Chapter 15
It ran on the twenty-fourth of April, at seven in the morning, and by half past seven her phone had gone off nine times and she had not looked at it once.
She had made a rule. She had made it at a stop sign at the bottom of Cedar Fork and she had written it down, in pencil, in the notebook, because she was thirty-seven weeks pregnant and she did not trust one single thing about her own judgment.
Don't read it the day it comes out.
She got to nine in the morning.
Micah was the one who broke her, and he did it without meaning to.
"Have you read it."
"No."
"Okay." A pause. "Jenna, I'm going to say one thing and then I'm going to get off the phone. I've known that man since we were fifteen years old and I have never in my life heard him say any of it out loud, not drunk, not at three in the morning, not at his own father's funeral."
"Micah — "
"He's not doing okay," Micah said. "That's not me asking you for anything. That's just a fact about a man that somebody ought to know."
He hung up.
Jenna Bishop stood in a one-room apartment over a bike shop with her hand on a folding table, and then she sat down and read seven thousand words.
It was a magazine piece. A woman had been asking him since January and he had said no four times and then in April he had called her back himself and said he would do it on one condition, which was that nothing was off the record and nothing got sent to him to approve.
There was no photographer. He had refused that too. The only picture in it was a phone shot the writer took herself, of a man on a piano bench in a barn, from behind.
He named himself in the fourth paragraph.
"I haven't written a song since I was thirty. Everything with my name on the front of it was written by my wife. That's been publicly true since October and privately true for fifteen years and I want it on the record in my own voice, because a filing isn't a sentence and people forget filings."
Then he did the credits. Plainly, mechanically, in a way that must have taken an hour: the 2011 restructure, the entity, the six pages in a stack of forty in a hotel in Denver.
The writer asked whether he had known.
"Not at first. I found out in 2013 and I asked my manager to fix it. He said he'd look at it. I asked four times over four years and every time he said he'd look at it, and then I stopped asking."
Why did you stop?
"Because nothing bad happened to me when I stopped."
Jenna put her hand over her mouth.
And then, on the third page, he did the thing she had actually asked for, and he did it better than she had asked for it.
"I want to talk about Sadie Kaye, because I've watched a twenty-seven-year-old woman lose her record deal, her publishing, a tour and her mother over something that did not happen, and I'm the reason.
"Nothing happened between us. Not one thing. There was no affair. I'd like that printed in a way that can't be trimmed down into something else.
"What actually happened is that I brought pages into that room in my wife's handwriting, out of my back pocket, every week for eight months, and I put them on the piano and said 'I've got a start.
' I never said they were mine. I let a young writer build melodies on top of another woman's work while thinking she was collaborating with me.
She asked me once, in April, who was singing on a tape I played her, and I said nobody.
"She's the best writer under thirty I've been in a room with, and I don't get to say that as a favor, because I'm the reason nobody will hire her.
If there's one thing in this that I would take back first, before the credits, before any of it, it's what I did to that girl, and she never got a vote in any of it. "
The writer asked about his marriage.
"No."
Nothing at all?
"No. I've said everything I'm going to say about my wife in public and it was all in December. She'll speak for herself. She's better at it than I am — you saw."
That was the entire mention. Twelve words and a joke against himself, in seven thousand.
Jenna read the whole thing twice and then sat very still in a chair in a room over a bike shop for about twenty minutes with her hands on the arms of it.
He had done it exactly. Not approximately. Not generously, not in a way that got him anything. He had taken her three conditions and executed them like a man defusing something.
And there was not one syllable in seven thousand words that asked her for anything at all.
Something else happened that week, and it happened fast, and it was the only part of the whole spring that was unambiguously good.
On the Friday, Sadie Kaye's name went back on a board.
Not at Marbury — Vic Sandell was never going to be the one, and Sadie would not have taken it.
Somewhere else, smaller and better, run by a woman who had read seven thousand words on a Thursday morning and made a phone call by lunchtime.
