CHAPTER TWO
Everything He Wasn't Looking For
POV: Sharon
The second time he came in, Sharon told herself it was the pie.
Men came back for the pie. Men came back for the meatloaf, for the coffee that was strong enough to stand a spoon in, for the booth by the window where the light was good and nobody bothered you. Harlow ran on repeat customers. There was nothing strange about a repeat customer.
Except this one had driven from Chicago.
She knew because he'd let it slip the first day, the bad building in Carbondale, the corridor he wanted to see from the ground.
Chicago was three and a half hours away with a fair wind.
Carbondale was another two past Harlow. No sane man made that drive twice in a week for a building, and no man made it at all if he could sit in the front seat of an airplane instead, which she was fairly sure this one could.
"You're back," she said, setting down the water he hadn't asked for.
"The building needed a second look."
"Mm. And the building's in Carbondale."
"It is."
"Which is south of here."
"It is."
"And you came in from the north." She nodded at the parking lot, where the car sat facing the wrong direction for a man headed south.
A different car this time. Not broken. "So either you got lost, Jack, or you drove past Carbondale to come back the way you came.
Which would be a strange thing for a man to do to a diner. "
He looked at her for a moment, and she watched him decide whether to lie, and watched him decide not to, and found that she liked him better for the second thing than she'd have disliked him for the first.
"The pie," he said, "is very good."
"It is," Sharon agreed, and left it there, and did not let him see that her heart had done something foolish on the word back.
He came the next week. And the week after.
By the fourth visit, Dolores had started putting a slice of peach aside when the lunch rush thinned, because a man who drove three hours for pie deserved to be sure of getting some.
By the fifth, Earl had stopped calling him "the suit" and started calling him "your fella," loud enough for the whole counter, and Sharon had thrown a dish towel at Earl's head and missed on purpose.
She learned things about Jack in pieces, the way you learn about a stray that won't come all the way inside.
He noticed everything. He'd tell her the AC was three degrees warmer on the left side of the room, and she'd check, and he'd be right, and it drove her a little insane.
He tipped like a man apologizing for something.
He always sat where he could see the door.
And he never, not once, talked about himself.
She noticed that last one slowly, the way you notice a clock has stopped.
She'd tell him about her mother, who called about scissors.
About her father, gone four years now, who'd taught her to drive in the diner lot and to never trust a man who wouldn't eat in front of you.
About Dolores's ex-husband, about Earl's feud with the county over a drainage ditch, about the whole small loud tangle of her life.
And Jack would listen like it mattered, like she was telling him something rare, and then she'd ask him one plain question back, and the shutter would come down so smoothly she almost missed it.
"What's your family like?" she asked him once, refilling his cup.
"Complicated." A beat. "What did your father drive?"
And there it was. The door, closing without a sound, and then handed straight back to her so gently she wanted to answer it.
She answered it. She told him about the Buick. But she filed it away, the way she filed everything.
"He's married," Dolores said, through the kitchen window, the sixth week.
"He is not married."
"How do you know?"
Sharon didn't know. That was the trouble. "He'd have said."
"Would he." Dolores slid a plate onto the pass.
"Men who drive three hours to look at a waitress don't lead with the wife.
" She said it without cruelty, the way she said most true things.
"I'm not telling you to stop. I'm telling you to keep your eyes open.
Whatever that man's not saying, he's not saying a lot of it. "
Sharon carried the plate out and set it in front of Jack and looked at him, at the good suit and the careful hands and the watch that probably cost more than the diner, and thought, not for the first time, that Dolores wasn't wrong.
There was a whole country in this man she'd never been shown a map of.
"You get quiet," Jack said, "when you're thinking. It's the only time you're quiet."
"I'm allowed to think."
"I didn't say you weren't. I said it's the only time." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer, lining up the handle, a small controlled thing he did without seeming to know he did it. "You want to ask me something. You've wanted to for a week."
