CHAPTER THREE
The Secret Wedding
POV: Sharon ? One year later
He told her his last name on a Tuesday, and it went wrong almost immediately.
Not because of the name. Because of how he'd planned it.
Sharon should have known something was off when he asked her to dinner somewhere that wasn't the diner.
In a year of Jack, they had eaten at the Bluebird, at the picnic table on the rise, at her tiny kitchen table where the third chair had a wobble he kept meaning to fix and never did.
They had never once gone somewhere with cloth napkins.
So when he said there was a place he wanted to take her, forty minutes away in the county seat, white tablecloths, he'd made a reservation, she felt the ground tilt a little under the word reservation.
She wore the green dress. She did her hair in the mirror with the crack in the corner. She felt, getting into his car, like a woman auditioning for a part in her own life.
The restaurant was beautiful and wrong. The waiter called Jack Mr. Scott, and Sharon heard it, and filed it, and said nothing, because she had spent a year not looking him up and she was not going to fall apart over a waiter.
Jack ordered wine she couldn't pronounce and got a look on his face she'd never seen, stiff and rehearsed, and she realized he was nervous, which made her nervous, because Jack was never nervous.
Jack read rooms. Jack was the calmest man she'd ever met.
And here he was folding and refolding his napkin like a man about to give a deposition.
"Just say it," she said, halfway through the appetizer neither of them was eating.
"Say what?"
"Whatever this dinner is. You've been building up to something since we got in the car. You did the thing with the cup twice and there's no cup." She set down her fork. "You're scaring me, Jack. Just say it."
So he said it. But he said it like a presentation.
He told her his full name was Jackson Scott.
He told her about Scott Hospitality Group, about the buildings, the number of them, the size of the number.
He told her about his father and the board and the estate on the North Shore, and he did it in order, in that even controlled voice, the voice she now understood was the room voice, and the more he explained the smaller she felt, and the smaller she felt the angrier she got, and she couldn't have said, in the moment, exactly why.
"Stop," she said.
"I haven't gotten to the part where"
"Stop talking, Jack." Her voice came out sharper than she meant it, and the couple at the next table glanced over, and she didn't care. "You're doing a pitch. You practiced this. You practiced telling me who you are like I'm a board you need to get a yes out of."
"I wanted to do it right."
"There's no right way, that's the whole" She stopped.
Started again. "You've known who you are for a year.
I asked you not to tell me the name until it was real.
And this is how you decided it got real?
A reservation and a rehearsed speech and a waiter calling you Mr. Scott before you got the chance? "
"I was trying to give you the full picture so you could"
"So I could what. Decide?" She laughed, and it wasn't her good laugh, it was the other one, the one that came out when something hurt.
"You think I've been deciding? I decided a year ago, at a picnic table, when I had the search bar open and closed the laptop.
I decided you. Not this." She gestured at the wine, the tablecloth, the size of the number he'd said out loud like it was a gift.
"You just decided you needed to buy me a nice enough dinner first, in case the man wasn't enough without it. "
That landed. She watched it land. And she was not sorry, and she was a little sorry, both at once, which was the truth of most fights she'd ever had.
Jack sat there. For once he didn't have the next line. The napkin was ruined in his hands.
"I've never told anyone before," he said finally, quiet, the rehearsal gone out of his voice.
"The real version. There's a version I give people and it's the one you just heard, and I don't know another way to say it, because I've never once had to say it to someone I actually" He stopped.
"I did it wrong. I know I did it wrong. I could feel myself doing it wrong the whole time and I couldn't stop. "
And there he was. The man, coming back into his own face.
Sharon breathed out.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. Try again. Without the number. Without the waiter. Just tell me one true thing, like the rain."
"I'm terrified," Jackson said, "that when my father finds out about you, I'm going to have to choose. And I already know what I'm going to choose. And it's you. And that terrifies me more than losing him does, because I've never once put anything above him, and I don't know who I am if I do."
