CHAPTER THREE #3
Not we're having a baby. Not the version with his hands on her face. The flat version, the one designed to land like a slap, delivered to the man who'd said unmovable, and it worked, it landed exactly like she'd built it to.
Jackson stood in the kitchen with the flowers going stupid in his hand.
"You're"
"Eight weeks. I found out Thursday. The Thursday you cancelled.
" She turned around then, and her eyes weren't soft, they were furious and frightened in equal measure, and the lighter ring was gone, drowned out.
"I sat here Thursday night by myself with a test in my hand and you were at something unmovable.
So no, I'm not going to tell you the nice way.
You didn't earn the nice way this week."
And here was the thing Jackson would think about for years: he didn't defend himself.
For once he didn't explain, didn't give the picture, didn't reach for the room voice.
He put the flowers down on the counter, and he crossed the kitchen, and he got down on the floor in front of her, actually down, on the linoleum she'd mopped that morning, and he put his forehead against her stomach and his arms around the backs of her knees and he didn't say anything at all for a long time.
"I'm going to fix this," he said, finally, into her shirt.
"Fix what. The baby's not a wobbly chair, Jack."
"The unmovable. All of it. I'm going to tell them.
I've been waiting for the right time and there's no right time, I know that now, so I'm going to make it.
Before this baby comes, you're going to be a Scott out loud.
" He looked up at her from the floor, and he believed it, she could see that he believed it, which was the terrible part, because she believed it too. "I promise you. Before the baby."
Sharon put her hand in his hair.
She wanted to believe him more than she'd ever wanted anything, and she did believe him, and some small cold part of her that had grown up watching her father promise her mother things filed the promise away with a date on it, the way you file a receipt you suspect you'll need.
Before the baby, she thought.
She was already, without meaning to, counting the weeks.
POV: Jackson
He drove to the estate the next Sunday to tell them, and he didn't tell them.
That was the whole scene, though it didn't feel like a scene while it was happening.
It felt like nothing. That was the trap of it.
His father was in the study with a glass of something and the market pages, and his mother was arranging peonies she'd have the staff rearrange later, and the house was doing what the house always did, which was make Jackson feel like a boy who'd tracked mud somewhere.
He had the words. He'd practiced them in the car, and hated that he'd practiced them, and practiced them anyway. I'm married. Her name is Sharon. We're having a child. I need you to meet her.
He got as far as the study door.
"There you are," Richard said, without looking up. "Sit. The Hargrove position closes in six weeks and I want you across a table from their people before it does. Vivian's included. Your mother's arranging a dinner."
And Jackson sat.
He'd tell himself later that he sat because the timing was wrong, because you didn't announce a secret marriage in the same breath a man mentioned a dinner with the woman he expected you to marry, because there was a strategy to these things and he was protecting Sharon by waiting for the right ground.
He'd tell himself a lot of things on the drive home. Some of them were even partly true.
But the plain fact, the one he couldn't quite look at directly, was smaller and worse than strategy. His father had said sit, and thirty-two years of Jackson had sat, and the words he'd practiced stayed folded in his chest like a napkin he couldn't stop ruining.
"Fine," he heard himself say. "Set the dinner."
His mother came to the door with peonies in her hands and something guarded in her face, because Eleanor Scott missed nothing, and she looked at her son for a moment too long.
"You seem tired, darling," she said. It was not quite a question. With his mother, nothing ever quite was.
"Long week."
"Mm." She let it go, the way she let everything go in front of Richard, saving it for later, filing it the way the women in Jackson's life all seemed to file things about him. "Come help me with these. Your father's useless with flowers and I've stopped pretending otherwise."
He helped her with the peonies. He stayed for lunch. He agreed to a dinner with the Hargroves and said nothing about his wife, and he drove the long dark road home to a woman who was carrying his child and counting weeks, and when she asked how it went, he said,
"Soon. Not yet. But soon."
And Sharon looked at him for a long moment across the wobbly-no-longer chair, and she nodded, and she didn't fight, and that was the first night he understood that her not fighting was worse than any fight, because it meant she'd started keeping her own counsel about him.
The receipt, filed. The week, counted.
Soon.