CHAPTER 10 JACKSON
JACKSON
“I’ll have the turkey sandwich on whole wheat, not white. And fries instead of mashed potatoes, but not if they’re breaded. If they’re breaded, I’ll do the mashed potatoes. Oh, and the salad with the Caesar dressing. But not if it’s dressing from the bottle. Homemade only, please.”
I hand over the menu to the unimpressed waitress. She smacks her gum and stares at me. “Of course the dressing is homemade. This is a diner, sweetheart, not a McDonald’s.”
I fold my hands together, not exactly inspired by how her pen hasn’t taken a single note.
This place is exactly as expected. Chipped vinyl flooring.
An octogenarian with bright blue hair and ten thousand pounds of mascara manning the cash register.
Leather booth seats that squeak when you move and miniature jukeboxes at the end of every table.
“We make everything in-house,” our waitress continues. “Including the Caesar.”
“Excellent, thank you.”
“Mashed potatoes got skins,” she adds, like she expects me to change my mind and list out another five to ten contingencies. But I’ve exhausted the lot of them, and I don’t like French fries that much anyway.
“That’s fine,” I say.
Our waitress turns wordlessly to Delilah, arching one penciled-on eyebrow. “Well,” she says. Another snap of her gum. “What about you?”
Delilah hands over her menu without looking away from me. She’s been doing that for most of this trip. Studying me like she wants to peel back my layers and poke around underneath.
“I’ll have the turkey sandwich with fries.
No additions or modifications, thank you.
” The waitress disappears back into the kitchen and Delilah scrunches her nose.
She’s still wearing my jacket, draped over her shoulders like a cape.
I know she’s been teasing me about my timetable, but if she reached into the left pocket, she’d find exactly that, folded into neat squares and highlighted to within an inch of its life.
“Really stepped outside your comfort zone with that order, huh.”
I reach for the sugar packets, slowly arranging them by height and color. “I know what I like.”
“You order food like a serial killer.”
I swap a Sweet’N Low with a Sugar in the Raw, then change my mind and switch them back.
“I’m particular,” I explain. “I like things done a certain way. And the sign said the turkey sandwich was famous.”
I’m particularly particular when it feels like I’m losing control of everything else.
I am currently hurtling toward a massive winter storm in the mountains with my polar opposite as company.
I’m supposed to go on live television and explain—in clear and concise terms—what’s happening.
I left my sisters behind for the first time since I assumed custody, and my mother won’t stop sending me text messages from random, unknown numbers, asking the most asinine questions.
My head is in shambles, and so I ordered the mashed potatoes.
With skins.
Delilah drops her chin into her hand. “I’ll accept that answer.
” She takes a noisy slurp of her chocolate milkshake.
The one she politely inquired about as soon as we walked through the front door (“You don’t happen to have chocolate milkshakes, do you?
”) and was somehow waiting for her at our table, like a foreign dignitary sitting down to a state dinner.
I’ll never understand how she draws people in and makes them love her, all with a sunny smile and a flick of her long hair.
She smacks her lips. “For now,” she adds, a thin undercurrent of warning in her voice.
“Noted,” I answer.
So far, this trip is both exactly what I expected and nothing like I planned.
I thought Delilah would babble incessantly for the duration of our time in the car, some vapid, sugary-sweet commentary on the passing pine trees or gas station snacks.
And while she did deliver a fifteen-minute monologue about the underrated power of a good peach ring, she’s otherwise largely kept to herself.
“Tell me about your sisters,” she demands from the other side of the table, reaching up to toy with the button at the base of her throat.
“Um,” I say, distracted. She’s wearing a soft-looking V-neck sweater that clings to all her curves, so different from her structured broadcast dresses.
My eyes dipped once when she was climbing into the van and I pinched myself so hard, I still have the mark on my wrist. The last thing I need is to start looking at Delilah Stewart.
But holding that line is borderline impossible with the way she keeps dancing her fingers along the top of her chest. She closes the snap then undoes it again. Open. Closed.
My jaw clenches tight.
“How old are they?” she asks.
I have to forcibly drag my brain back into the conversation. “What?”
“Your sisters,” Delilah says, amused. “How old are they?”
“Oh, they’re fifteen.” I push the sugar container away. “Twins,” I explain.
