Chapter 14 #2
She drove up on the Monday, the fourteenth of April, and did not call ahead.
He was in the barn. He was always in the barn now. He came out into the yard when he heard the truck and stopped a good distance away with his hands at his sides, the way he had every single time since March.
"I need twenty minutes," Jenna said. "Not about a song."
Inside, he moved the cushion chair without being asked and then went and stood by the tape racks instead of sitting, because he had understood something from the way she came through the door.
Jenna stayed on her feet too.
"I'm going to say a thing, and you're not going to answer today," she said. "That's a condition of me saying it. If you answer fast I'll get in the truck."
"Alright."
"I'm not coming back this month." She watched it land.
"Whatever happens with us, it's not happening in the next four weeks, because I'm going to have a baby in three of them and I will not make a decision this size while I'm frightened.
That's not a punishment. That's the only way I'll ever trust it. "
Shane nodded slowly. "That's right," he said. "That's — yeah. That's right."
"Second thing."
"Okay."
"You want to know what it would take." She put her hand on the back of the chair. "You've been taking things apart since October. Money, credits, the record, the tour, Hal. Every bit of it in the dark where I couldn't see it, and every bit of it was real, and none of it is the thing."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yeah," Shane said. "It's the six sentences."
"It's the six sentences," Jenna said. "And not to me."
He looked up.
"Not to me," she repeated. "That's the whole condition and I want you to hear it exactly.
If you say it to me in this barn, it's ours, and it's warm, and in ten years I won't be able to tell the difference between what you meant and what I needed to hear.
I've had twenty years of things being said to me in this room. "
"Then where?"
"On the record," she said. "Out loud, in your own voice, to somebody who isn't me, in a form that cannot be taken back or cleaned up or handled.
What you did with my pages. Why my name came off and what you did about it for fourteen years, which was nothing.
And Sadie Kaye — all of it, plainly, so that girl gets her name back, because she is the only person in this entire mess who never lied to anybody and she's the only one still paying for it. "
Shane Bishop stood against the tape racks in the room where they had written six albums.
"And not one word about our marriage," Jenna said. "Not one. You don't get to ask me for anything in public ever again. If your name is next to mine in a sentence, I put it there."
"Okay," he said.
She had known he would say it, and it took about a second, and she had told him not to answer today, and she was still standing there with a whole speech left over about how agreeing was not the same as doing it.
She said it anyway.
"Agreeing isn't doing it."
"I know."
"You'll be doing it with no manager and no label and no lawyer telling you where the edges are, and there is nobody left to clean it up after you, and if you get it wrong you will not get another one."
"I know that too," Shane said.
And then he did the thing that stayed with her all the way down the mountain, which was nothing. He did not promise. He did not tell her when. He did not say thank you or I love you or I'll do it tomorrow.
He said, "Drive careful. The gravel's washed out by the gate."
She got to the bottom of the hill and pulled over and sat there with the engine running, which was becoming a habit she did not care for.
She had come up that mountain with a speech and had delivered it, and it had been the right speech, and she had watched it land in a man's face, and she felt no relief at all.
Because there was a version of the next four weeks she could see very clearly.
In that version he did it — a real interview, unmanaged, on the record — and it was magnificent, and it went everywhere, and every person in America read it and wept, and she read it in a hospital bed three days after a birth with a newborn on her chest and her defenses at the lowest they would be in her entire life.
And she would never know. Not ever. Not at sixty.
She sat at the stop sign for a long time with that.
Then she thought about the other version, which was that he did not do it — that he sat in that barn for a month and could not, and June came, and she found out that the six sentences were a thing he had built to keep her interested and that Hal Fitch had been right in his kitchen in March when he said he did not believe the man could say it.
She was not sure which of the two she was more afraid of, and that told her something about the state of herself that she did not enjoy.
"Alright," Jenna said, out loud, in an empty cab, at the bottom of Cedar Fork. "Then don't read it."
She said it again on the way home, twice, to see whether she believed it.
She did not.
She did not sign anything that week.
Not Grady's deal — she called him Wednesday and told him she was not signing before the baby and that she understood exactly what it cost, and Grady Ames, to his eternal credit, said, "Alright," and then, "You know I'll still take your calls," and meant it.
Not the mechanicals for Vic Sandell, who called twice more.
Not the divorce papers, which had been sitting in a drawer in Charlotte since October and which Angela had not mentioned since January.
"You're not going to ask me about those either," Jenna said.
"No."
"I'm thirty-six weeks pregnant and I've got four documents in front of me and every single person who wants me to sign one of them has a reason it has to be this month."
"Yes," Angela said. "That's how it works. That's always how it works, and there is nothing on any of those tables that will not still be there in July."
Jenna stood in a one-room apartment over a bike shop, thirty-eight years old, with a hospital bag in the truck and a hit on the radio and a catalogue worth sixty million dollars and a husband on a mountain forty minutes away who had agreed to something in under a second.
"Then I'm not signing a thing," she said. "Not for him, not for Grady, not for the label, not for you. Not one name on one line until this child is born and I know my own mind."
"Good," Angela Mackey said.
Jenna hung up and stood there and put both hands on the small of her back.
Three weeks. Maybe four.
She had never in her life been so afraid of a month, and she had never once, not for a single hour since September, been so entirely sure that whatever came out the other end of it was going to be hers.