CHAPTER FIVE
Just a Little Longer
POV: Jackson ? Five years before the present
The conversation where he asked her to wait didn't happen the way either of them would have chosen. It happened over a broken washing machine.
Sharon was seven months pregnant and the machine had flooded the little utility room off the kitchen, and Jackson had come down for the weekend to find her on her knees on a wet floor, sopping it up with towels, in a house he could have bought a thousand of and never noticed the dent, and something about the picture of it undid him.
"Get up. Sharon. Get up, you shouldn't be down there, let me"
"I've got it."
"You don't have it, you're seven months"
"I know how many months I am, Jack, I'm the one carrying the months." She wrung a towel into the bucket, not looking at him. "It's a washing machine. It broke. I'm cleaning it up. This is a thing that happens to people. It's not a crisis."
He got down on the wet floor next to her, in the good trousers, and took the towel, and she let him, which he'd learned to read as a small white flag. For a while they mopped in silence. The machine ticked as it cooled.
"I'll buy you a new one," he said. "A good one. Monday."
"I don't want a new washing machine. I want the old one fixed.
There's a difference and you've never once had to know it, so I'm not mad you don't." She sat back on her heels, one hand going to her back the way it did now.
"You throw money at things and they go away.
That's your whole toolbox. And it's a good toolbox for some things.
It's a terrible toolbox for a marriage."
There it was. Not the washing machine.
"Say the rest of it," he said.
"There's no rest of it."
"Sharon."
She looked at him then, tired, on a wet floor, and she didn't cry and she didn't get sharp, she just said it plainly, which was somehow worse than either.
"You've had two more months. Since the house.
Since your father. And you haven't told anybody anything, and I know because nothing's changed, nobody's called, there's no dinner, there's no.
Nothing. And the baby's coming in eight weeks whether or not you've found a good time, and I need to know if I'm about to have a husband's baby or a secret's baby.
Because those are different things to be born into and I'd like to know which one I'm handing my kid. "
Jackson wrung the towel. He wrung it long past when it needed wringing.
"I need a little longer," he said.
He heard it. God, he heard it, the exact phrase, the one he'd promised himself in the hallway of his father's house he would never say to her again, coming out of his mouth on a wet floor because it was true and because it was easier than the alternative and because underneath everything he was still a man buying time he had no plan to spend.
"There's the Hargrove close," he said, because now that he'd started he couldn't stop building the case.
"Six weeks. If I blow up the family right before, my father loses the position, and then it's not about you, it's about money, and he'll spend the rest of his life telling everyone the waitress cost him the deal.
I don't want that to be the story. I want to do it clean, after, so there's nothing for him to blame but himself.
That's not me stalling. That's me being"
"Strategic," Sharon said.
"Yes."
"You're always so strategic about me." She said it without heat. She'd run out of heat weeks ago. "Okay, Jack. Six weeks. After the Hargrove thing. I can do six weeks."
And Jackson felt the relief flood through him, warm and total and shameful, the relief of a man handed six more weeks of not-yet, and he mistook her agreement for forgiveness, because he wanted to, because it was easier, and he did not see the thing she'd done, which was quietly move the date.
She'd had a date. The due date, no grace.
He didn't know that. And on the wet floor she'd just given it up, traded it for his six weeks, and told herself six weeks was reasonable, and hadn't noticed or wouldn't let herself notice that this was exactly how it started, the small reasonable slide, the date that moves because moving it once doesn't cost much.
Her father had done this to her mother. One reasonable slide at a time.
She knew that. She knew it while she was doing it. And she did it anyway, because she was seven months pregnant on a wet floor and she loved him, and knowing better and doing better turned out to be two entirely different countries.
POV: Sharon
The Hargrove thing came and went and she found out it went from a newspaper.
Not from Jackson. From the business section of a paper somebody left on the counter at the diner, a photo of Richard Scott shaking hands with a man named Hargrove, SCOTT HOSPITALITY CLOSES REGIONAL EXPANSION, and in the background, half cut off, a young woman in a pale suit whose name the caption gave as Vivian Hargrove, "family friend. "
Sharon stood at the counter in her apron with her hand on the small of her back and read the caption twice.
