CHAPTER TWO #2
"My father," Jackson said, "is a man who has never once been wrong in front of me.
Not once. I'm thirty-one years old and I have never seen him lose.
And I have spent my whole life becoming the kind of man he can't lose in front of either.
So I'm very good at rooms. I can read a room the way you read this one.
I can tell you who's angry and who's about to fold and who's lying about a boat.
" Rain ran down the window and cut the neon into pieces on the table between them.
"And I got very good at it, and one day I realized I couldn't remember a single conversation I'd had in years that wasn't a room.
Everyone I know wants the same thing from me, and they all pretend to want other things first, and I'm supposed to enjoy the pretending.
That's the family. That's the true thing.
" He looked up at her. "You're the first person in a long time who talked to me before you knew what I was worth.
I keep driving down here to find out if it holds. "
Sharon had stopped eating the fries.
For a moment she didn't say anything, and Jackson felt the old panic, the certainty that he'd handed over the contents of the room and would now watch her weigh them.
"Jack," she said instead, quietly. "That's the saddest rich-guy thing anyone's ever said to me, and I once had a man cry at the counter because his yacht guy quit."
The laugh came out of him before he could stop it, startled and real, and it broke the thing open instead of closing it, and Sharon grinned at him across the wreckage of his fries, and outside the rain kept coming down, and neither of them mentioned that he still hadn't told her his last name.
The first time she let him take her somewhere, it was nowhere.
Her shift ended at nine. He was still in the booth, pretending to read the property brief he'd long since memorized, and she came out from the back in her own clothes instead of the uniform, and it stopped him for a second, the way seeing a coworker in a swimsuit stops you.
Not because she looked different. Because she looked like herself with the diner subtracted, and he realized he'd only ever met the version of her that was working.
"There's a spot," she said, tying a jacket around her waist. "If you're not in a hurry to get back to your building."
The spot was a rise at the edge of a soybean field two miles out of town, where somebody long ago had pushed a picnic table nobody maintained.
From the top you could see the water tower, the grain elevator, and the whole flat dark country running out to a horizon with one set of headlights crawling across it.
"This is where everybody comes," Sharon said, sitting on the tabletop with her feet on the bench, "to feel like the town is small enough to hold." She glanced at him. "You're gonna hate it. There's no valet."
"I don't hate it."
"You're doing the face you do at the AC. The this-could-be-optimized face."
"I'm not."
"You are a little."
He was a little. He was standing at the edge of a soybean field in two-thousand-dollar shoes, and some part of him was already pricing the view, calculating what it would take to put a boutique property on this rise, forty keys, farmhouse-modern, a restaurant that served an elevated version of Dolores's pie at nine dollars a slice.
The part of him that did that never fully switched off. It was the part his father had built.
He made it switch off. He sat down next to her on the table, and he looked at the town the way she was looking at it, small enough to hold, and after a while the pricing stopped.
"My whole life is the opposite of this," he said. "Everything I'm around is designed to feel like more than it is. This feels like exactly what it is."
"That's the nicest way anybody's ever called my town nothing."
"That's not what I said."
"I know what you said." She bumped her shoulder against his, light, the first time she'd touched him on purpose.
"I'm just checking you know the difference between a place that's small and a place that's less.
Because the people up in your world, Jack.
They don't. I've served enough of them passing through.
They look at Harlow like it's a waiting room for a real life.
" She said it without heat, which was worse than heat.
"I need you to not be one of those, or this is a nice night and nothing else. "
He turned to look at her. The lighter ring was there, near the center, the one that showed when she was about to say a thing she'd decided to risk.
"I'm not one of those," Jackson said.
"You sure? Because I looked you up, Jack." Her voice stayed easy, but her eyes didn't. "There's a lot of Jacks in Chicago hotels. Took me a while. You didn't make it easy."
Everything in him went still.
"But I stopped," she said, before he could speak.
"Halfway through. I closed the laptop. Because I figured a man drives three hours a week to be somebody who nobody's looked up, and if I looked you up I'd have the answer and I'd lose the man.
" She shrugged, but it cost her something.
"So I don't know your last name. I decided not to know it.
But I'm telling you I decided, so you know I'm choosing this on purpose, and not because I'm some small-town girl who can't work a search bar. "
Jackson looked at the one set of headlights crawling across the far edge of the dark, and understood that she had just handed him something he had no right to, and that the honest thing, the decent thing, was to tell her the name and let her make the choice with her eyes open.
"Sharon," he said.
"Don't." She was watching the same headlights.
"Not tonight. Tonight I want the man." She turned to him then, and the ring was gone, replaced by something steadier and more frightening.
"Tell me tomorrow. Or next week. Tell me when it's real enough that the name won't change it.
But if you tell me now, I'll always wonder if I only stayed because of what came after the name.
And I don't want to wonder that. Not about you. "
He should have told her anyway.
He would think about that later, for years, standing in rooms much larger than a soybean field. He would understand that this was the first door he closed on her, and that he closed it because she'd asked him to, and that asked-for or not, a closed door is a closed door, and they compound.
But that night he only nodded, and she leaned her head on his shoulder, and they watched the headlights reach the horizon and disappear, and he did not tell her his name.
He drove back to Chicago that night three and a half hours in the dark, and for the first time he could remember, the phone in the cupholder stayed face down the entire way, and he never once checked it.