CHAPTER FOUR
The First Rejection
POV: Sharon ? Six years before the present
She was five months along when Jackson finally brought her to the house, and she threw up in the car twice on the way, once from the baby and once from nerves, and she wasn't sure the second time counted as morning sickness but she blamed it anyway because it was less embarrassing.
"You don't have to do this today," Jackson said, for the fourth time, somewhere on the interstate.
"Yes I do. You've said soon about nine times.
If I let you say it a tenth I'll have the baby first and then it's not soon, it's late.
" She pressed a bottle of ginger ale to her forehead.
"Also I already told Dolores I was doing it.
I can't come back and tell her I chickened out.
She'll make a face. You haven't seen the face. "
"What does the face do?"
"It doesn't do anything. That's what makes it the face."
She was talking too much. She knew she was talking too much.
She did it when she was scared and she couldn't stop, and Jackson knew it too, and he reached over and put his hand on her knee and didn't tell her to calm down, which she appreciated, because if he'd told her to calm down she'd have thrown the ginger ale at him.
The house, when they came up the drive, was worse than she'd pictured, and she'd pictured a lot. It wasn't a house. It was a statement about houses. There was a person whose entire job appeared to be the door.
"Okay," Sharon said, mostly to herself. "Okay. It's just a big house. Mrs. Ellery lived in a trailer and she had more class than any of this. It's just a big house."
"What?"
"Nothing. Pep talk. Keep driving, we're committed."
She'd worn the green dress. She realized, halfway up the drive, that this was a mistake, that the green dress was a courthouse dress and a wrong-restaurant dress and it was going to look, in this house, like exactly what it was, which was the nicest thing a diner waitress owned.
She smoothed it over the bump and felt cheap and hated that she felt cheap and hated Jackson a little, unfairly, for being the reason she was in a car feeling cheap in the first place.
She didn't say any of that. She should have. That was the thing she'd think later. She'd walked into that house already bracing, already half-defeated, and she'd let Jackson think she was fine, because being fine was the job she'd given herself, and nobody had asked her to take that job but her.
POV: Jackson
His mother was gracious, which was worse than if she'd been cruel.
Eleanor met them in the front room with her hands out and a smile that had been to finishing school, and she took both of Sharon's hands and said how lovely, how good of Jackson to bring her, what a pretty dress, and every word was correct and every word was a small closed door, and Jackson watched Sharon try to open each one and find it locked and keep smiling anyway.
"You're expecting," Eleanor said, glancing at the bump with an expression Jackson couldn't read and didn't want to. "Jackson didn't mention how far along."
"Five months," Sharon said. "Give or take. The baby doesn't check in with me on the schedule."
Eleanor laughed, a small silver laugh, the kind you could serve on a tray. "No, they never do." A beat. "And you two have been. Seeing each other. How long?"
"We're married," Jackson said.
He hadn't meant to say it like that. He'd meant to build to it.
He had, God help him, practiced building to it.
But his mother had said seeing each other in a tone that made Sharon into a phase, a thing that would resolve, and something in him refused it, and the truth came out flat and graceless in the middle of the front room.
The silver laugh stopped.
Eleanor looked at her son. Then she looked at Sharon's hand, at the ring she must not have noticed or must have decided not to notice, and her face did something complicated and quick and then closed over smooth as water.
"I see," she said.
"Mother"
"Your father is in the study." She was already turning.
"You had better tell him yourself. He does not like to hear important things from me.
" She paused at the door and looked back at Sharon, and for one second, one only, something almost human crossed her face, something that might even have been pity.
"Sit down, dear. You shouldn't be on your feet. I'll have someone bring you water."
And she was gone, and Sharon was standing in the middle of a room the size of the whole Bluebird, one hand on the bump, and Jackson saw her mouth dear to herself with an expression he'd spend years trying to forget.
POV: Jackson
The study door was heavy and it didn't quite close, and that was how Sharon heard everything, though Jackson didn't know that yet.