The restaurant went on around them, forks and low voices and someone laughing two tables over.
"That," Sharon said, "is a much better dinner."
POV: Jackson
The proposal was worse than the dinner, and he'd had time to prepare for the proposal.
He'd bought the ring in Chicago from a man who'd known his mother for thirty years, which meant it was beautiful and it meant it wasn't a secret anymore, not entirely, and Jackson had lain awake over that trade and made it anyway.
He'd planned to do it at the picnic table on the rise. He'd planned words.
What actually happened was the third chair.
He was at her kitchen table, the wobbly-chaired one, on a Sunday he'd skipped a family lunch to be there, which was its own kind of statement.
Sharon was at the stove doing something to eggs, talking about Earl's drainage ditch, and Jackson had the ring box in his jacket on the back of the wobbly chair, and he kept looking at the jacket, and she caught him looking.
"You keep staring at your coat like it owes you money."
"It's nothing."
"You've checked it four times. Is there a phone in there? Are you being trained again?" She turned around with the spatula. "Jack. What's in the coat."
And that was it. That was the whole plan, gone.
There was no rise, no view, no words. There was a kitchen that smelled like eggs and a woman holding a spatula and looking at him like she already half knew, and Jackson understood that if he waited for the version he'd planned he'd be waiting for a version that didn't exist, because nothing about them had ever once happened the way he planned it.
So he got the box out of the coat. He didn't kneel. There wasn't really room, and later he'd wish he had, and later still he'd understand it didn't matter.
"I had a whole thing," he said. "At the rise. I had words."
"Oh my God."
"Marry me. That's not the words, the words were better, but"
"Jack."
"I know it's fast. I know we can't do it the normal way, I know my family is going to be a fight I haven't had yet, I know I'm asking you to sign up for a war before I've even" He was doing it again, the explaining, the picture.
He made himself stop. "I love you. Marry me.
That's the true thing. That's the only part I practiced that was real. "
Sharon put down the spatula.
She didn't say yes right away, and the two or three seconds of silence were the longest of Jackson's life, longer than any board vote, longer than any of his father's pauses.
"The eggs are burning," she said.
"Sharon."
"I'm saying yes, you idiot, I'm also saying the eggs are burning, both things are true.
" She turned off the burner without looking, the way she refilled coffee without looking, and then she was in his lap on the wobbly chair, which tipped alarmingly and held, and she had her hands on his face and she was crying and laughing in the way he'd only seen her do for other people, and she said yes properly, into his mouth, and the ring didn't fit and neither of them cared.
Later he fixed the wobble in the chair. It took four minutes and a folded matchbook. She'd lived with it for three years.
"You could've done that anytime," she said, watching.
"You never asked."
"I shouldn't have to ask a man to fix a chair, Jack."
"Scott," he said. "You're going to be a Scott. You should practice being annoyed at me by my whole name."
"I'll be annoyed at you by whatever name gets the chair fixed faster," Sharon said, and it was, he thought, the most married thing anyone had ever said to him, and they weren't even married yet.
POV: Sharon
The wedding was small the way a thing is small when it's hiding.
That was the part nobody told you about a secret.
It made everything smaller. They married at the county courthouse on a Thursday, because the courthouse was empty on Thursdays, and Jack booked the whole thing under the name Williams, her name, so that no one would think twice.
Sharon stood in her green dress again, the one from the wrong restaurant, because it was the nicest thing she owned and because she was stubborn about it, and Jack wore a suit that probably cost more than the courthouse's annual budget, and they looked, in the one photo Dolores took, like two people who did not quite belong in the same picture.
Dolores was the witness. That was the fight, actually, the small ugly fight nobody would think to have.
"You want Dolores to stand up for you and you can't tell your own mother," Dolores said, in the courthouse bathroom, adjusting Sharon's collar with hands that had made forty years of pie. "I'm not saying no. I'm saying somebody should say the thing out loud, and it's not gonna be him."
"Dolores."