CHAPTER SIX #2
Monday he was back at the long table, and the man who'd worn dinosaur-pajama grass stains on Saturday wore a suit that fit like a verdict.
The meeting was about a coastal acquisition, and Jackson ran it, and he ran it well, and halfway through he caught his own reflection in the black glass of the conference room window and did not, for a second, recognize the person in it.
Composed. Certain. His father's son. There was a version of him in that glass who had no wife, no boy, no Saturday, no burnt pancake, and that version was extremely good at his job, and the board was nodding at that version, and Jackson felt the familiar horror of how easy it was to be him.
"Well handled," Richard said afterward, in the hall, which from his father was a bouquet.
"Thank you."
"Vivian Hargrove asked after you. At the club.
" Richard said it mildly, the way he said the things that weren't mild.
"She's back from London. Unattached, I'm told.
" A pause, the deliberate weight of it. "You're thirty-eight, Jackson.
People notice a man your age with no one on his arm.
It reads as a flaw. It reads as something to explain. "
And here was the moment, the one that came every few months now, the open door his father kept holding for him without knowing it.
Jackson could have said it right there in the hall.
There's someone. There's been someone for seven years.
I have a son. The words were sitting in his chest where they'd sat for six years, folded, ruined, ready.
"I'll keep that in mind," Jackson said.
His father nodded, satisfied, and walked on, and Jackson stood in the hall of the building with his name on it and felt the folded thing settle back into place, and thought, with a flatness that frightened him more than grief would have: I am never going to say it.
That's the truth I keep not looking at. It was never going to be soon.
There is no version of me that walks up to that man and chooses.
I have known this for years. I just keep the not-knowing where the soon used to be.
Then Marcus appeared with the next thing, and the next thing needed him, and it was so easy, it was always so easy, to let the next thing be the reason.
He texted Sharon from the elevator. Thursday.
Bringing the good syrup this time. She sent back a photo of Ethan asleep face-down in a library book, and Jackson looked at it the whole way down fifty-two floors, and it got him through Monday, the way it always did, the photo of the life he wouldn't claim getting him through the life he'd chosen instead.
POV: Sharon
Saturday was the pancake disaster, and it was, she'd think later, the last purely happy day before everything.
Jackson could not cook. This was established fact, on par with the earth going around the sun.
He'd grown up in a house with a staff and he'd lived his adult life in hotels, and the man could read a balance sheet in six languages of money but could not, it turned out, be trusted with a griddle.
This did not stop Ethan from believing, with the total faith of the five-year-old, that Saturday was Daddy Pancake Day, a tradition Ethan had invented and then enforced with the rigidity of scripture.
"You have to make the face one," Ethan instructed, standing on a chair he was not supposed to stand on, supervising. "With the chocolate chips. Two eyes and a mouth."
"I'm making the face one."
"That's not a face. That's a scared face."
"It's a surprised face. He's surprised to be a pancake.
" Jackson flipped it and it came apart in the air, and half of it landed back in the pan and half of it landed on the counter, and Ethan screamed with the delight of a boy witnessing his father fail at something, which was, Sharon understood, its own rare gift she could give the child that the North Shore never could.
A dad who was bad at pancakes. A dad who was present enough to be bad at things.
"Your father," Sharon announced from the table, not helping, "is a very important man who has never once successfully flipped a pancake."
"Not once," Jackson agreed.
"Millions of dollars. Can't flip a pancake."
"I heard you the first time."
"I'm saying it for Ethan. Ethan needs to know that being fancy doesn't teach you pancakes.
" She caught Jackson's eye and there it was, the good thing, the private joke of it, the two of them building a boy in a kitchen that smelled like burnt batter, and for a second she forgot the drawer and the card and the magazine and the woman who did eleven years.
For a second it was just Saturday, and pancakes, and her family, hers, no one else's, in a house nobody was watching.
Then Jackson's phone rang on the counter, face up, and the screen said DAD, and the whole kitchen changed temperature.
He looked at it. He didn't pick it up. That was new, actually, the not picking it up, and Sharon noticed it and loved him for it and understood at the same time that a man declining a call was not the same as a man ending one, and that she'd learned, over six years, to be grateful for scraps she'd once have found insulting.
"You can get it," she said.
"It's Saturday."
"He doesn't know it's Saturday. He doesn't know Saturday's a thing." She kept her voice light, for Ethan, who had gone quiet the way children do when the temperature changes, sensing the weather without reading the map. "Get it. I'll rescue the scared pancake."
Jackson took the phone into the other room.
Sharon flipped the pancake, which held together perfectly, because of course it did, because she could flip a pancake in her sleep, and she plated it and cut the face into it herself with a knife, two eyes and a mouth, a happy one, and set it in front of Ethan.
"Is Daddy in trouble," Ethan asked, small.
And there it was. The thing she could never quite protect him from, the thing seeping in at the edges no matter how good her half-sentences got. A five-year-old asking if Daddy was in trouble because a phone rang.
"No, bug. Daddy's not in trouble. That's just work." She sat down next to him and stole a bite of his pancake, the way Walter used to steal fries, the way she'd stolen the peach off Jackson's plate a hundred years ago. "Eat the mouth first. Best part."
"Why's the best part the mouth?"
"Because the mouth is where the pancake keeps all its secrets," Sharon said, and Ethan laughed, and in the other room she could hear the low even murmur of her husband's other voice, the room voice, the north voice, the one that belonged to the man she didn't get to keep, and she smiled at her son and ate the mouth of the pancake and did not let a single thing show on her face.
She'd gotten so good at that. That was the thing she'd started to be afraid of. Not that she couldn't hide what she felt anymore.
That she could.