His father listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which was its own kind of terrible, because Richard Scott interrupting meant he was engaged and Richard Scott listening in silence meant he'd already decided and was only waiting for you to finish.
Jackson told him. Married a year. A child coming.
Her name is Sharon, she's from downstate, she waited tables, she's the best person I've ever known.
He got it all out. He was proud, distantly, that his voice didn't shake.
Richard set down his glass.
"How much does she know," he said, "about what you're worth."
"That's not"
"It is exactly the question. It is the only question.
" His father stood and went to the window, hands behind his back, the pose he took when he was being reasonable at you.
"A waitress. Downstate. Meets a man who won't say what he does, drives an expensive car, tips too much.
I'd have caught it in a week, Jackson. You had a year and a child before you thought to be suspicious. "
"She stopped looking me up. She didn't want to know."
"Of course that's what she told you."
"You don't know her."
"I don't need to know her. I've known forty of her.
" Richard turned. He wasn't angry. That was the thing Jackson could never make anyone understand about his father afterward.
He wasn't angry, he was sure, and his sureness had the weight of a closing door.
"Do you imagine you're the first man in this family a pretty girl saw coming?
Your grandfather nearly married a dancer.
My own brother, you don't even remember him, we made sure of that.
This is not a story that ends well and it is not a new story. We have a procedure for it."
"She's my wife. There's no procedure. There's a child."
"There's always a procedure." Richard sat back down and picked up the market pages, which was how Jackson knew the conversation was ending whether or not it was finished.
"Bring me the marriage certificate and I'll have Coleman look at it.
We can keep this quiet. An annulment is cleaner than a divorce, and the child can be provided for privately, generously, no one need ever"
"Stop."
Jackson didn't recognize his own voice. Neither, apparently, did his father, who looked up from the paper with something that wasn't quite surprise, because Richard Scott was never surprised, but was in the neighborhood of it.
"You will not," Jackson said, and his heart was going like a rabbit and he thought absurdly of Sharon's hand pressed flat over it, slow down, I want you to last, "say the word provided for about my son again.
Ever. You've never met her. You're going to.
You're going to sit across a table from my wife and you're going to find out that she's worth ten of the Hargroves and forty of whoever you were going to make me marry, and if you can't do that, then"
He stopped.
There it was. The end of the sentence. The one he'd been running from for a year, the then, the choice, right there in his mouth, and his father watching him with mild interest to see if he'd say it.
He didn't say it.
That was the failure. Not that he defended her badly.
He defended her, mostly, clumsily but he did.
The failure was the then he swallowed, the ultimatum he built and couldn't fire, because underneath the rabbit-heart and the fury there was still a boy who had never once seen his father lose and could not be the one to make him.
"You'll want to sit with this," Richard said gently, back in the paper. "You're upset. That's natural. We'll talk when you're thinking clearly."
And Jackson walked out of the study having won nothing and lost nothing, which felt, in his father's house, exactly like losing.
POV: Sharon
She heard the word procedure through a door that didn't quite close, and she heard annulment, and she heard provided for, and she heard her husband not finish a sentence.
That was the part that broke something. Not the cruel words.
She'd expected cruel words. She'd braced for cruel words the whole drive up, had a whole speech ready about how she didn't want their money and never had.
What she hadn't braced for was the sound of Jackson getting right up to the edge of choosing her and then going quiet, and the quiet was so much worse than anything Richard said, because Richard was supposed to be the enemy and Jackson was supposed to be hers.
She was on her feet before she decided to be.
The water someone had brought her was in her hand and she set it down too hard and it slopped over.
She should have waited in the front room.
She knew even then that the smart thing, the dignified thing, was to wait in the front room and let Jackson come to her and hear his version and be gentle about it.
She wasn't dignified. She was five months pregnant and she'd thrown up twice and she'd worn the wrong dress and she'd just heard the word provided for about her baby, and she walked toward the study, and she was crying already, angry ugly crying, Dolores would have been proud, and she didn't have a speech anymore.
The speech was gone. She'd practiced the wrong speech.