Chapter 17
FOURTEEN MONTHS LATER
Lucy Bishop learned to run in June and had not stopped since, and by the second Saturday in July she could cross the whole yard at Cedar Fork in under nine seconds, provided nobody was actively trying to catch her.
Somebody was always actively trying to catch her.
"She's got the wire," Micah called from the porch.
"She has not got the wire."
"Jenna. She has got the wire."
Jenna Bishop came around the side of the house at a speed she had not moved at in years, in a dress, with her hair half done, and removed a two-foot length of fence wire from her daughter's fist. Lucy considered this development, decided against a scene, and set off for the barn instead.
She was fourteen months old. She had her father's ridiculous eyelashes and her mother's total absence of interest in what anybody thought about anything, and she had said four words so far, the first of which had been dog, the second up, the third no, and the fourth, at ten months, in the barn, at four in the morning, song — which Shane had refused to stop telling people about for a solid week and which Jenna had not, in fairness, discouraged.
"Two hours," Jill said from the steps, with a hairbrush. "Two hours and you're outside wrestling farm equipment away from a toddler."
"She's fast."
"She's a menace. Sit down."
Jenna sat down on the porch steps and let her oldest friend do her hair in the July sun while a hundred and forty people got a yard ready down the hill.
Here is what had happened, in the order it happened.
Lucy came on the seventeenth of May, at twenty past two in the afternoon, after a labor that Jenna described afterward as long and boring, right up until it wasn't. Shane was in the room.
He had been in the building for every appointment since the first week of the month, and in the room for the last two, and when they put his daughter in his arms he said one word, which was, "Oh. "
That was all. Just oh, like a man arriving somewhere.
They settled with Marbury in September. It cost most of what was left, and Vic Sandell put the shelved record out in October under both names, and it did respectably, and nobody much cared by then and neither of them ever played it.
The lawsuit went away and the money did not come back, and for about four months in there they were, by the standards of the people they used to have dinner with, poor.
Jenna paid the property tax on the land out of the catalogue in November and Shane, who had spent twenty years buying rounds for whole rooms, sat at the kitchen table and let her do it, and said, "Thank you," and did not say anything else about it, which was the single hardest thing he had done all year.
She never gave any of it back. She had thought about it — in the hospital, and once in the fall — and had decided against, and the reason was not money.
The reason was that he had done it, on a Thursday, with no photographer. That belonged to him. Handing it back would have been taking it off him, and she had spent a marriage having things taken off her, and she was not going to start doing it to somebody else in her own house.
Then, in January, the two of them went into the barn and made a record.
Fourteen songs in nine weeks. The one about the truck, which he had written and she had fixed the bridge of, standing at a piano in March with a baby three weeks out.
Four from the November batch, the ones she had written standing up at a folding table over a bike shop while she waited to find out what her life was.
Two written at four in the morning with a monitor on the console and a one-year-old asleep in the house.
One that Maxine Gault came and sang on, at seventy-five, for scale, and would not take a dollar more.
It came out in April.
BISHOP — Both Names
On the front, in small clean letters, in this order: Jenna Bishop. Shane Bishop.
Jenna sang lead on eight of them. That had not been a plan.
It had been an argument, in February, that lasted four days and that she lost, and the thing that lost it for her was Shane sitting down on the amp and saying: "I've had your voice on a tape in my pocket for fifteen years and I've never once been able to say who it was. I'd like to stop."
It was the biggest thing either of them had ever done.
Not the biggest of his. The biggest of either of theirs — bigger than the fourth record, bigger than the arenas, bigger than "Hold Still," which had been quietly restored to the services that spring with a corrected credit line and which nobody thought about anymore.
They played theaters in May and June and were home by the ninth of July, and the marquees said BISHOP, and the two of them walked out together every night, and the woman went to the microphone in the middle.
The differences were small and there were a great many of them, and Jenna could have listed them in her sleep.
