Chapter 13 #2
The old version of this man would have said it in about four seconds. He'd have said it beautifully, with his hand over his heart, in a room with people in it, and she'd have believed every word and it would have been true and it would have changed nothing at all.
"Alright," she said.
"Alright?"
"I've spent five months being furious at you for saying whatever was easiest and now you've gone and got difficult about it," Jenna said. "Give me a minute to be annoyed."
And Shane Bishop laughed.
It was one syllable, and it was involuntary, and it was the first laugh she had heard out of him since a Tuesday afternoon in September, and it went through her like a wire.
They sat with that.
That was the whole of the rest of it, and afterward she could not have said how long it went on.
There was no yelling. There were no accusations.
Two people sat in a barn in the last week of March and said true things at each other slowly, with long gaps, the way you take apart something that is still sharp.
She told him what Sadie Kaye had said in Black Mountain and watched him take it without one word of defense.
"She said you played her my voice off a phone in April and told her it was nobody."
"Yeah."
"Why."
"Because I'd been in a room for six hours trying to be a writer," Shane said, "and I wanted to hear what one sounded like."
He said it to the floor. He did not dress it up and he did not look at her while he said it, and Jenna understood that this was not one of the six sentences; this was smaller and worse, a splinter he had been carrying loose.
"I gave her a song," she said.
"Micah told me. 'Carry It Yourself.'" A pause. "That's the best thing in the November batch."
"How do you know what's in the November batch?"
"Because I know how you work," Shane said. "You always put the best one fourth."
She had never told anybody that. She had never told him that. It was not a thing she knew about herself in words until a man said it out loud in a barn, and it made her so angry she had to look at the tape racks for a second.
"She's going to have a career," Jenna said.
"Good. She should. She's got — " he stopped himself, hard, visibly. "That's not mine to have an opinion about anymore. She should. That's all."
He told her that the March record had been mixed and that he had listened to it once, all the way through, before he called Vic Sandell, and that it was good, and that it had made him sick.
She said she had not signed the papers. He said he knew. She said she did not know why, and he said, "I know that too," and did not push on it by so much as an inch.
She asked what he was going to do for money.
"Sell the Nashville place. Keep the land." He said it like a man reading a list he had already read a lot. "There's a thing where you go and play theaters for a couple of years and everybody says you're going back to your roots and what it actually means is you're broke. I'll do that."
"With what songs?"
"That," Shane said, "is the interesting part of the problem."
"You gave away the catalogue."
"I gave back the catalogue."
"You could have licensed it. Angela says you could have kept a — "
"Jenna." He looked up. "I'm not doing the version of this where you make my case for me. That's the last job I've got and I'd like to keep it."
She shut her mouth.
And she thought, sitting in a chair in a cold barn with her hands folded on top of the shelf her body had become: he has gotten harder to argue with, and I do not know what to do about that at all.
Nothing got fixed. She would have said that to anybody who asked, and she said it to herself in the truck, twice, on the way down.
But a door that had been shut since a kitchen table in September stood open by about two inches at the end of it, and both of them could see the light under it, and neither of them said so.
At the end she went to the door.
He did not get up. He stayed on the bench with his hands in his lap, and he did not walk her to the truck, and he did not ask her to come back, and he did not say her name.
"Bye, Shane."
"Bye," he said.
And then, when she was in the doorway: "Jenna."
She stopped.
"You'd have had that bridge in four minutes twenty years ago," Shane said, "and I'd have said 'there she is,' and I never once thought about what it cost you to be the one who could."
Jenna stood in the door of the Redbud barn with her hand on the frame.
"That's one of the six sentences, isn't it," she said.
"Yeah."
"Don't give me any more of them."
"No, ma'am," he said.
She drove down the mountain at five in the evening with the redbuds coming in on both sides of the road.
She was not crying. She noticed that and found it interesting. She had cried on a highway shoulder in December over a habit and she had not cried once since, including at a truck window in January, including in a stairwell.
What she was, sitting at the stop sign at the bottom of the hill with her hands at ten and two, was afraid.
Not of him. She wanted that clear, and made herself say it out loud in an empty cab, because being accurate was still the only thing she had that was entirely hers.
"I'm not afraid of him."
She was afraid because it was five in the evening on the twenty-eighth of March, and she was thirty-two weeks pregnant, and she had one hand on the wheel of a truck at a stop sign, and every single part of her wanted to go back up that hill tomorrow.
Not to forgive him. Not to move home. Not to talk.
To finish the song.