Chapter 13
She got as far as the bottom of the drive that Sunday and could not do it.
She sat there with the engine running and the redbuds just starting to come in along the fence, and the barn down the hill with a light on in it, and she looked at that light for about a quarter of an hour.
Then she backed out onto the road and drove home.
It was not fear, exactly, and it was not pride. It was that she had one question, and she was thirty weeks pregnant and extremely tired, and if she asked it that afternoon and he gave her a bad answer, she was going to have to live in the same body as that answer for the rest of the spring.
So she waited two weeks, which is what she always did with a line that was not ready.
She drove up on the last Saturday in March.
Thirty-two weeks. The redbuds had gone from the rust color to the other thing, the improbable purple that lasts about nine days and that she had watched from that kitchen window for thirteen springs.
The house had no cars at it. The barn door was open.
She heard him before she got out of the truck.
It was a piano and it was going nowhere. Eight bars, stop. Eight bars, stop. Then the same eight bars a little slower, as if that were the problem.
She stood in the yard in the wind with her hand on the truck door and listened to it for a while, and what she thought was: that's not one of mine.
She would have known. There was not a song in that catalogue she could not have named off four notes through a wall.
Jenna Bishop went in through the open door.
He did not hear her come in, which told her how long he had been at it.
Shane was at the upright against the north wall with a legal pad on top of it and pencil shavings on the floor and a coffee cup that had a ring in the bottom, and he was playing the same eight bars for what she would later work out was the fifth hour of that day and something like the fortieth hour of that month.
There were pages everywhere. Not a few. The floor around the bench was covered, and the bench itself, and a stack on the amp, and she could see from the door that they were all the same shape — four lines, a scratch-out, four lines, a scratch-out.
He got to the end of the eight bars and stopped and sat there with his hands on his knees.
"It's flat," Jenna said.
He came up off that bench like a man hearing a gun.
For about three seconds they looked at each other across twenty feet of a room they had built together, and she watched her husband try to arrange his face and fail entirely at it.
"You're — " he said, and then, "Is everything — is she — "
"Everything's fine."
"Okay." He put a hand on the piano. "Okay."
"That's not one of mine."
"No."
"Whose is it?"
Shane Bishop, forty-five years old, in a barn, in March, with pencil shavings on his boots, said, "It's mine."
She made him play it.
Not right away. First she sat down, because standing had become a thing with a clock on it, and he moved a stack of paper off the good chair without being asked and then went back to the bench and sat with his back to the keys like a man waiting outside an office.
"How long?"
"Since January."
"How many?"
He looked at the floor.
"Shane. How many."
"Forty-one," he said. "Give or take. There's more in the house."
Forty-one songs. In nine weeks. By a man who had not written one in fifteen years.
"Are they any good?"
"No," Shane said.
It was so flat and so immediate that she laughed — one syllable, out loud, before she could stop it — and he flinched at the sound like it had landed on him.
"Play it," she said.
"Jenna — "
"You've been playing it for five hours. Play it once with somebody in the room."
So he played it.
It was a verse and a half and eight bars of nothing.
The verse was — she made herself be accurate — the verse was actually not bad.
It was plain and it was about a man cleaning out a truck, and it did the thing she had spent twenty years trying to teach him, which was to stay on the object and let the object do the work.
He got to the end of the second verse and hit the eight bars where a bridge should be and played four chords that went in a circle and stopped.
"There," he said.
"Yeah."
"That's where it is every time." He put his hands in his lap. "Forty-one of them. It's the same eight bars every single time. I get to the middle and there's nothing behind me."
Jenna sat in a chair in the Redbud barn at thirty-two weeks pregnant and looked at the back of her husband's head.
She knew exactly what was wrong with it. She had known from the yard.
The verse was in the first person and the bridge was reaching for something general — everybody, sometimes, a man — and the song was flinching off itself at the exact moment it should have gone straight in.
It was a four-bar problem. It was the most common four-bar problem there is, and she had fixed it in other people's songs perhaps three hundred times.
She thought, very clearly: do not do this.
She thought: if you do this, it is not a conversation anymore.
