Chapter 11
By the last week of February, Shane Bishop had not contacted her in fifty-one days.
Jenna knew the number because she had not been able to stop knowing it, which annoyed her considerably.
Fifty-one days. No call, no text, no card, no flowers, no lawyer's letter, no message passed through Micah, no interview in which he said something moving about his wife.
Nothing at Christmas. Nothing on the ninth of February, which was their anniversary and which she had spent in a studio in Nashville on purpose, working, with her phone in a bag in another room, and had come out at six to find nothing on it, which was exactly what she had told him to do.
She understood that this was correct. She had stood in the middle of Haywood Road in front of three photographers and told the man not to come near her again and not to speak for her, ever, about anything.
She had meant it. She still meant it.
But she had been married to Shane Bishop for thirteen years and had known him for twenty, and in all that time he had never once in his life managed to leave a thing alone.
He was a man who called back four times.
He was a man who showed up at airports. When they fought — properly fought, the two-day kind — he had never gotten past hour nine without appearing in a doorway with two coffees and a bad joke, and she had counted on that so completely that she had built parts of herself around it.
Fifty-one days.
It was the single most impressive thing he had ever done, and she resented it more than anything else in the entire catastrophe.
Her life did not stop for it, which was the whole point.
She had the room in Nashville two days a week now — a little writing room off a hallway at Ames with a piano and a window that didn't open. She had six holds. She had a note on her phone from a man whose records she had learned to write from, asking, politely, whether she was taking meetings.
She had "Carry It Yourself" placed inside nine days, because Grady Ames, whatever else he was, could pick up a telephone. He had argued about the split for exactly four minutes and then stopped.
"You know she's going to have a career now," he'd said.
"Good."
"Jenna, I want you to understand that people are going to say that was a strategy."
"People said the same thing about him," Jenna said. "Turns out sometimes a person just does a thing."
At twenty-nine weeks she could no longer sit at a piano properly and had started writing standing up at a music stand, which she suspected was better for the songs and refused to think about too hard.
The hospital bag was fully packed. The nursery, such as it was, occupied one corner of a one-room apartment over a bike shop: a crib, a lamp she had bought in a hardware store in November, and a chest of drawers she had put together herself with a bad Allen key while Jill watched and drank wine and offered no help of any kind.
The divorce papers were still in a drawer in Charlotte, unsigned, which Angela had stopped mentioning around the second week of January.
"You're not asking me about them," Jenna said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you're seven months pregnant and you've had a hell of a winter," Angela said, "and because I've done this for twenty-six years and I have never once seen a good decision made by a person who was being asked about it."
The Tuesday before, she had gone into a room at Ames with two writers half her age and come out with a song in four hours.
It was the first co-write she had done with strangers since she was twenty-two, and she had been so nervous in the parking lot that she sat in the truck through an entire weather report.
They were good. That was the first surprise.
The second was that they knew exactly who she was, and not in the way she had braced for — not the wife, not the stairwell, not the headline.
One of them, a kid named Reuben with a cracked phone and no coat, said, about ninety seconds in, "Can I ask you a technical question about the second verse of 'Bell Ringer'?
" and then asked her a technical question about the second verse of "Bell Ringer," which nobody on this earth had ever done.
They wrote a song about a woman selling a car.
At the end of it Reuben said, "Same time in three weeks?" and Jenna said, "I'll be about eight and a half months," and he said, "So that's a yes," and put it in his phone.
She thought about that for the whole five hours home.
For twenty years she had believed that the reason her name came off the records was that Shane's world had no room in it for her.
Sitting in traffic outside Knoxville, she made herself look at the other version, which was that she had been a person with a folding table and a pencil who had never once in twenty years walked into a room and asked for anything.
Both were true. That was the miserable arithmetic of her whole thirties: a thing can be done to you and also be a thing you let happen, and neither fact cancels the other, and there is no court anywhere that will divide it up for you.
