CHAPTER ONE #2
When the bus loaded up and pulled out, the diner exhaled back into quiet, and Jackson stood behind the counter with an empty pot in his hand and no idea how he'd gotten there, and Sharon looked at him over the wreckage of the rush, both of them a little breathless, and something passed between them that neither of them named because naming it was still weeks away.
"You're not bad," she said. "For a suit."
"I got three orders wrong."
"Four. But you hustle. You can't teach hustle." She took the pot from him, and her fingers brushed his taking it, the first time they'd touched all day, and both of them noticed, and both of them pretended not to. "Most people would've sat in the booth and watched me drown. You got up."
"You told me to get up."
"I told you to make yourself useful. Getting up was your idea." She set the pot back on the burner. "There's a difference. I've told a lot of people to get up. You'd be surprised how many just order more coffee."
Jackson rolled his sleeves back down. His hands smelled like the diner now, coffee and something griddled, and he thought, absurdly, that he didn't want to wash them.
He thought about the fifty-second floor and the silence up there and the way no one had told him to get up in longer than he could remember, and he looked at this woman rescuing him from Mr. Petrie's heart and cataloguing the difference between people who rise and people who order more coffee, and he understood he was in some quiet trouble he had no vocabulary for yet.
"Sit back down," Sharon said, gentler now. "Your truck's not for a while. I'll bring you the good coffee. You earned the good coffee. It's the same as the regular coffee, but you earned it, so it's better."
He sat back down. She brought him the coffee that was the same but better. And Jackson, who could read any room, sat in the warm wreck of that one and could not for the life of him read what was happening to him in it.
At six-forty, Jackson stepped outside to stretch his legs, and his phone found a pocket of signal. It began to convulse in his hand, emails landing in bursts, voicemail alerts stacking, and then the screen lit with a name.
DAD.
Through the diner window he could see Sharon laughing at something the old man had said, her head tipped back.
He answered. "Dad."
"You missed the Hargrove dinner." No greeting. Richard Scott did not spend words on things already known.
"The car broke down outside Carbondale. I'm waiting on a tow."
"You drove. Marcus offered you the plane."
"I wanted to see the corridor. The market between here and the site. You can't see a market from the air."
"You can't see it from a ditch either." Papers moved on the other end of the line. His father was always doing two things, and the phone call was never the first one. "The Hargroves asked after you. Vivian was there."
Jackson closed his eyes briefly. "How is Vivian."
"Accomplished. Appropriate. Patient, though I would not test that last one indefinitely." His father let that settle like a chess piece being set down. "Her father's fund is taking a position in hospitality. These dinners are not social, Jackson. Nothing we do is social."
"I know that."
"Your mother made your excuses. She's better at it than you deserve. Bring me numbers on Carbondale, not instincts. If your instincts were sound, you'd have been at that dinner."
The line went dead. His father ended calls the way he ended discussions, which was whenever he was finished, regardless of whether anyone else was.
Jackson stood in the parking lot with a lifetime of practiced calm settling back over him like a coat he'd briefly forgotten he was wearing.
Through the window, Sharon caught sight of him. She held up his abandoned coffee cup and pointed sternly at his booth, like a woman ordering a large dog back to its bed.
He went inside. The bell jangled. The coat came off again, just a little.
"Everything okay?" she asked, refilling the cup. Not prying. Just asking, the way she'd asked Mrs. Ellery nothing at all.
"Family."
"Ah." She nodded slowly, as if he'd spoken a language she was fluent in. "The one call that finds signal anywhere. You could be on the moon and family would get through. Collect."
"Yours too?"
"My mother once tracked me down at a wedding in another state to ask where the good scissors were.
" She studied him for a second, the loosened tie, the careful face, and whatever she saw, she chose not to name it.
"Pie fixes about sixty percent of family.
You want another slice, or are you gonna sit there being forty percent unfixed? "
"Another slice. Obviously."
"Attaboy."
The tow truck came at ten past seven, headlights sweeping the diner window. Jackson watched it pull in and felt, absurdly, disappointed.
He paid at the register. Sharon rang him up while shouting through the kitchen window that the pie had claimed another victim, and Dolores shouted something back about a punch card for out-of-towners, and then there was a moment, brief and unremarkable to everyone else in the building, where Sharon looked at him across the counter and the smile faded into something quieter, and neither of them said anything at all.
"So," she said finally. "The bad building in Carbondale. You'll come back through? To decide if it can be a good one?"
"Probably. Next week."
"Then take the highway route." She counted out his change with great concentration. "It's slower. But there's this diner about a mile past the breakdown point. Terrible neon. Excellent pie."
"I hear the meatloaf's good too."
"The meatloaf is life-changing, but the waitress talks too much."
"I didn't mind the waitress," Jackson said.
He hadn't planned to say it. It came out quieter than he intended, and more honest, and for the first time all afternoon Sharon Williams looked like she didn't have the next line ready.
She recovered by handing him a to-go cup he hadn't ordered. "For the road. Frank drives the truck. He's gonna tell you about his boat. There is no boat. Nobody knows why."
Jackson took the cup. "Thank you, Sharon." Her eyes flicked down to her own name tag, as if she'd forgotten it was doing her introductions for her.
"You're welcome," she said, and paused, eyebrows up. Waiting.
And here it was. The moment he'd navigated a thousand times. His full name, then the flicker of recognition, or the pretense of none, which was its own performance. The recalibration in their eyes. The way a room changed shape around his last name.
"Jack," he said.
"Jack." She tried it out, nodded, unimpressed and unchanged, exactly as he'd hoped. "Drive safe, Jack. Tell Frank the boat sounds beautiful."
Frank told him about the boat.
Jackson made appropriate sounds about a vessel that did not exist while the Bluebird's neon shrank in the side mirror and his mind stayed a mile back down the road.
He reached Chicago a little before eleven. He had missed the board dinner. There were twenty-six urgent emails, four missed calls from his father, and a voicemail from Marcus that began with a sigh.
His apartment was on the fifty-second floor, the lake a sheet of black glass below, the city laid out beneath him like something he was expected to inherit. He stood at the window with his tie loosened and his phone in his hand and every intention of returning the calls.
Instead he thought about a woman inventing a house account so a widow could eat with her dignity intact. He thought about three hours of conversation, and realized he could not remember the last time anyone had talked to him that long without wanting something.
She hadn't even wanted his name.
The Carbondale inspection was set for the following Thursday. Marcus had proposed flying. Forty minutes each way, back before lunch, efficient, sensible, entirely correct.
Jackson opened his calendar and blocked out the whole day.
Driving, he typed in the notes field. And then, because the calendar was private and no one would ever ask him to justify it:
Highway route.