Grady had "Carry It Yourself" out to three artists inside a day and pulled it back off all three by Monday, because Sadie was going to cut it herself.
"That's a career," Grady said. "That's a whole career, out of a paragraph. I've been doing this thirty years and I've never seen one turn on a paragraph."
"He owed her that."
"Sure he did. Owing it and paying it are different countries, Jenna." A rustle; he was in a car again. "You want the thing I actually called to say?"
"Go on."
"That interview was the single most expensive four hours of that man's life and he spent about a third of it on a girl he isn't married to and doesn't want anything from," Grady said.
"I don't like him. I've got no reason to.
But I'm not going to sit here and tell you it wasn't real, and I'm the man with the most to lose by saying that out loud, so you can take it to the bank. "
Jill called Saturday and was quiet for a while first.
"I've read it four times."
"Me too."
"There's nothing in it for him. That's what I keep — " Jill stopped.
"Jenna, I've spent seven months looking for the angle in everything that man does and I have finally got to the bottom of the pile and there's no angle in it.
There's just a man saying what he did into a tape recorder without a lawyer in the room. "
"So what do I do?"
"Don't ask me that," Jill said, and there was something in her voice Jenna had never heard before, which was fear. "That's the first time you've asked me that in seven months and I'd give you an answer and I'd be guessing. You've never once needed me to guess."
The cost came in over the next nine days, and she watched it the way you watch weather come up a valley.
Marbury sued on the Monday. Not for the interview — for the undelivered record.
It had been coming since March and the interview simply removed the last reason not to file, because a label does not sue a man the public feels warmly about.
There was a number in the filing that Grady said was theater and Angela said was about sixty percent theater.
The industry, which had been calling him remarkable in December and a fraud in January, arrived at its third position, which was worse than either: that he was finished.
There is a specific tone that gets used about a man who is finished, and it is not cruel, it is fond, and Jenna read three pieces in it and had to stop.
And in the middle of that week, quietly, in a filing nobody covered for two days, Shane Bishop signed over the masters.
All of them. Six records. Everything Redbud Songs still held that had not gone across in October — the recordings themselves, the licensing, the entity. He kept the land and the house and the barn and a truck.
Angela called her about it and for the first time in eight months she did not sound like a lawyer at all.
"I've been doing this since 1999," she said.
"I want to tell you what I'm looking at, because you should hear it from somebody who does the arithmetic for a living.
Your husband has, over seven months, voluntarily transferred to you approximately everything he has ever earned, and taken on a lawsuit he will probably lose, and he has done all of it without asking you for a single thing, without a photographer, and mostly without telling you. "
"I know."
"I have never seen it," Angela said. "Not once. Not close. I want that on the record with you because in about a year some man in a bar is going to tell you that you took him for everything, and I need you to be able to hear that and know exactly what it's worth."
She drove up on the second of May with the hospital bag still in the back of the truck, because it lived there now.
She was thirty-eight weeks and two days. The redbuds were done and everything was green and stupid with spring and she had to stop once on the way up to walk around the truck.
He came out into the yard and stopped at his distance, the way he always did.
"I need to say what this is before I get out," Jenna said, through the window. "I'm not here to decide anything. I told you I wouldn't do that this month and I'm not doing it. I'm going home in an hour and nothing about my life will have changed."
"Okay."
"I read it."
"Okay."
"You did what I asked."
Shane put his hands in his pockets. "It's not a favor," he said. "You asked for the only thing that was actually owed."
"I know that." She opened the door and got out, slowly, and stood with one hand on the roof of the cab. "That's not why I'm here."
"Alright."
"I want the six sentences," Jenna said. "Now. Out here. Standing in a yard. And then I'm going to get back in this truck."
Shane Bishop looked at his wife across ten feet of grass.
"Okay," he said.
He did not come closer. He did not put his hand out. He stood in the middle of the yard he had bought with her songs and he said it to her plainly, in the flat voice of a man reading something he had been carrying a long time.
"I stopped being able to write when I was thirty and I never told you.