The appointments were every two weeks now, at the clinic on Biltmore Avenue, at four in the afternoon.
She saw the truck on the third one.
It was a Tuesday, and raining, and she came out through the double doors with her coat over her arm because the building was overheated and the parking lot was half empty at that hour.
And there, at the far end, nose out, in the last row against the fence, was a truck she had ridden in for six years.
Jenna stopped on the sidewalk.
She stood there in the rain for a moment doing something her brain did without permission, which was flip backward through the last two appointments like pages.
The one in the middle of February. There had been a truck against the fence. She had registered it the way you register a truck.
The one in January, the week after Haywood Road. Same row. Same end of the lot.
He had been there for all three.
She started walking toward it before she had decided to.
She got maybe forty feet, out past the ambulance bay, with the rain coming down and her coat over her arm, close enough to see the shape of him behind the wheel — his hands at the top of it, his head turned toward the doors.
Close enough that he saw her.
She watched him see her. She was absolutely certain of it, then and afterward: he sat up, and his hand came off the wheel, and for about a second and a half a man leaned toward a door handle.
Then he stopped.
He put his hand back on the wheel. He looked at her through a windshield in the rain across sixty feet of parking lot, and he did not get out, and he did not raise his hand, and he did not roll the window down.
He put the truck in gear and drove out the far exit onto the side street and was gone.
Don't come here again, she had said. And you don't get to speak for me. Not ever again. Not once.
He had taken it as law. He was going to take it as law for the rest of his life if she let him.
Jenna Bishop stood in the rain in a parking lot on Biltmore Avenue at twenty-nine weeks pregnant, holding a coat, and thought, with total clarity and no charity whatsoever:
You absolute bastard.
She called Micah from the truck with the rain going on the roof.
"How long has he been sitting in that parking lot?"
Micah was quiet for a second too long.
"Micah."
"Since January."
"How does he know when they are?"
"He asked me once," Micah said. "Sometime after the — after the road thing. He called me and he said, 'Does she have people going with her?' And I said no. And he said, 'Will you tell me the dates.'" A pause. "And I said I'd have to ask you, and he said, 'Don't ask her. Forget I said it.'"
"But you told him."
"I told him," Micah said. "That's on me and I'd do it again."
Jenna put her hand over her eyes.
"He never comes in," Micah said. "He asked me one time what the doors looked like so he'd know which ones. That's the only other thing he's ever asked me about it. He's not — Jenna, he's not out there so you'll see him. He's been going out of his way for two months so you wouldn't."
"Then why be there at all."
There was a long silence on the line, and when Micah spoke he sounded like a man saying something he had been holding for a while.
"Because if something went wrong in that building," he said, "he'd be in the lot."
Jenna sat in her truck in the rain.
"That's it," Micah said. "That's the whole thing. He's not doing anything. He's just there in case."
She did not go home for a while.
She drove out past the river and back and then sat in the parking lot of a hardware store with the engine off, doing something she had been refusing to do since December, which was add it up honestly.
Money, in October: rejected, correctly.
Gear, in October: rejected, correctly.
A statement in January with her name on it: unforgivable, and she had made him eat it in the middle of a public street, and had been right.
And then, in between and underneath and mostly invisible: a filing on a Thursday with no photographer.
A padded envelope with everything in it that could destroy him.
Twelve minutes on a stage in front of two thousand people and a television camera, planned in a dressing room, with no ask attached.
A knock on a stranger's door at ten at night in Nashville with an envelope of somebody else's handwriting.
Four phone calls to a label president that were not working and that nobody was supposed to know about.
And a truck at the far end of a parking lot, in the rain, three times, for two months, with the engine off.
Not one of those things had been done in front of her.
That was the pattern and she had been looking straight at it since October and had not let herself see the shape, because the shape was unbearable.
Every single thing Shane Bishop had done that mattered, he had done where she could not see it.