Chapter 16
What broke it was not a gesture, because there were no more gestures coming. He had run out of things to give away.
What broke it was Tuesday.
She woke at four the way she always did and lay in the dark in a room over a bike shop and did the thing she had been doing every morning since September, which was take the whole marriage out and look at it.
Except that morning it was not there.
She went looking for the anger the way you reach for a light switch in a house you have lived in for years, and her hand went through the place where it had been.
Not gone — she could still name every single item on the list, and she did, deliberately, lying on her back at four in the morning: the credits, the room, the pages, the eight months, Hal's statement with her name on it, a photograph in a stairwell.
All of it true. All of it still true.
And underneath it, where for seven months there had been a hot wire running, there was nothing but a woman lying in the dark at thirty-eight weeks who wanted to be in a barn on a hill.
She had spent four days waiting for the anger to come back, and it had not.
That was the whole of that week, if anybody asked. She went to the grocery store. She washed a load of very small clothes. She finished a song for a woman in Texas and sent it to Grady and he said it was the best thing she'd sent him all year and she felt nothing much about that, which was new.
On the Sunday she had gone downstairs and sat in the bike shop for an hour with the kid in the apron, who was called Ollie and who was nineteen and who explained bottom brackets to her at length, and she had listened to every word and thought about nothing at all.
On the Monday Micah had called about a load of firewood he was not delivering to anybody in May, and had talked for twenty minutes about a snare head, and had not mentioned Shane once, and Jenna had understood, with real affection, that the man was checking on her the only way he knew how.
She had waited for the thing that had run under every single day since September — the hot wire, the list, the arithmetic — and it had not come, and by Tuesday morning she had stopped waiting.
Jenna lay there until it got light.
Then she got up and made tea and stood at the window over Haywood Road and understood, with the specific flat clarity she got maybe four times a year and had learned to trust more than anything else about herself, that she had made up her mind at some point in the last week and had simply not been informed.
"Well," she said to the window. "Alright then."
She called Grady Ames at nine o'clock in the morning, before she did anything else, and that order was not an accident.
"You're up early."
"I'm turning down the record."
There was a pause of about four seconds.
"Alright," Grady said.
"That's it?"
"What did you want, a speech?" A chair creaked. "You want me to run it one more time? Because I will. It's dead the end of the month and it does not come back and there is no version of it in three years when you feel like it."
"I know."
"You're a national songwriter with a hit and a catalogue and you're about to give away the only shot you'll ever get at being the one who sings it." His voice was completely level. "Say it out loud so I know you heard yourself."
"I'm turning down the record," Jenna said. "Today. Before I've talked to him. Before I've seen him. Before anything happens or doesn't happen up that hill."
Another pause.
"Now, why'd you do it that way round?" Grady said.
"Because if I do it after, then it's a thing I gave up for him," she said. "And in ten years, on a bad night, I'd get it out and count it. So I'm doing it first, in a kitchen, by myself, at nine in the morning, and it's mine, and nobody gets it."
Grady Ames laughed — one short bark, genuinely delighted, the sound of a man watching somebody make a move he had not seen coming.
"God almighty," he said. "You know, I've been trying to work out for six months what makes you write like that."
"And?"
"And it's that," he said. "That right there. That's the whole thing." He blew out a breath. "Alright. It's dead, it's your call, and I'll take your calls till one of us is in the ground. Go on up the hill."
She did not call Angela. There was nothing to say to a lawyer yet and she was not going to manufacture a reason to be told she was making a mistake.
She did not call Jill, and she thought about that for a long time afterward, and the honest version was this: Jill had asked her, three days earlier, what do I do, and had been afraid, and had said she would be guessing.
Jenna was not going to make her friend guess about this.
She washed her face. She put on the green shirt, which had been her favorite for six years and had recently become the only thing she owned that still went around her.
Then she stood in the middle of a one-room apartment and looked at it — the mattress, the folding table, the crib in the corner, the drying rack, the pencil — and she thought: I wrote seven songs in this room and four of them are the best I've ever done, and I'm going to miss it for the rest of my life.
