Chapter 14
She went back up the hill twice in April, and both times it was about the song, and both times they were extremely careful with each other, the way you are careful carrying something full.
The first time they finished it.
The second time she stayed four hours and they started another one and got nowhere and it was, she thought on the drive down, one of the better afternoons of her life.
He never asked her to stay. He never asked her anything. He put a chair with a cushion in it by the piano before the second visit and never mentioned it, and she sat in it and never mentioned it, and that was the shape of April.
The first afternoon was the one she kept.
They had the verses and the bridge and no ending, and he kept reaching for a big one — a lift, a resolve, the kind of last verse that fills an arena — and she let him do it three times before she said anything.
"It's a man cleaning out a truck."
"I know what it is."
"Then he doesn't get a choir." She had her boots up on the rail of the piano bench, which was the only way she could sit anymore. "You keep trying to make it worth the four minutes. It's already worth the four minutes. Just finish taking the stuff out of the truck."
Shane sat there for a second.
Then he wrote nine words, and they were right, and he knew they were right, and he did the thing he had done ten thousand times over twenty years, which was look up at her with his mouth already opening.
He stopped it before it got out. She watched him stop it. The words there she is died about a quarter of an inch inside a man's face, and he looked back down at the page and said, "Okay. That's the end of it, then."
And Jenna Bishop sat in a cushioned chair in a barn with her hands folded on top of a baby and thought, with real violence: say it. I want you to say it and you don't get to and we are both going to sit here.
Neither of them said anything for about a minute.
"Play it whole," she said finally, and he did, and it was a good song — not a great one, an honestly good one, the first he had ever had — and when he finished he wrote her name above his on the legal pad without a word.
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't," Shane said. "That's why I get to."
She was thirty-six weeks. The bag was in the truck now, not the apartment, because Angela had said something offhand about how fast a first labor is not, and Jill had said something considerably less offhand.
And everybody in her life, all at once, that week, wanted her to sign something.
Grady first, because Grady was honest about it.
He drove up. That was the tell — five hours from Nashville, on a Tuesday, in a car with a bad muffler, to sit in a booth in a place on Haywood Road and not eat a sandwich.
"I'm going to be straight with you and you're not going to like it."
"You're always straight with me."
"Yeah, well, this one costs me something." He pushed the sandwich away. "The artist deal. It's live until the end of May and then it's dead and it does not come back."
"You said six months in December."
"December was December." Grady spread his hands.
"Here's where we are. Your husband cancelled a summer, shelved a record, fired the best manager in the business, and pulled a number one off the shelf.
Nobody knows why. And every single person in this business has spent eight weeks deciding it's about you. "
"It isn't."
"Jenna, I don't care if it is, and neither does anybody with a checkbook.
" He leaned in. "The offer on the table is for a record by the woman who wrote the whole thing and walked out.
If you're up on that mountain by summer, it's a record by a woman who went back, and I cannot fund a woman who went back. "
"That's a disgusting way to describe a marriage."
"It's a disgusting business," Grady said. "I've never once told you it wasn't."
She looked out the window at Haywood Road.
"Say the number."
He said the number. It was very large. It was, she calculated without wanting to, roughly four times what she'd have needed to buy a house in this town outright and never think about money again in her life, and she already had a catalogue worth sixty million dollars, and that was the ugly comedy of the whole thing — none of it was about need.
It had stopped being about need in October.
"And if I say no?"
"Then you're the best songwriter in America and you'll write for other people forever and be rich and respected and about nine people a year will know your voice.
" Grady got his keys off the table. "That's not a threat.
It's just the other road. I've watched a lot of people take it and most of them are fine. "
"Most of them."
"Most of them," Grady Ames agreed, and drove five hours home.
Vic Sandell called on the Thursday and was considerably less honest.
She had never spoken to the man. He had a warm voice and used her first name four times in the opening minute.
"I'll be brief. We've got a finished record sitting in a vault and I've got a hundred and forty people in this building who need a spring."
"That's not my record."
