Chapter 11 #2
For twenty years the man had performed everything.
Their anniversary was a stage announcement.
His apologies came with tickets. He had proposed to her on a stage in Sylva in front of four hundred people, and she had said yes and had loved it, and had never once wondered what it would look like if he ever had to be sorry in private.
Now she knew. Now she had watched him do it for five months with nobody in the room.
She made herself say the counterargument out loud, because that was how she had always tested a line.
"A man can be sorry and still be the man who did it."
That was Jill's, from December, and it was correct, and it had held up for three months.
"A man can change for five months and go back in the sixth."
Also correct. She had watched him revert in nine hours in January under the first real pressure he'd had, and there was no reason on earth to think January could not happen again in June.
"And he still has not said one word to me about what he actually did."
That one was the wall. That was the one she came back to every time.
Not the credits — he had said plenty about the credits, in public, at cost. The other thing.
The eight months. The room. The pages in the back pocket.
In five months Shane Bishop had never once said a single sentence about why, and she had begun to suspect he could not, and a man who cannot say it cannot be trusted not to do it again.
She sat with all three of them lined up.
They were still true. Every one.
And they had stopped being enough, sometime between a windshield in the rain and a hardware store parking lot, and she could not for the life of her work out what had replaced them.
"Damn it," Jenna said.
She put her forehead on the steering wheel of her truck in the parking lot of a hardware store and stayed there for a long time, furious — genuinely, righteously furious — at how much it mattered to her that a man had sat in a lot in the rain and not gotten out.
Because it did not fix anything.
He had still taken her name off six records. He had still spent eight months hiding from her in a room with her own pages in his back pocket. He had still let Hal Fitch write a sentence about her body and send it to the country.
None of that had moved. Not one inch.
And she was sitting in a hardware store parking lot at twenty-nine weeks with her forehead on a steering wheel, thinking about a man she had not spoken to in fifty-one days, and she understood — with the specific dread of a person watching weather come over a ridge — that something in her had begun to move without asking her permission.
Jill came up that weekend with a car full of things nobody needs.
"It's not a shower," she said, carrying in a bag with a rabbit on it. "You said no shower. This is not a shower. This is a delivery."
"You've got four bags."
"It's a large delivery."
They spent Saturday afternoon on the floor of the apartment washing tiny clothes in the sink and hanging them on a drying rack in front of the radiator, and Jill told a story about her brother's wedding that Jenna had heard three times and laughed at anyway.
At some point Jill sat back against the wall with a sock in her hand and said, without any setup at all, "Are you scared?"
"About the birth?"
"About the after."
Jenna looked at the crib in the corner of a one-room apartment over a bike shop.
"I'm going to be thirty-nine in a place with a sloped floor and no washing machine," she said, "and I can afford about anything I want, and I have not been able to make myself rent a house, and I'd like to tell you it's because I'm busy."
"But."
"But it's because if I rent a house it's a life, and if it's a life then this is the life, and then it's decided." Jenna folded a sleeve about the size of her thumb. "So I'm living in a waiting room, Jill. I know exactly what I'm doing. I've known since January."
Jill did not tell her to rent a house.
"Okay," she said. "Then we'll wait in it together and I'll bring the rabbit."
That was the best afternoon of that whole winter, and afterward Jenna could not remember one single thing either of them had said about Shane, because neither of them had said anything about Shane at all.
She did not tell Jill about the parking lot.
That was the first thing she had kept from Jill Sterling since September, and she noticed herself doing it, and did it anyway.
What she did instead was work. She wrote four days straight, standing up at a music stand in a room over a bike shop, and two of the four were good, and one of them she put in a drawer immediately because it was about a truck and she was not that far gone.
On the Friday, Grady called about something else entirely and mentioned it in passing on his way off the phone.
"Oh — and your husband's tour came off the on-sale."
Jenna stopped with her hand on the kettle.
"What?"
"The arena run. Fifteen dates, summer. It was going up Monday and it just — didn't. No statement, no reason. Sandell's office says 'scheduling.'" Grady snorted. "Nobody postpones an on-sale for scheduling, Jenna. You postpone an on-sale because somebody upstairs is having a conversation."
"About what?"
"That," said Grady Ames, "is the exact question everybody in this town is asking today."
"Guess."
"I don't guess in front of clients."
"Grady."
He blew out a breath. "Fine. Two ways it goes.
Either Marbury's got cold feet about putting out a comeback record by a man the country decided was a fraud in January — that's the boring one and it's probably right.
" A pause. "Or he's the one who stopped it.
And if it's that one, Jenna, then somebody over there is looking at a very large hole in a very expensive year, and people do not stay calm about holes that size. "
Jenna stood in a room over a bike shop with a kettle going cold in her hand.
"Which do you think it is?"
"I think," Grady said, "that in thirty years I have never once seen an artist cancel his own summer, and I also think I've never seen a man sign away sixty million dollars on a Thursday, and I've now seen one of those things this year."
He hung up.
Jenna stood there for a while.
Then she made the tea, because the tea was a thing she could do, and she did not sleep much that night, and on Sunday afternoon somebody knocked on her door.