about the good plates, in an earlier version, before she found the second verse. A whole song from 2019 she had abandoned. Four pages of a thing she had never shown anybody because it was about her mother.
"He said they were his."
"He never said they were his," Sadie said. "Not one time. That's the part I've been chewing on since Christmas. He'd put down a page in your handwriting and say I've got a start, and I'd say God, Shane, and he'd let it sit there. Eight months. He never once said the words."
"And you never once asked."
"And I never once asked," Sadie said. "So."
The waitress refilled the coffee. Neither of them touched it.
"Where'd you get the copies?"
"He gave them to me." Sadie almost laughed, and it came out wrong.
"In January. After the — after the show.
He drove to Nashville and knocked on my door at ten at night and handed me an envelope and said, 'These are hers.
You should have them, because you're going to need to know what actually happened when people start asking you. '"
Jenna looked up.
"And then he said one more thing and left," Sadie said. "He said, 'None of this is your fault and I'm going to say so.'"
"Did you sleep with my husband?"
She had promised herself she would not ask it. She had rehearsed not asking it in the truck for forty minutes.
"No," Sadie said, without any heat at all. "No. Not one time, not a hand on an arm, nothing. He talked about you constantly. Not — " she made a face — "not nicely. Not unkindly either. Constantly and sort of around you. Like a man walking around a hole in a floor."
"Say more."
"He'd say, 'my wife would've had this in four minutes.
' He said it a lot. He said it like a joke and it wasn't." Sadie turned her cup on the table.
"There was one night in April, we'd been at it six hours and nothing was working, and he put on a tape.
Old one, from a phone or something. A woman singing with just a guitar. "
Jenna's whole body went still.
"He didn't say who it was," Sadie said. "He played about a minute and a half of it and then he turned it off and put his head in his hands, and I said, who is that, and he said, 'Nobody. Forget it.' And then we went back to work."
The diner in Black Mountain went on being a diner.
There it was, then. Not a love affair. Not a younger woman. Not a better writer.
Her husband had sat in a room with a stranger for eight months, carrying her pages in his back pocket like contraband, playing her voice off a phone at midnight and calling it nobody, because he could not stand to be in a room with what she was and could not stand to be out of it either.
It was so much smaller than a betrayal. It was so much worse.
Not a woman, she thought. A hiding place.
"I lost the deal," Sadie said, later. "You probably know that."
"I know."
"I lost the publishing too, and the tour I was going out on in the spring, and my manager, and — " she counted it off flatly, a young woman reading her own list — "and my mother won't talk to me. She's a churchgoing person and she believes the internet."
"For something that didn't happen."
"For something that didn't happen." Sadie shrugged, and her chin went, once, and she got it back. "You want to know the stupid part? Everybody thinks I ruined your marriage and nobody at all thinks I can write. Both of those are wrong and I only care about the second one."
Jenna sat with her hands around a cold cup of coffee and looked across a formica table at a twenty-seven-year-old whose entire life had been used as a place to put something.