Chapter 12
There was no coffee this time.
That was the first thing she noticed through the gap in the door, and it told her everything before he opened his mouth: Hal Fitch standing on a landing over a bike shop in West Asheville on a Sunday afternoon in March with nothing in his hands.
He had aged. Not in the way people say. He looked like a man who had missed several nights and then put on a cardigan.
"Can I come in."
"No."
"Jenna."
"Say it from there."
"I've been fired," Hal Fitch said.
Jenna stood with her hand on the door.
"Twenty-two years," he said. "Thursday morning. On the phone."
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she opened the door, because there was no version of her life in which she did not hear the rest of it, and because she had spent five months being handled and had decided in a diner in Black Mountain that she was done getting her information secondhand.
He did not sit. He stood in the middle of a one-room apartment and looked around it — the crib in the corner, the drying rack, the folding table with a pencil on it — and something crossed his face that she chose not to interpret.
"You want to know what he's done," Hal said.
"Yes."
"Good. Because somebody in this world needs to know the whole list and you're the only person left who might be able to stop it.
" He held up a hand and started counting on his fingers, and his hand was not steady.
"Thursday morning he pulled 'Hold Still' off every service on earth.
Gone. Not delisted from playlists — gone.
Number one record in the country in January and it does not exist as of nine a.m. Thursday. "
Jenna sat down on the edge of the bed, slowly.
"Two. He called Vic Sandell Thursday afternoon and told him he will not be delivering the comeback record.
Not late. Not reshaped. Not delivering." Hal's voice cracked on the last word and he covered it by pushing his glasses up.
"That record is done, Jenna. It's mixed.
It's mastered. It's been paid for twice. "
"Three?"
"Three, he took his own summer off the on-sale himself. Fifteen arenas. He made that call personally on Friday morning at six-thirty in the morning, and he did not tell me he was doing it, and I found out from a promoter in Charlotte who thought I already knew."
Hal stopped counting.
"And four," he said, "he fired me."
"Sit down, Hal," Jenna said.
He sat down on the only chair, and put his hands on his knees, and for about ten seconds he did not say anything at all.
"I want to be careful here," he said finally. "I know what I am to you. I know what I did in this apartment in October and I know how it looked, and I'm not going to pretend I've had a change of heart, because I haven't, and you'd smell it."
"Alright."
"I came here to ask you to talk him out of it." He looked up. "That's the whole reason. That's not a nice thing to come and ask you and I've been sitting in a car downstairs for forty minutes."
"Why would I do that?"
"Because he is going to be broke," Hal said, "and because there are nineteen people on that payroll who did nothing to anybody."
It took him about half an hour to lay it out and she let him do it without interrupting, because it was the most information she had received about her own life since September and she was not going to spend it arguing.
The money first, because Hal Fitch thought in money the way other people think in weather.
Shane had signed over the writer's share in October. That was the catalogue income — the part that came in forever, the part that paid for a life. Everything he had left was touring, and touring is not money, it is revenue, and revenue costs money to have.
Cancelling fifteen arenas after they had been announced meant guarantees. It meant holds released, venues compensated, a production already half built in a warehouse in Nashville, a crew that had turned down other work.
"Somebody pays that," Hal said. "It was going to be insurance, and insurance doesn't pay when the artist himself makes the call, and he knew that when he made it, because I told him. Twice. In writing."
"How much?"
Hal named a number.
Jenna sat on the edge of a bed in a room over a bike shop and did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic said that after the guarantees and the record and the lawyers there would be a house, and some land, and a barn, and not a great deal else.
"He'll be fine," she said. "People like him are always fine."
"People like him have a catalogue," Hal said. "He gave you the catalogue."
She let that sit in the room for a second, because it was aimed and they both knew it.
"Say the rest of it, Hal."
"There's no rest of it."
"There's always a rest of it. You've been doing this since you were twenty-four." Jenna put her hands on her knees. "You want me to feel it. Go ahead and say it."
Hal Fitch looked at her, and to his considerable credit he did not pretend.
"Alright," he said. "You've got sixty million dollars of a man's life work and he's got a barn, and by summer there will be people writing that down."