He asked questions now. That was the largest one and the one nobody outside the house would ever see.
He asked her four or five a day, ordinary ones, and waited for the answers, and sometimes changed his mind because of them, and about once a month she still caught herself bracing for the announcement that did not come.
He knocked on the barn door. Every time. She had said it in a yard in May as a condition and had assumed she would have to say it again, and she had never had to say it again.
He did not touch her in front of people the way he used to — the hand on the back of the neck, the arm around, the small constant public arrangement of a wife.
He had stopped that altogether, without discussion, some time in the first month, and what he did instead was find her hand, which was a different thing, because a hand can be let go of from either end.
And she talked in rooms.
That was hers, and it had been harder than anything he did.
In October, in a meeting at a label in Nashville about the shelved record, a man had said "we thought — " and Jenna had said "who's we," in a perfectly pleasant voice, and the room had rearranged itself around her in about four seconds and she had gone out to the truck afterward with her hands shaking.
By March she was not shaking.
By June she was the one who said the number, and Shane sat beside her and let her say it, and afterward in the parking lot he said, "You enjoyed that," and she said, "I did," and he said, "Good," and that was the entire conversation.
The public part had changed too, and not in the way she expected. Nobody wrote about the marriage anymore; it had stopped being a story the day it stopped being a fight. What they wrote about now was the record. She did the interviews. He did about one in four and spent most of it saying her name.
"Sit still," Jill said.
"I am sitting still."
"You're vibrating." Jill put a pin in. "Grady's here, by the way. He brought a tent."
"He brought a what?"
"A tent, Jenna. He drove five hours with a tent in a trailer because he decided it might rain, and it is not going to rain, and he has been putting it up since eight o'clock this morning with two men from the hardware store."
Down in the yard, Grady Ames was in fact putting up a tent.
He had taken his shirt off, which nobody had asked for.
He had also, in the past year, signed Sadie Kaye, made an enormous amount of money on "Carry It Yourself," and told the story of how he lost the best artist deal of his career to a woman in a kitchen at nine in the morning to approximately everyone in Nashville, always with obvious pride, always telling it against himself.
Sadie had sent a gift. It came in June: a copy of her own record, which had gone gold in April, and a note in small careful handwriting.
My mother called me in March. She'd read the interview. It took her fourteen months.
Thank you for the song. I've been paid more for it than for anything I've ever done, which I know you arranged, and I'm not going to argue with you about it in writing.
I hope she's well. — S.K.
Jenna had put it on the shelf in the barn, next to the reel boxes, where she would see it.
They did it at six, in the yard, with the hill going green-gold behind the fence.
A hundred and forty people, which was the number the Christmas show had started with, and which was not a coincidence, because Shane had counted it out on a legal pad in April and then not mentioned it to anybody until Micah found the pad.
Half the town came. The woman from the diner in Black Mountain came.
The kid from the bike shop came and brought his mother.
Deanna Fife played, and two of Micah's cousins played, and the whole thing had the specific quality of a thing organized top to bottom by people who make music for a living, which is to say the food was late and the sound was perfect.
Before it started, Jenna went looking for her husband and found him behind the barn with his daughter on his hip, showing her the fence.
Not doing anything with the fence. Showing it to her — running her hand along the top wire, saying the word, letting her hit it with her palm to hear the note it made.
"That's a fence," Shane said.
"Dog," said Lucy.
"That's a fence, Lucy."
"Dog."
"Alright," he said. "It's a dog."
Jenna stood at the corner of the barn in her good dress and watched her husband agree that a fence was a dog, and thought about a man who for twenty years had not been able to get out of a room without turning it into an event, standing behind a building where nobody could see him, doing the least performed thing in the world.
He looked up and caught her.
"How long've you been there?"
"Long enough to hear you concede."
"She's very persuasive." He came over. Lucy immediately reached for her mother's hair and Jenna intercepted her with the ease of fourteen months of practice. "You alright?"
"I'm fine."