Family friend.
She wasn't jealous. That surprised her, a little.
She looked at the woman in the pale suit, accomplished, appropriate, the woman Richard had picked, and she felt no jealousy at all, because Jackson didn't love that woman, she was sure of that the way she was sure of very few things.
What she felt was smaller and colder. The Hargrove thing was done.
The six weeks had a start date now, today, and she hadn't even gotten to set it herself.
She'd found out her own husband's business was concluded from a newspaper a trucker left behind.
She didn't call him. She finished her shift.
She was thirty-eight weeks pregnant and on her feet eight hours and Dolores kept trying to send her home and she wouldn't go, because home was where she'd have to sit with the newspaper, and the diner was where she got to be Sharon, just Sharon, who knew everyone's coffee and wasn't a secret to anyone in the room.
That was the thing nobody warned you about being hidden. You started to prefer the places where you weren't.
Her water broke at the counter at 6:40 in the evening, three days later, mid-sentence, arguing with Earl about the drainage ditch.
"Oh," she said, looking down.
"Oh what," Earl said, and then, "Oh. OH. DOLORES."
What followed was not dignified and was not cinematic and involved a great deal of Earl panicking and Dolores being the only calm person in a fifty-mile radius and Sharon herself saying a word in front of the whole diner that she'd apologize to Mrs. Ellery for later.
She called Jackson from the truck. Dolores drove.
Earl came too, uninvited, because Earl had decided this was his grandchild now, apparently, and no one had the strength to argue.
"He's coming," Dolores said, meaning Jackson, taking a corner too fast. "He'll make it."
"He's three and a half hours away, Dolores."
"Then the baby better be slow." She glanced over. "You want me to keep talking or you want me to shut up?"
"Talk. If you shut up I'll think about things."
So Dolores talked, the whole way to the county hospital, about nothing, about everything, forty years of nothing and everything, and Sharon breathed through it and held the door handle and did not think about the fact that she was about to have a husband's baby or a secret's baby and still didn't know which.
POV: Jackson
He was in a board meeting when Marcus put the note in front of him, and the note said SHARON. HOSPITAL. BABY. and Jackson stood up in the middle of his father's quarterly review and left without a word.
"Where are you going?" Richard said. Not alarmed. Just the fact of a son standing up in the middle of a sentence.
"Out," Jackson said, which was the most honest thing he'd said in that boardroom in a year, and he took the stairs because the elevator was too slow, and he drove south out of the city with his hazards on through traffic, and he made the whole drive in just under three, and he missed it anyway.
Ethan Scott was born at 11:52 that night, and Jackson got to the county hospital at 12:40, forty-eight minutes too late, and that would have been forgivable, three and a half hours was three and a half hours, geography wasn't cowardice.
What wasn't forgivable was the paperwork.
He found Sharon in a room with faded curtains, wrecked and radiant and furious and asleep in flickers, the baby a small furious red thing on her chest, and he crossed the room and he was crying, actually crying, he who hadn't cried at his own wedding, and he put his hand on his son's back, the whole back fit under his hand, and for a moment nothing else in the world existed, no father, no board, no name, just the impossible heat of a person who hadn't existed that morning.
Then the nurse came in with the birth certificate worksheet, and asked, kindly, for the father's information, and Jackson felt Sharon wake up under his hand.
He hesitated.
It was half a second. It was nothing. It was the whole marriage.
Because in that half second he thought about the certificate being a public document, and public documents being searchable, and the Hargrove ink barely dry, and his father, and the story, and whether his name on this piece of paper tonight was the clean after he'd promised or a messy during that would blow up before he'd built the ground for it.
He thought all of it in half a second, the way he thought everything, strategically, and Sharon watched him think it, from the bed, with their son on her chest.
"Jackson Scott," he said to the nurse. "I'm the father. Put my name on it."
He did the right thing. That was what he'd tell himself. He hesitated and then he did the right thing, his name went on the certificate, Ethan Scott, father Jackson Scott, real and legal and permanent.