CHAPTER SIX
The Life Nobody Sees
POV: Sharon ? The present
The trouble with a five-year-old was that he had no idea he was a secret, and thank God for that, but it made mornings interesting.
"Is Daddy famous," Ethan asked, over cereal, on a Tuesday.
Sharon did not choke on her coffee, which she considered a personal triumph. "Why do you ask, bug?"
"Micah said his dad saw my dad in a magazine at the dentist." Ethan pushed a single cheerio around the bowl with great scientific focus. "Micah said my dad has a big hotel. I said Micah was a liar and then I had to sit in the thinking chair."
Six years of practice went into how casually Sharon buttered a piece of toast. "Well, Daddy does work with hotels. That part's true. So maybe don't call Micah a liar, because then you're the liar, and also we don't call people liars, we say 'I respectfully disagree.'"
"I respectfully disagree that my dad is in a magazine."
"Perfect. Eat your cheerios. All of them, not just the one you're bullying."
This was the tightrope, and she walked it every day without a net, and she'd gotten good enough at it that most days she didn't look down.
The truth was a thing she was raising her son alongside, like a second child she couldn't feed in public.
Yes, your father works with hotels. No, we don't go to Grandma's.
Grandma is far away. Grandma is busy. Grandma doesn't. Grandma isn't. She had a whole file of half-sentences she never finished, and Ethan was five and accepted them, because five-year-olds accepted the shape of their own life the way they accepted gravity, as simply the way things were.
He wouldn't be five forever. That was the thing that woke her at three in the morning sometimes. Somewhere out there was a Micah with a magazine, multiplying.
Jackson came on Thursdays and left on Sundays, mostly, when the world let him, and the Thursdays were the whole point of the week.
Ethan had a system for Thursdays. He was not allowed, per Sharon, to wait at the window, because a boy waiting at a window all afternoon broke something in her she couldn't name, so instead he'd invented a rule where he could check the window only when the microwave clock changed to a number with a five in it, which meant he checked roughly every ten minutes and considered himself very restrained.
"Five!" he'd bellow from the kitchen. "There's a five! I'm allowed!"
"Then go check."
Thundering feet. A pause. "Not yet." Thundering feet returning. This was Thursday. This was the sound of Thursday.
When Jackson's car finally turned into the drive, the boy went off like a smoke alarm, and Sharon would stand in the kitchen doorway drying a dish she'd already dried and watch her husband climb out of a car worth more than the house and get hit at knee height by a projectile in dinosaur pajamas, and watch him go down, every time, theatrically, as if felled, into the grass, and let the boy sit on his chest and explain the entire week at a volume you could hear from space.
That was the man nobody at the shareholder meetings would recognize. Flat on his back in the crabgrass, tie askew, listening with total seriousness to a five-minute report on the social politics of the thinking chair.
"And Micah says his dad saw you in a magazine," Ethan finished, "and I respectfully disagreed, and now I'm in the thinking chair at school AND I respectfully disagreed, so."
Sharon watched Jackson's face do a thing, over the top of Ethan's head, a small stricken thing, quickly folded away.
He was good at folding things away. She'd married a man who was good at folding things away and then spent six years watching him do it, and she'd learned to read the fold the way she'd once learned to read a room full of truckers.
"You know what," Jackson said, sitting up, brushing grass off both of them. "Micah's dad's right. I do work with some hotels. It's very boring. There's a lot of carpet. You want to hear about carpet?"
"No."
"Smart boy." He stood, hoisting Ethan onto his hip, and met Sharon's eyes across the yard, and neither of them said the thing, which was that the magazines were a problem now, that the boy was getting old enough to be a witness, that the wall between the two lives had a child-sized hole starting to open in it.
"Hi," Jackson said to her instead, over the boy's head. Just that.
"Hi." She let him kiss her, in the yard, where no one could see because there was no one for three-quarters of a mile, which was, she'd come to understand, the only kind of public they had. "You're early."
"I skipped a thing."
"You're allowed to skip things?"
"I skipped it anyway." He said it like a small gift, and it was a small gift, and she took it, and hated a little that a skipped meeting counted as romance now, and took it anyway, because you take Thursday where you find it.
