Chapter 10 #2
She had built this woman for five months. She had built her carefully, out of a photograph and a duet and eight months of timestamps, and she had made her someone worth hating, because you cannot hate arithmetic and you have to hate something.
And here she was, in a parka, with her mother not talking to her.
Jenna reached into her bag and got out the notebook and turned to the back.
"Have you got a pen?"
"What?"
"A pen, Sadie."
She wrote it out on two pages — words, chords, the bridge, all of it — tore them out along the spiral, and pushed them across the table.
"That's called 'Carry It Yourself,'" Jenna said. "It's not on hold anywhere. Nobody's heard it. It's the best thing I wrote in November and it's in your key, which I know because I've heard your record."
Sadie Kaye looked at the two pages on the table and did not touch them.
"I can't."
"You can. I'm not doing you a favor and I'm not forgiving anybody. It's a business decision and it's mine to make." Jenna capped the pen. "Grady Ames at Ames Music Group. Tell him I sent you and tell him the split's yours entirely, and if he argues, tell him I said the word 'entirely' twice."
"Mrs. Bishop — "
"Jenna."
Sadie put her hand flat on the pages, very carefully, the way you'd hold something down in wind.
"Why?"
"Because a man took eight months of your work and made it into a story about your body," Jenna said, "and I'm the only other person alive who knows exactly what that's worth."
They walked out together at ten past three and stood in the cold on the main street of Black Mountain.
"He's been calling Vic Sandell," Sadie said.
Jenna stopped.
"Since Christmas. Four times that I know about, and Vic told my old manager about two of them because Vic is a talker." Sadie put her hood up. "He's been trying to get my deal put back. He offered them things. I don't know what things — the March record, I think, and something else."
"Did you ask him to do that?"
"I haven't spoken to him since he knocked on my door in January.
" Sadie shook her head. "And it isn't working, for what it's worth.
Vic doesn't put a girl back on the board because the man who blew her up feels bad.
It's the wrong shape. Everybody in that building thinks he's doing it to look like a man who does that. "
She got into a small car with Tennessee plates and rolled the window down.
"Can I say one more thing?"
"Go ahead."
"I don't know what you're going to do about your marriage and it's none of my business," Sadie said.
"But I've been in a room with him a hundred times and I've never seen him do one single thing that cost him anything until this year, and this year it's all he does, and nobody's watching, and it isn't working.
" She put the car in gear. "I just thought somebody should tell you the part you can't see. "
Then she drove off toward the interstate, and she went out of Jenna Bishop's life entirely, and stayed out of it.
Jenna sat in the truck in the diner lot for a while with the engine off.
She waited to feel worse. That was what she had come for, in some way she had not admitted on the drive over — the full weight of it, delivered by the only other witness, so she would finally have the whole thing in her hands.
She had the whole thing in her hands now. Every page of it.
And what she felt, sitting in a cold truck in Black Mountain at twenty-seven weeks, was the ground.
Not forgiveness. Nothing like it. The wound was exactly the size it had always been, and now it had edges, and a shape, and a bottom — and a thing with a bottom can be stood on.
He didn't leave me for somebody, she thought. He hid from me in a room, for eight months, with my own work in his pocket.
That was the truth and it was the last of it and there was no more coming.
She started the truck.
She called Jill from the parking lot, because there are limits.
"You did what."
"Black Mountain. About an hour ago."
"By yourself. With no lawyer. At twenty-seven weeks." Jill's voice went up an entire register. "Jenna, she could have recorded the whole thing. She could be selling it right now. She could have — "
"She didn't."
"You don't know that."
"I do," Jenna said. "Sit down, Jill. I'm going to tell you what's in the folder and then I'm going to tell you what I did about it, and you're going to be angry about the second one."
She told her.
It took about ten minutes. Jill did not interrupt once, which had never happened in twenty-five years of friendship, and when Jenna got to the tape — the minute and a half of a woman singing with a guitar, and nobody, forget it — she heard Jill actually stop breathing for a second.
"Oh," Jill said. "Oh, that's — "
"Yeah."
"That's not an affair. That's a man having a breakdown in slow motion in front of a stranger."
"That's about the size of it."
"It doesn't excuse anything."
"It doesn't excuse one thing," Jenna said. "It's not smaller. It's just finally the right shape. Five months I've been carrying a thing with no edges on it, Jill. You can't put a thing down if it hasn't got edges."
Jill was quiet.
"And then I gave her a song."
"You what."
"'Carry It Yourself.' Wrote it out in the back of the notebook and handed it across the table. Full split, hers."
"Jenna Bishop."
"Say it."
"That's the best song you wrote in November."
"I know it."
"You gave away a hundred thousand dollars to the woman on the front of every — " Jill stopped.
There was a long pause on the line, and Jenna could hear her thinking about it, and could hear the exact moment she got there.
"No. No, you didn't. You did the one thing in this entire mess that nobody can spin. "
"That's not why I did it."
"I know it isn't. That's why it works." Jill exhaled. "Do you want to know what I think?"
"Always."
"I think you just took the last thing he owns of yours back," Jill said. "He made her into a story about your marriage. And you just made her into a songwriter, and there is not one damn thing he or Hal Fitch or Vic Sandell or the internet can do about it."
Jenna sat in a truck in a diner lot in Black Mountain and put her hand flat on the top curve of her own stomach, where a girl had been moving for about an hour.
"Yeah," she said. "That's about right."
And underneath, quiet and unwelcome and impossible to put down, the other thing Sadie Kaye had handed her across a formica table without meaning to:
Four times. Since Christmas. And nobody was watching.