Chapter 17 #2
"You sure? Because we don't have to do a single bit of this. There's a hundred and forty people down there and I would cheerfully send every one of them home right now and eat a sandwich with you in the kitchen."
Jenna looked at him.
"You mean that."
"I mean it entirely."
"I know you do," she said. "That's why we're doing it."
Micah did the words, because he had a license off the internet and had been threatening to use it for a decade.
He got about four sentences in before he had to stop and look at the sky for a second, and a hundred and forty people waited for him, and Lucy said "Dog!" very loudly into the silence, and everybody laughed, and Micah said, "Yeah. Okay. Good," and went on.
They had written their own, because of course they had.
Shane went first. He had it on a card and did not look at the card once.
"I stood on a stage in December and told two thousand people what I did to you," he said, "and I'm not going to do that again today, because it's July and this is a party and everybody here already knows.
"So I'm going to say the other thing.
"You are the best writer I have ever known and I married you and I still can't get over it.
You wrote my whole life. I let people take your name off it and I got used to it, and you came back up this hill anyway, and you did it in a green shirt at eight and a half months pregnant, which is the bravest thing I have ever seen anybody do.
"Jenna — I'm not going to say I'll spend my life making it up to you, because you've told me what you think of that sentence.
" A laugh went through the yard; Jill, loudest. "So here it is instead.
I love you. I'm not going anywhere. Your name goes first on everything for the rest of my life, in the house and out of it, and I'll say so out loud to anybody who asks and most people who don't.
"That's the whole promise. I've got nothing else and I don't need anything else."
Jenna had a card too. She put it in her pocket without looking at it.
"I had a whole thing," she said, and the yard laughed, and she waited it out.
"Alright. Here's mine.
"I loved you when I was eighteen and I loved you at thirty-eight in the worst year of my life and I love you today, in this yard, in front of all of you, and I have never once stopped, including in the eight months when I would have told you otherwise and meant it.
"I'm not going to stand here and say what we've been through, because half of you read about it, and the other half brought us a casserole.
"So I'll say the part nobody knows.
"I chose this. I want that on the record — I want it on the actual record, and Micah, you're going to write it down.
" She turned and looked at her husband. "I had somewhere else to go.
It was a good somewhere. I turned it down in a kitchen at nine o'clock in the morning by myself before I ever came up that hill, so that for the rest of my life there would be no possible argument about whose choice this was. "
She reached out and took his hand.
"I'm not owed to you and I'm not saved by you," Jenna said. "I picked you. I'm going to keep picking you. I'll say that in front of anybody, and Shane — nobody says it for me. Not ever again."
"No, ma'am," Shane said, and his voice went entirely to pieces on it, and a hundred and forty people pretended not to notice.
"I love you," she said. "That's the promise. It's not a hope and it's not a plan. It's a fact about the rest of my life and you can build on it."
Micah, who had abandoned the card in his own hand, said, "Well, hell. Kiss her, then."
The rest of it was a party in a yard, and it went on until two in the morning.
Lucy fell asleep at nine on Jill Sterling's shoulder, in her good dress, with a fistful of somebody's hair, and Jill sat in a lawn chair for two hours rather than move her.
Somebody found a fiddle. Deanna played until her arm gave out.
Grady Ames danced badly with the woman from the diner.
Maxine Gault, who had come with a driver and stayed four hours longer than anybody expected, sat on the porch steps holding court and told a story about 1979 that made three people cry.
At about midnight the band that had not been a band in a year set up in the grass and played, badly and joyfully, for an hour and a half, and Shane sang three songs and then handed the microphone to his wife and went and stood at the side with everybody else and watched her do it.
That was the picture that ended up everywhere, in the end. Somebody's phone, from the back. A woman singing in a yard in a green dress, and off at the edge of the frame, out of the light, a man with his arms folded, looking at her the way you look at the thing you nearly lost.
He never once complained about being at the edge of the frame. Not that night, not in the two years after, not ever.
At four in the morning Jenna woke up out of habit, in her own bed, in her own house.
She lay there for a second and listened. The monitor was quiet. The whole hill was quiet. Somewhere down in the yard the tent was still up because Grady had gone to sleep in it.
Shane was awake beside her, on his back, with his hands behind his head.
"You too?"
"Every night," he said. "Fourteen months. I don't know how you did it for twenty years."
"You get used to it." She turned over and put her hand flat on his chest. "There's a second verse in the barn with nothing in it."
"There is."
"Do you want to go and look at it?"
Shane Bishop turned his head on the pillow and looked at his wife, and in the dark she could hear the grin arrive before she could see it.
"There she is," he said.
And Jenna laughed out loud in her own bed at four in the morning, and kissed him, and got up and went to find her boots — because she was thirty-nine years old and married and happy, and her name was first on the front of the best record in America, and there was a song downstairs with a hole in it, and the man who was going to help her fill it was pulling on his jeans in the dark behind her, and every single bit of that was hers, and she had picked it.