CHAPTER FOUR #2
She met Jackson in the hall coming out.
"You didn't finish," she said. Not how could you, not what did he say, none of the lines she might have written for herself. Just: "You didn't finish. I heard you. You got to the part where you were going to make him choose and you stopped. Why did you stop."
"Sharon"
"Why did you stop, Jack." Her voice cracked on it and she hated that it cracked. "I would have finished it. If it was your mother in that room saying that about our kid, I would have finished the sentence and set the house on fire. Why couldn't you finish the sentence."
And Jackson, who had a true thing for every occasion, who could read any room, who had undone her a hundred times with the right words, stood in his father's hallway and said the wrong thing.
"You don't understand him," he said. "It's more complicated than"
Which was the worst possible thing he could have said, and he knew it the instant it was out, she watched him know it, and it didn't matter that he knew it, because it was already in the air between them and it wasn't the kind of thing you could pull back.
"No," Sharon said quietly. The ugly crying had stopped.
That was worse. "No, you're right. I don't understand him.
I understand you, though. I finally understand you.
" She wiped her face with the back of her hand, ungracefully, and there was nothing quotable in it, nothing wise, just a pregnant woman in a green dress in a rich man's hallway with a runny nose.
"Take me home, Jack. I want to go home. Not soon. Now."
POV: Jackson
The drive home was three and a half hours and they made maybe twenty minutes of it in words.
He tried, early, on the interstate. He said he was sorry.
He said his father was worse than he'd remembered, which was a lie, his father was exactly as he'd remembered, which was the problem.
He said give me time, and heard the word time land in the car like a stone in a pond, ripples of every other time he'd asked her for time, and stopped talking.
Sharon looked out the window. She had one hand on the bump, not protective exactly, just resting, the way you'd rest a hand on a door you were keeping closed.
"Say something," he said, near Kankakee. "Please. You not talking is"
"What. Worse?" She didn't turn from the window.
"You noticed that a while ago, didn't you.
That me not talking is worse. And you kept doing the things that make me not talk anyway.
" It wasn't cruel. It was tired, which was worse than cruel.
"I'm not doing the silent thing to punish you, Jack.
I genuinely don't have anything. You used them all up.
All my words. I had so many words this morning. "
He didn't have an answer. For once he let himself not have one instead of manufacturing one, which was maybe the only decent thing he did the whole day.
They stopped for gas outside Champaign and she went in and came back with two coffees and a package of the terrible powdered doughnuts she liked and couldn't get at the diner because Dolores would have been insulted, and she handed him one without a word, and Jackson understood that this was not forgiveness.
It was just that they'd been married four months and shared everything and her hands did kind things out of habit even when the rest of her wanted to leave him on the shoulder of I-57.
The kindness was involuntary. That, somehow, moved him more than a chosen kindness would have.
"Thank you," he said, about the doughnut, meaning about everything.
"It's a doughnut, Jack."
"I know."
"Don't make it a thing. I can't do a thing right now. It's a doughnut."
So he didn't make it a thing. He ate the terrible doughnut and drank the gas station coffee and drove his pregnant wife home in a silence that wasn't peace, and somewhere south of Champaign her breathing changed and he glanced over and she was asleep, or pretending, her head against the window, one hand still on the bump, and he drove the rest of the way slow and even, as if the car were full of something breakable, which it was.
POV: Sharon
She wasn't asleep. She let him think she was, because it was easier than talking and because a small mean part of her wanted him to sit alone with it for two hours, and she wasn't proud of the small mean part but she was five months pregnant and entitled to one or two things she wasn't proud of.
She lay against the window with her eyes closed and did the thing she'd sworn in the courthouse she wouldn't do. She counted.
She counted the soons. She counted the cancelled weekends.
She counted the months to the baby, four of them left, and she counted the promise, before the baby you'll be a Scott out loud, and she held the promise up against what she'd heard through a door that didn't quite close, and she did the math the way her mother had never learned to do it, the cold clear math of a woman deciding in advance how much she'd forgive and when she'd stop.
Not now, she decided. Not over this. She loved him and the baby was coming and she was tired and one bad day at a rich man's house was not a reason to blow up a marriage. She'd give him the time. She'd give him room. She'd let soon be soon a little longer.
But she gave the promise a date. In her head, silent, against the cold window glass, she gave it a real date this time, not a feeling but a number, the baby's due date plus nothing, no grace, no extension.
Be a Scott out loud by then, Jack, or I'll know what you are, and I'll know what I am for staying.
She didn't tell him the date. That was her mistake, and she half knew it even then. She filed it away private, the receipt with the number on it, and let him drive her home thinking he had time, when the truth was the clock had started and only one of them could see it.
She fell asleep for real somewhere past the last exit she recognized, and dreamed about the diner, and woke up in their own driveway with his coat over her and no memory of him putting it there.