Chapter 15 #2
"I let Hal take your name off because if your name wasn't on it, I didn't have to know what it meant that mine was.
"Every year after that it got harder to look at you, because you were the proof, and you were in my house.
"So I found a room where nobody knew, and I carried your pages into it, and for eight months I got to be the man I've been telling people I am since I was twenty-five.
"It was never her. Not for one minute. It was that in that room I wasn't married to the person I'd stolen from.
"I didn't want somebody else, Jenna. I wanted to stop being me for four hours a week, and the only way I could afford it was you."
The wind came up the hill and moved the grass and went on.
"That's the whole thing," Shane said. "That's all six. There isn't a seventh and there's nothing underneath it."
Jenna stood with her hand on the roof of the truck.
"Say the last one again."
He said it again.
"I wanted to stop being me for four hours a week, and the only way I could afford it was you."
She did not cry, and she did not go to him, and afterward she was glad about both.
What she did was stand in the grass and let it be true.
Because it was. She had known it in a diner in Black Mountain in February with a folder open on a formica table, and she had known it in a hardware store parking lot in the rain, and she had built the shape of it out of forty-one pages and four hundred hours and a truck at the end of a lot.
She had assembled the entire thing herself, piece by piece, over seven months, out of everything except his voice.
And now she had his voice.
It changed nothing about what he had done. She wanted that written down somewhere, and she wrote it that night, in pencil, in the notebook: It does not make it smaller. It makes it his.
That was the whole of it. For seven months this thing had been something that happened to her — done by a room, by a manager, by a schedule, by a machine, by a girl in a duet, by everybody's arithmetic but his.
He had just stood in a yard and picked it up and carried it.
"Can I say two things back," she said.
"You can say anything you want."
"First one. You did not do it to me." Jenna kept her hand on the roof of the truck.
"That's what I came up here to find out and I've got it now.
You did it to yourself and I was standing where it landed, and those are not the same, and I'm not going to pretend they are just because the second one hurts more. "
Shane did not answer. His jaw was working.
"Second one's worse."
"Okay."
"I let it happen." She said it evenly, because she had been rehearsing it in a truck for forty minutes and she was not going to fumble it now.
"Nobody made me take my name off a piece of paper and say nothing for fourteen years.
Nobody made me stop going in rooms. I was thirty-one years old and I decided it was easier to be the person who made you possible than to be a person, and I have been telling myself since September that you did that to me, and you didn't. You did half of it. "
"Jenna — "
"Don't." She held a hand up. "Don't take that one off me. That one's mine and I've had to fight to get it and you don't get to be gallant about it in a yard."
Shane Bishop shut his mouth.
Then he said, carefully, "Alright. It's yours."
"Thank you."
"Can I say one thing that isn't an ask?"
"One."
"You were never the person who made me possible," he said. "You were a songwriter who married an idiot with a good voice. Those are two completely different women and I lived with the second one for thirteen years and never once looked her in the face."
The wind went across the yard again.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"I heard it." She opened the truck door. "I'm going home now, like I said."
"Alright." He did not move from where he was standing. "Jenna — do you need anything? For the — " He stopped himself and started over, and got it right. "That's not what I'm allowed to ask. Never mind."
"Ask me in June."
Shane Bishop stood in his own yard and nodded once, and did not smile, and did not push it by so much as an inch.
She got as far as putting the key in.
"One more," she said, out the window. "Why not in September?"
He was quiet for a second.
"Because in September it wasn't true yet," Shane said. "In September I'd have said whatever worked."
Jenna sat in her truck at the top of Cedar Fork with her hand on the key.
"Yeah," she said. "That's the right answer."
Then she drove down the mountain, carefully, the way you drive with something full.
She stopped once, halfway, where the road comes out from under the trees and you can see the whole valley and most of the county.
She had done what she said she would do. She had gone up, and heard it, and come back down, and made no decision, and that was worth something and she made herself count it.
But she was thirty-eight weeks and two days pregnant, and she had a hospital bag behind the seat, and there was a man forty minutes back up that road who had spent seven months taking his own life apart in the dark and had just handed her the last piece of it standing in a yard in the wind.
I'm going to have this baby by myself, she thought. That's the plan. That's been the plan since April and it is a good plan and Jill is right about all of it.
She sat there in a truck on a mountain road in the first week of May with the engine running.
"Ask me in June," she said out loud, to the windshield, in a voice she did not entirely recognize, and then she laughed at herself once, without any humor in it at all, and put the truck in gear.
She made it four days.