She could have laughed it off. She was good at laughing things off. Instead she sat down across from him, uninvited, the way she had the first day, and folded her hands on the table.
"Are you married, Jack?"
The question landed clean. No cushion on it. She watched it hit.
"No," he said. And then, because she was still looking at him, because she had a way of looking that made the short answer feel like a coat that didn't cover you: "There's no one.
My father would like there to be. There's a woman he thinks I should marry.
I've met her four times. I couldn't tell you the color of her eyes. "
"What color are mine?"
"Brown," Jackson said, without looking. "There's a lighter ring near the center. It shows up when you're about to say something you shouldn't."
Sharon opened her mouth. Closed it.
"That," he said, "was one of those times."
She stood up too fast, grabbed the coffeepot she didn't need, and went to refill cups that were already full, and did not trust herself to speak until the heat had left her face.
POV: Jackson
In Chicago, the woman with the unremembered eyes had a name, and the name kept turning up on Jackson's calendar without his consent.
"Vivian Hargrove," Eleanor said, at the Sunday lunch he could not get out of, "is coming to the museum benefit. Her mother tells me she asked whether you'd be there."
"I'll be traveling."
"You are always traveling." His mother said it lightly, the way she said everything that was not light at all.
She was beautiful in the way of women who had decided decades ago exactly which version of themselves to be and had never once slipped.
"Carbondale, is it? Still? Your father says you've been down there four times. "
"Five."
"Five." Eleanor set down her fork. Across the table Richard did not look up from the market pages, but the whole room angled toward him anyway, the way a field angles toward the one tree in it.
"There is nothing in Carbondale, Jackson, that requires you five times.
A junior could inspect a building. What is in Carbondale? "
"Diligence," Jackson said.
His father turned a page. "Diligence," Richard repeated, and the word came back stripped of everything but its skin.
"The Hargrove fund closes its hospitality position in the spring.
If we are in it, we are in it because of a relationship, and the relationship is you.
Vivian is not a chore, Jackson. She is an alignment.
Her family and ours want the same things, move in the same rooms, understand the same rules.
That is worth more than a spark. Sparks burn out. Alignments compound."
"I'm aware of how compounding works."
"Then behave like it." Richard set the paper down at last and looked at his son, and his eyes were not unkind, which was somehow the worst of it, because it meant he believed every word he was about to say was a gift.
"You are the only Scott left to carry this.
I have built something that outlives me.
I need it handed to someone who will not embarrass it.
Marry well. Marry someone the board can look at without flinching.
That is not cruelty. That is love with a longer horizon than yours. "
Eleanor reached over and touched Jackson's wrist, once, the gesture she used in place of the words she would not say in front of her husband.
Let it go. Agree to nothing. Wait him out.
Four decades of marriage had made her fluent in the management of Richard Scott, and she had passed the language to her son the way other mothers passed down recipes.
"I'll be at the benefit," Jackson said, which was a surrender small enough to end the conversation and large enough to cost him nothing he valued.
His father nodded, satisfied, and picked the paper back up, and the field turned away from the tree, and lunch continued.
Jackson looked out the tall windows at the lake and thought about a lighter ring near the center of a pair of brown eyes, and could not for the life of him have told anyone the color of Vivian Hargrove's.
He didn't mean to tell Sharon the truth.
He'd built his whole life on the principle that the truth, offered freely, was a thing other people used.
You gave them the shape of you, the useful parts, the parts that closed deals and reassured boards, and you kept the rest in a room with the door shut.
It had never once occurred to him to open the door, because it had never once occurred to him that anyone would want what was in there rather than what it was worth.
Then it was the eighth week, and it was raining, and the diner was empty, and Sharon was sitting across from him eating fries off his plate because hers had "gone missing" in the exact way Walter's fries went missing, and she said, "Tell me one true thing about yourself, Jack.
Not boring-secret. True. You know everything about me and I know your coffee order and that you lie about Carbondale. "
And he thought about the door.