She left everything exactly where it was. She did not pack. She was not moving; she was going up a mountain.
The bag was already in the truck.
He was in the yard when she came up the drive, and he had a coil of fence wire in his hands and no idea, and she watched his face go through about six weathers in the time it took her to park.
She got out slowly, because everything was slow now.
"Jenna — is she — "
"Everything's fine."
"Okay." He put the wire down on the tailgate of his own truck like a man setting down something breakable. "Okay."
"I'm going to say some things and I'd like to say them out here," she said, "because the last four times I've been up this hill I've said something important standing in this yard and it seems to be where I do it."
"Alright."
She put one hand on the warm hood of the truck.
"I turned down the record this morning," she said. "Grady's artist deal. It's dead. I did it at nine o'clock before I got in this truck, on purpose, so that it belongs to me and not to you and not to us."
Shane went very still.
"Jenna."
"I don't want you to say anything about it.
Not now, not in ten years, not ever. It's not a gift and it's not a sacrifice and if you ever thank me for it I'll take a piece out of you.
" She kept her voice steady. "It was a good deal and I'd have been good at it and I didn't want the life.
That's all it is. That's the entire thing. "
"Okay," he said. His voice had gone.
"Now the rest."
"I'm not moving back into the marriage I left," she said.
"That one's over. It died in September and I'm not going to spend the next thirty years pretending we resuscitated it, because that thing had a woman in it who took her own name off a piece of paper to keep the peace and I'm not going to be her again for anybody, including you, including me. "
He nodded once. He did not speak. He was, she noticed, holding absolutely still, the way you do when something wild is deciding whether to come closer.
"So here's what it is instead. Both names on everything. Mine first, and not because you're being gallant about it, and not as an apology — because that's the actual order it happened in and we're going to stop lying about it in public and in this house."
"Yes."
"Nobody speaks for me. Not you, not a manager, not a label, not a publicist, not a friend being helpful. If my name is in a sentence, I put it there. That one is forever and there is no version of an emergency where it bends."
"Yes."
"The barn belongs to whoever's writing in it. Not to you. Not to me either — to the work. If I'm in there at four in the morning you knock."
"Yes."
"And you're going to keep writing," Jenna said. "That's not a kindness. That's a condition. You've got forty-one dead songs on that floor and one good one and I am not spending my life married to a man who's decided he's finished, because that man is the one who went looking for a room."
Shane Bishop put his hand over his mouth for a second and then took it away.
"Okay," he said.
"Now the hard part."
"Okay."
"I haven't forgiven you," Jenna said.
She watched him take it. He took it standing up, without flinching, which she had not been sure he would.
"I'm going to," she said. "I know that the way I know my own handwriting. It's coming and it's probably not far off and I could do it right now, standing here, and mean every word of it for about a year."
"Then don't."
"I'm not going to." She let out a breath. "I'd rather get there slowly and have it hold. You're going to have to live in a house with a woman who loves you and hasn't finished forgiving you, and some days that's going to be a cold house."
"I can live in a cold house."
"I know you can. You've been living in one alone since September and you did it without complaining once, which is the single most persuasive thing about you.
" She took her hand off the hood of the truck.
"But I want you to hear the other half, Shane, and I want you to hear it plain, because I've had eight months of people telling me what I'm allowed to be sure about.
"The marriage is not on trial. That part's decided. I'm not here on a trial basis and this is not a see-how-it-goes and there is no calendar on it anywhere. I'm not moving back in to find out. I'm moving back in."
The yard was very quiet. Somewhere down the hill a truck went by on the road and kept going.
"I'm your wife," Jenna said. "I've been your wife the entire time. I'm just going to be a different one, and you're going to be a different man, and we're doing it in the same house."
Shane crossed the yard.
He stopped about a foot away, which was the closest he had been to her since a kitchen in September, and he did not touch her.
"Can I — "
"Yes," she said. "God, yes."
He put both hands on her face and kissed her, and it was not careful.