POV: Jackson
He lived two lives and the cruelty of it was that he was good at both.
Monday through Thursday he was Jackson Scott, who wore the suits and ran the meetings and sat at his father's right hand at a table where the future of a company got decided in the tone of voice men used when they weren't saying the real thing.
He was, by every visible measure, winning.
The regional expansion had gone through.
The board liked him. His father had started, in the last year, occasionally deferring to him in front of others, the highest form of love Richard Scott had in his vocabulary, and Jackson had felt the old boyish thrill of it every time and hated himself for feeling it.
Then Thursday afternoon he'd point the car south, and somewhere around the halfway mark, at a particular gas station he'd started thinking of as the border, he'd stop and buy a coffee he didn't want just to stand in the lot for a minute and change over.
Take off the one man. Put on the other. By the time he hit Harlow he was Jack, who got tackled in the crabgrass and knew which kitchen drawer stuck and had a son who checked the microwave clock for fives.
The problem was the drive back.
Nobody warned you that the drive back was the hard one.
Going south he was shedding weight. Going north on Sunday nights he was putting it back on, mile by mile, the coat of the other man, and by the time the city came up out of the dark he'd have folded Jack all the way back down into the place he kept him, and he'd walk into his empty apartment on the fifty-second floor, the good apartment, the one with the view his father had helped him choose, and it would be silent in a way that Harlow, with its one bathroom and its stuck drawer and its five-year-old who woke at dawn, never was.
He'd stand at the window over the lake. He'd think: I could end this.
I could tell them. One conversation. He'd rehearse it, the way he'd rehearsed the name reveal in a restaurant six years ago, and he'd get to the part where his father's face changed, and he'd stop, the way he always stopped, and he'd tell himself the same thing he'd been telling himself for six years, which was that he'd do it when the time was right, and go to bed alone in a life he'd chosen and didn't want, a long dark drive from the life he wanted and wouldn't claim.
He never noticed he'd stopped calling it soon even to himself. He'd stopped believing his own soon somewhere in the last couple of years, and hadn't marked the day, the way you never mark the day you stop believing anything.
POV: Sharon
The Circle found her before she found it, which was how those things worked.
It was a Tuesday, the same week as the magazine, and she was at the county farmers market with Ethan strapped into complaint mode, and a woman at the next stall over, older, put-together in a way that didn't match the tomatoes she was buying, watched Sharon deflect a stranger's friendly question about her husband's work with the smooth practiced nothing of a woman who'd been deflecting for years, and afterward, quietly, apropos of nothing, said:
"You do that very well."
"Do what?"
"The thing where you answer a question about him without answering it." The woman bagged her tomatoes. She had kind eyes and a hard mouth, or maybe it was the other way around. "I did it for eleven years. You get a look. I can spot the look now. Takes one to know one."
Sharon's stomach did something cold. "I don't know what you"
"No, of course. Forget I said it." The woman smiled, and it was a real smile, and she pressed a card into Sharon's hand the way Sharon had once pressed a to-go cup on a stranded stranger, like it was nothing, like it was just something to do with your hands.
"Some of us have coffee, second Tuesdays.
Women who married complicated men. That's all it is.
Coffee. No pressure, no speeches." She looked down at Ethan, who had stopped complaining to stare up at her with the frank assessment of the very young.
"He's a beautiful boy. They always are. That's half the trouble. "
And she was gone into the market crowd, and Sharon stood there holding a card that said only a first name, MARGARET, and a phone number, and nothing else, no logo, no group name, and she almost threw it away.
She almost threw it away three separate times over the next week.
She put it in a drawer, the stuck one, which felt like a message.
She told herself she wasn't the kind of woman who needed a support group, she had Dolores, she had a whole diner, she had a good life that she'd chosen with her eyes open.
She kept the card.
She didn't call it. But she kept it, in the stuck drawer, and every time the drawer jammed she thought of the woman with the kind eyes and the hard mouth saying eleven years, and Sharon would do the math she was always doing now, six years, going on seven, and she'd think: eleven.
She did eleven. And then she'd shut the drawer, and go make dinner, and wait for Thursday.
POV: Jackson