"There will."
"And you'll be fine, and he won't, and no court in this country did that to him. He did it in a filing on a Thursday because he wanted to." Hal spread his hands. "There. I've said the ugly thing. I'd rather you hear it in this room than read it in June."
"You've spent forty minutes," Jenna said, "telling me that the way a man ends up like this is that everybody around him talks him out of things."
Hal Fitch opened his mouth and then shut it again.
It was the only point she ever scored on him in twenty-two years, and she had done it with his own material, which was probably the only way anybody ever could.
"Tell me about the credits."
He had been waiting for it. She watched him arrive at it almost with relief.
"2011," Hal said. "Publishing restructure.
We were setting up Redbud and there was a — " he moved his hand — "there's a structure you can use where the writer's share sits inside the entity and the entity's held by the artist, and it saves an enormous amount of money and it is completely legal and about four hundred people in Nashville do it. "
"And my name comes off the writer line."
"Your name comes off the writer line."
"Whose idea?"
"Mine," Hal Fitch said.
He said it flatly and without one gram of apology, and Jenna understood that she was finally, after twenty-two years, in a room with somebody who was going to answer the question.
"He signed it in a hotel in Denver," Hal said. "Six pages in a stack of forty. He did not read it. Nobody reads them. He'd have signed a confession."
"And you never told me."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you'd have said no," Hal said, "and you'd have been right, and it would have cost my client four million dollars."
The bike shop compressor came on under the floor and ran for a minute and stopped.
"When did he find out?"
Hal took his glasses off.
"That's the one you want," he said. "That's the one you've been waiting the whole time for and I've thought about whether to say it every mile of the drive."
"Say it."
"Two years later. Two thousand thirteen.
He came into my office in Nashville with a royalty statement in his hand and he was white, and he said, 'Where's Jenna's name,' and I explained it to him the way I've just explained it to you.
" Hal turned the glasses over in his hands.
"And he said, 'Fix it.' And I said I would look at it. "
"Did you?"
"No."
"And he never asked again."
"He asked twice more that year," Hal said. "Then once in 2015. Then never."
Jenna sat very still.
"So he asked," she said. "Four times. Over four years. And then he stopped."
"Yes."
"And it stayed off for another decade."
"Yes."
Hal put his glasses back on.
"Jenna, I've been in this business since I was twenty-four and I'll tell you the only thing I actually know," he said.
"Nobody in that world ever tells an artist no.
Not me, not the label, not the band, not the promoter, not the man who drives the bus.
And an artist who has never once been told no doesn't turn into a monster.
That's the movie version." He shook his head slowly.
"He turns into a man who asks a question four times, gets told I'm looking at it, and finds out that if he stops asking, nothing bad happens to him.
That's all. That's the whole disease. It took fourteen years and nobody in the room ever raised their voice. "
"What did he say?" Jenna asked. "When he fired you."
"He said, 'Hal, you have never once told me no in twenty-two years.'" Hal's mouth went thin. "And I said, that's the job. That is the actual job, and I have done it better than anybody in this country.
"And he said: 'I know. That's what I'm firing you for.'"
Hal Fitch sat in a chair in a one-room apartment and looked at the floor.
"Twenty-two years," he said. "I signed him out of a barn.
I have three of his gold records on my wall.
And he did it on a Thursday morning on the phone in about ninety seconds and he was not angry, and that's the part I can't — " He stopped.
Started again. "He wasn't angry. He thanked me.
He said he'd pay out the contract in full and not to bother with a transition, and then he said goodbye and hung up, and I sat there in my kitchen. "
"Did he say why?"
"He said one more thing." Hal's jaw worked. "He said, 'I'm not doing it because of Sadie Kaye and I'm not doing it because of the statement. I'm doing it because I can't tell the difference anymore between what I decided and what you handled, and I need to be able to tell.'"
She stood up. Hal understood and got to his feet.
"So you want me to call him," she said.
"I want you to tell him he's throwing his life in a hole."
"He gave my life to a girl in a writing room for eight months, Hal, and you booked the room."
Hal Fitch flinched. It was the only time she ever saw him do it.
"That's fair," he said.