“That’s quite the age gap.”
I shrug. I thought the same thing when my mom came back to our tiny apartment after being gone on a two-week bender, clutching a sonogram with tears in her eyes.
Our family just got bigger, Jack, she had said with a tremulous smile. How lucky are we?
I didn’t feel lucky at all. I felt horrified that she’d bring two more children into the world when she was already doing such a shit job raising the first one.
“My mother is . . .” I try to think of a word that fully encompasses Camille Clark. “Unconventional,” I finally settle on. “It’s why I have full custody of the girls now.”
I know what to expect at this point in the conversation.
Pity will soften her features and she’ll struggle to find something to say.
She won’t bring it up again, and she’ll make her own assumptions about me, the girls, and the family we’ve stitched together.
I’ve seen it happen a thousand times. The discomfort that people distort themselves into, just so they don’t need to feel the edges of mine.
I brace myself for it, but when I lift my eyes, Delilah is toying with the cherry from the top of her milkshake, chewing on the stem thoughtfully.
“That’s cool,” she says, without a trace of . . . anything. “You must be close.”
I blink, stupefied. “Yeah. We are.”
“Are they excited to see you on TV?”
I think about the family text thread and how it’s filled to the brim with a string of incomprehensible emojis and requests for updates.
Penelope’s last message of, Should I get a life-sized cardboard cutout of you for our viewing party?
And Adeline’s immediate response of, YES, WE ARE DOING IT I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU SAY.
A picture twenty-five minutes later of Aiden standing next to a cobbled-together cardboard cutout of me, his arm slung over its shoulders.
“Yeah, they’re excited.” I pick at a tiny chip in the side of the sugar container. “They’re big fans of yours.”
Her face lights up and she sits straighter in the cracked leather booth seat, the jacket slipping off one shoulder, taking the collar of her sweater with it.
I get a glimpse of pale, creamy skin. The delicate line of her throat.
She has a thin gold necklace on, anchored with some sort of rabbit charm.
Do not look below her chin, you asshole. Do not.
I’m acting like a Regency era viscount. Two inches of collarbone, and I’m gripping the edge of the table so hard it’s biting into my palms.
“That’s so nice,” Delilah exclaims, like all of Baltimore isn’t already in love with her and the loyalty of two teenagers is something awe-inspiring.
It would be annoying if it wasn’t also completely genuine.
She pops the cherry into her mouth. “Honestly, the only reason I started doing broadcasts is because my grandpa was obsessed with seeing me on television. He said it was my destiny. Big horoscope guy, Gus Stewart.”
“Yeah?”
She nods with a little hum. “Yeah. He’s always believed in me best. I think if he could rewrite the stars for me, he would.” She takes another long slurp of milkshake. “He raised me, you know. My mom was also . . . unconventional.”
My breath backs up in my lungs. “Oh,” is all I can think to say.
“She was a violin prodigy,” Delilah continues, undeterred.
“I’ve seen some videos of when she was little and she was incredible, even then, when the bow was bigger than her.
My grandpa took her to the Peabody three times a week.
Worked multiple jobs so she could have the very best of the best when it came to lessons, equipment.
Eventually, she won a chair with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.
Coincidentally around that time, she also got pregnant with me.
” Delilah shoots me a small, tight-lipped smile.
“I guess she thought she could have both, but I was . . . too much, and she chose what she’d invested the most time in.
She was going to put me up for adoption, but my grandpa begged her to reconsider.
She signed over custody to him instead.” She takes a noisy slurp of her drink.
“He gets a kick out of seeing me on TV, and I like showing him he didn’t make all those sacrifices for nothing.
” She frowns at her milkshake glass. “Hey, hand me that extra straw. This one is zapped.”
I hand her my straw without looking away from her face. How can she do that? Open a vein and let all her barbed truths spill free without stumbling over a single word. Without being broken or burdened by it.
She taps the straw on the table to clear the wrapper, then drops it into her milkshake.
“So. We have more in common than you think. Or, me and your sisters, I guess.” She hits an empty spot with her straw and shifts it around, trying to find another pocket of chocolate while I navigate the brand-new, tipsy-topsy feeling tightening like a band around my chest.
“What do they think of your unmitigated hatred for me?”