Then she said, "Move over."
It took four bars and about ninety seconds.
She could not sit at the bench properly, so she sat sideways on the end of it with one hand on the keys, and she played the four chords the way they wanted to go, which was down instead of around, and she said, "And you don't say 'a man.
' You say 'I.' You've got a whole verse about a truck and then you get scared and go up in the air.
Come back down. It's yours. Say the actual thing. "
He sat completely still.
"Say it," she said. "Out loud. Don't write it."
And Shane, looking at the keys, said the line.
It was six words long. It was about her, and it was terrible in the way true things are terrible before anybody smooths them, and it landed in the middle of that bridge like a stone in a bucket.
The barn was very quiet.
"Yeah," Jenna said. "That's it."
And there it was — the whole thing, the entire twenty years, the thing that no lawyer and no filing and no stage in Asheville could touch.
Two people at a piano at the end of March, and a hole in a song, and one of them could see it and one of them could not, and the one who could had just handed it over for free the way she had ten thousand times before, because she could not physically sit in a room with a broken bridge and leave it broken.
She got up off the bench so fast her back complained about it.
"Jenna — "
"That's not — " She put her hand up. "That was not a thing. Don't make it a thing."
"Okay."
"I'm serious."
"I know," he said. "Okay."
He did not write it down. She noticed that. He had a pencil in reach and forty-one dead songs on the floor and the first real bridge he'd had in fifteen years just sitting there in the air, and he did not pick up the pencil, because picking up the pencil would have been taking something.
That was the moment. Not the parking lot, not the stage, not the padded envelope.
That.
"I came up here to ask you a question," she said.
"Alright."
"Hal came to see me."
"I know. He told me." Shane turned around on the bench. "I want to say one thing about that before you ask, and then I'll shut up. Whatever he told you is probably true. He doesn't lie. He just decides what's worth saying." A pause. "And I'm not going to un-fire him, if that's the — "
"That's not the question."
"Okay."
Jenna stood in the middle of the barn with her coat open and her hands at the small of her back.
"Why did you do it?"
Shane Bishop looked at her.
"The credits, the room, the girl, the eight months, all of it," she said.
"In six months you have never once said why.
You told two thousand people what you did.
You've taken apart your entire life. You've never said one word about why, to me, or to Hal, or to Micah, or to her.
" She kept her voice level. "I've had every fact in this thing handed to me by somebody else.
I've got the folder and the tape and the pages and the parking lot and I have got everything except the one sentence that would make it make sense, and I have been carrying it around since September like a rock in a coat. "
He did not answer.
"Shane."
"I know."
"Then say it."
"I can't say it without it sounding like an excuse," he said.
"Then say it badly."
He stood up.
He walked over to the north wall and put his hand flat on the tape racks and stood there with his back to her for what felt like a very long time, and Jenna watched a man try to open something and fail.
"When I was thirty," he said, "I sat in this room for four days and I couldn't — "
And then he stopped, and she heard him breathe once, and he said, "No."
"No?"
"No. Not like this." He turned around and his face was wrecked. "I've got it, Jenna. I've had it since about February. I know exactly what it is and it takes about six sentences and I've said it out loud in here maybe two hundred times."
"Then say it to me."
"Not standing up in a barn because you asked me a good question and I want to be forgiven," Shane said. "That's what that would be. You'd hear it, and it'd be true, and you'd feel sorry for me, and that is precisely what I don't get to have."
"That's the most infuriating thing you have ever said to me," Jenna said.
"I know it."
"You understand that you've just told me you have an answer and you're not going to give it to me."
"Yes."
"Because you'd feel bad about how it landed."
"No." He shook his head. "Because you have had six months of everybody in your life managing what you get told and when you get told it.
Hal. Me. The label. That lawyer, probably, in her way.
Even Micah, and he's the best man I know.
" He sat back down on the bench. "You have been handled since September.
I'm not going to hand you a thing designed to work on you and call it honesty. "
"So when?"
"When it costs me something to say it and nothing to you to hear it," Shane said. "I don't know when that is. I'd tell you if I did."
Jenna looked at him for a long moment.