"No, ma'am, it's your songs." He let that sit exactly long enough. "Ten of the twelve. Corrected credits and all."
Jenna stood at the window with the phone against her ear.
"What do you want, Mr. Sandell?"
"I want to put out a record everybody's already paid for.
Shane's a no. Shane's been a no since March and he won't take my calls.
" A creak of a chair four hundred miles away.
"But here's the thing — as the writer, you could grant the mechanicals.
And if you and he appeared somewhere together, once, anywhere, for four minutes — "
"You want a photograph."
"I want a context," Vic Sandell said. "There's a version of this spring where that record is the biggest story in American music and it ends with the two of you on a stage, and I have to tell you honestly, Jenna, that in that version everybody wins. Including him. Especially him."
"He asked you to shelve it."
"He did."
"And he's told you no since March."
"He has."
"Then you're calling his wife to get around him," Jenna said, "and I'd like you to hear that sentence in your own voice."
There was a pause on the line.
"That's fair," Vic Sandell said, in a completely different tone, and she understood that she had just met the actual man. "Think about it anyway. It's a lot of money for a lot of people who didn't do anything to anybody."
"Everybody keeps saying that to me," Jenna said, and hung up.
She called Angela within the minute, because she had learned that much.
"Can he do that?"
"Can a label president call a credited writer directly about mechanicals? Yes. Is it a filthy thing to do to a woman at thirty-six weeks whose husband won't take his calls? Also yes." Paper moved. "Do you want me to write to him?"
"No. I want to know if I could."
"Grant the mechanicals?" Angela sounded genuinely surprised.
"Of course you could. You're the writer on ten of those twelve songs, Jenna.
That record does not exist without you and it does not come out without you.
" A pause. "You could put it out tomorrow over your husband's objection and there is not a thing on God's earth he could do about it. "
Jenna stood at the window over Haywood Road for a while after that.
She had not understood, until a lawyer said it out loud on a Thursday, that she was now the one holding it — that somewhere in a vault in Nashville there was a finished record with ten of her songs on it and a duet she had heard for the first time in a barn in September, and that the only person on earth who could decide whether the world ever heard it was her.
He handed you the gun in October, she thought, and you have been carrying it around for six months without noticing the weight.
She did not grant the mechanicals.
But she thought about it, for about four minutes, standing at a window — the pure hot pleasure of it, of putting that record out herself with her name on every line of it and letting him find out from a screen — and then she put the thought down, carefully, the way you put down something you would rather not know you were able to pick up.
Jill drove up on Friday and did not go home for four days, which was how Jenna knew what was coming.
She waited until Sunday afternoon, which was, in fairness, restraint.
"How many times have you been up there."
"Twice."
"In April."
"In April."
Jill put down the tiny shirt she was folding.
"Okay," she said. "Here's mine, and then I'll never say it again, and I mean that.
You're thirty-six weeks pregnant. You are about to be inside the single most physically and emotionally overwhelming month of your entire life.
You are going to be exhausted and frightened and in a hospital and then alone in a room with a newborn at four in the morning. "
"I know."
"That is the worst possible month to decide anything about a marriage," Jill said, "and it is the best possible month to be talked into one, and I would be a coward if I didn't say that out loud to you."
Jenna sat down on the edge of the bed.
"You're right," she said.
"Don't do that."
"I'm not managing you. You're right." She put her hands on her knees.
"I've thought about it every day for a month.
If I go back up that hill in the last four weeks of a pregnancy, I will never know for the rest of my life whether I meant it or whether I was just tired and scared and it was warm up there. "
Jill looked at her.
"Then don't," she said.
"I'm not going to."
"...Okay." Jill sat back, visibly recalibrating. "Then what are you going to do?"
"I'm going to go and tell him what it would take," Jenna said. "And then I'm going to come back down this mountain and have a baby by myself, and he can spend that month proving it or not proving it, and I'll find out which in June."
Jill Sterling was quiet for a long moment.
"That's the smartest thing I've ever heard you say," she said. "I hate it. Go on."