Chapter 12 #2
"It isn't fair. It's just true." She opened the door. "I'm not going to call him. Not for you, and not about money."
He got as far as the landing.
Then he turned around, and there was something in his face that was neither warm nor practiced, and Jenna would think about this for a long time, because it was the single honest moment of their entire twenty-two-year acquaintance.
"Ask him why he did it," Hal said.
"What?"
"He's never said. Not to me. I've asked him twice and I've known him longer than you have and he's never once said a sentence about why.
" Hal put his hand on the rail. "He told the whole country what he did in December.
He's spent five months taking it apart. He has never said one word about why, to anybody, and I don't believe he can. "
"Why does that matter to you?"
"It doesn't," Hal said. "I'm a man who books rooms. It matters to you."
He went down two steps and then stopped, with one hand on the rail, and did not turn around.
"I've got a granddaughter about eight months old," he said. "I want you to know I thought about that in the car and decided not to say it upstairs, because it would have been a tactic."
"It's a tactic now."
"It is." He nodded at the stairs. "I'm sixty-six and I'm not going to get another artist and I know exactly what I am. I'm the man who took your name off a piece of paper in 2011 to save four million dollars and then let a decade go by because nobody made me look at it."
Jenna stood in the doorway with her arms folded on top of the shelf her own body had become.
"Do you want me to say I forgive you?"
"God, no." Hal Fitch laughed, once, without any humor in it at all.
"I'd think less of you. I've been doing this since Carter and I've never once seen forgiveness improve anybody's paperwork.
" He went down another step. "I'd like you to be able to say, in twenty years, that somebody told you the truth about it.
That's all I've got left to give anybody and I'm aware it isn't much. "
"It isn't."
"No," he agreed. "But nobody else was ever going to."
And that, Jenna thought afterward, was true, and would stay true.
Sadie Kaye had told her what was in the room. Micah had told her what was on the hill. Jill had told her what it looked like from outside.
Only Hal Fitch had come up a flight of stairs on a Sunday afternoon in March, with nothing in his hands, and told her the mechanism — the meeting, the six pages, the four times Shane asked and the one year he stopped, the whole slow machine that had run over her life for fourteen years without one single person in it ever raising their voice.
He had done it for his own reasons, and the reasons were bad, and it did not matter.
"Hal," she said, when he was nearly at the bottom.
He looked up.
"The nineteen people. Did you ask him what happens to them?"
"I did."
"And?"
Hal Fitch stood at the bottom of a stairwell over a bike shop with his hand on the rail.
"He said he'd already worked it out," he said, "and then he told me it wasn't my business anymore, and he was right, and that's the first time in twenty-two years anybody's said that sentence to me."
He went out onto Haywood Road.
She called Micah before Hal's car was off Haywood Road, because she had learned one thing since September and it was not to take a man's word for the shape of her own life.
"Is it true?"
"Which part."
"All of it. The single. The record. The tour. Hal."
Micah let out a breath that went on a while.
"Yeah," he said.
"When."
"Thursday and Friday. I found out about the tour Saturday morning like everybody else.
" A chair scraped somewhere. "Jenna, we had a band meeting yesterday.
In the barn. Nine of us plus the crew chiefs.
He stood up and told everybody there's no summer, there's no record, and there's no Hal, and that he's paying everybody through December out of his own pocket whether there's work or not. "
"Through December."
"Through December. He had the numbers written down on a piece of paper. He'd done it himself; you could tell, it was a mess." Micah's voice went odd. "Then somebody asked him the question everybody was thinking, which was why, and he said — "
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'Because if I keep the machine, the machine keeps me.'"
Jenna closed her eyes.
"And then?"
"And then he asked if anybody needed money before Friday, and three fellas put their hands up, and he wrote it down, and that was the meeting." A pause. "It took nine minutes. Nobody said a word after. We all just went out and stood in the yard."
"Micah."
"Yeah."
"Did he mention me?"
"Not once," Micah said. "He hasn't said your name out loud in front of me since January. I don't think he thinks he's allowed to."
Jenna stood in her own hallway with the door open and the cold coming up the stairwell.
She had come into this apartment in September with a very clear picture of her husband. She had been adding to it carefully ever since, the way you build a case: the folder, the hours, the photographs of her handwriting, the statement with her name on it, the twenty years.
And in five months, piece by piece, every single thing she had learned had made him smaller instead of worse.
Not better. That was important and she held onto it.
Smaller. A man who asked four times over four years and then stopped asking because stopping cost him nothing.
A man who hid in a room with a stranger because he could not be in a room with his own wife and know what he was.
A man who did not take a lover; a man who took a hiding place.
And now a man who had, in one week, in silence, with nobody watching, dismantled every single structure that had made all of it possible — the manager, the record, the machine, the year — and had not told her, and would not have told her, and had fired the only person on earth who might come and say so.
He's throwing his life in a hole.
No. She stood in the cold stairwell and got it clear, because being accurate was still the only thing she had that was entirely hers.
He was not throwing his life in a hole. He was taking apart the thing that had eaten twenty years of hers.
And he was doing it at the exact moment when it could not possibly get him anything, because she had told him in the middle of a public street never to come near her again, and Shane Bishop had been obeying that instruction to the letter for fifty-eight days.
Jenna shut the door.
She stood in the middle of the room for about a minute, with her hand flat on the top of her stomach, where a girl who was due in nine weeks turned over slowly.
Then she picked up her keys.
"Alright," she said out loud, to nobody at all. "Alright. Then I'll go ask him."