CHAPTER SEVEN
Family Friend
POV: Jackson ? The present
He invited her to the gala because he wanted, for once, to be the man she deserved, and that was exactly why it was unforgivable, because the wanting was real and it still wasn't enough.
It started as a good impulse. That was the part he'd turn over for years afterward. He hadn't set out to hurt her. He'd come home to Harlow on a Thursday with an actual plan for once, sat at the wobbly-no-longer chair, and said it before he could talk himself out of it.
"There's a thing. In two weeks. A benefit, the children's hospital, my mother's on the committee." He'd watched Sharon's face go carefully blank, the blank she did now instead of hoping. "I want you to come. With me. As my"
He'd stopped.
He'd heard himself stop, and hated it, and pushed through. "As my date. In public. There'll be press, it's that kind of thing, and I'm tired of. I'm tired, Sharon. I want to take my wife somewhere."
She hadn't said yes right away. She'd looked at him for a long moment, and he'd seen her want it and distrust it in the same expression, and finally she'd said, "As your date. Not your wife."
"It's a step. I can't do the whole thing in one night, my father will be there, I can't blow it up at a hospital benefit. But you'll be on my arm and people will see you and it's a step. It's the first step. I want to start taking the steps."
And Sharon, God help them both, had believed him. He'd watched her decide to believe him, watched the distrust lose to the hope, and she'd said okay, and she'd worked so hard not to make it a big thing, and it had been a very big thing, he'd known it was a big thing, and he'd let her buy a dress.
POV: Sharon
She bought a dress that wasn't green, and that was its own small event, the retiring of the green dress after six years of service.
She drove two hours to a real store in a real city to do it, without Ethan, who stayed with Dolores and had strong feelings about the injustice.
She tried on eleven dresses. She wasn't a woman who tried on eleven of anything.
But she stood in the fitting room in a deep blue one, floor-length, the kind of thing she'd only ever seen on the women who passed through the diner on their way to somewhere that mattered, and she looked at herself and thought, for the first time in a long time, that she looked like a person who belonged on someone's arm in public.
That was the thing she'd let herself feel, driving home with the dress in the back seat.
Belonging. She'd kept it small for six years, the wanting, she'd trained it down to almost nothing, and Jackson had said the first step and the wanting had come roaring back up to full size overnight, and she'd let it, because he'd asked her to.
Dolores was skeptical, which was Dolores's whole way of loving people.
"A step," Dolores said, holding the blue dress up to the light in the diner after close, examining it like evidence. "Toward what."
"Toward not hiding. He said he's tired of it."
"He's been tired of it for six years, honey.
Tired's not the same as done." She laid the dress over a booth, gentle with it.
"I'm not saying don't go. Look at you, you're already gone, you've got the dress.
I'm saying keep one foot on the ground. Go to the party.
Wear the dress. Have the night. But don't hand him the whole thing before he's earned the whole thing.
Keep a little back. For me. Keep a little back in case. "
"In case what."
Dolores didn't answer that. She just smoothed the blue dress flat, the way she'd smoothed Sharon's collar in a courthouse bathroom six years ago, and Sharon heard the unanswered question anyway, the same one from the courthouse, the one that had been sitting patient in the corner of her marriage the whole time.
"You always do this," Sharon said. "You always find the cloud."
"I find the cloud so you can enjoy the sun without watching the sky." Dolores kissed her forehead. "Go. Be beautiful. I hope I'm wrong. I have been wrong. Once, in 1994."
Sharon laughed, and took the dress home, and hung it on the back of the closet door where she could see it, and for two weeks it hung there like a promise with a date on it, and she tried not to count, and she counted anyway.
POV: Jackson
The gala was in the ballroom of one of his own hotels, which he'd thought would make it easier and made it worse.
Everyone there worked for him, or invested with him, or wanted something from him, and he moved through it the way he moved through all of them, and for the first hour it was almost perfect.
Sharon was on his arm in the blue dress.
She was, he could see people noticing, the most alive person in the room, and he watched the noticing with a fierce private pride, because they were seeing what he'd seen at a diner counter seven years ago, that she filled a space in a way none of these polished people could.
She was good at it, too. That surprised him and it shouldn't have.
She could work a room, she'd been working rooms her whole life, only her rooms had had truckers in them instead of trustees.
She made a hospital administrator laugh.
She asked a nervous young donor about himself and lit him up.
She was, for one hour, exactly what Jackson had wanted to show the world, and he let himself believe it was working, that the step was being taken, that this was the beginning of the after.
His mother watched from across the room.
Jackson caught Eleanor's eye once, over the crowd, and his mother's face was unreadable, doing the thing it did, the closing-over.
She knew. Of course she knew. She'd known for six years the way mothers know, filed it, said nothing, waited.
He looked away from her and told himself it didn't matter, that he wasn't going to let his mother's face ruin the one good night.
Then the reporter.
He was from a lifestyle magazine, the kind that covered these benefits, harmless, notebook and a photographer, and he'd been working the room for names, and he came to Jackson with the easy smile of a man doing a boring job, and he took down the details of the donation, the hotel, the usual, and then he looked at Sharon, pen ready, and asked the simplest question in the world.
"And who's this? For the caption."
And the whole night came down to the next second, and Jackson knew it, felt the hinge of it, felt Sharon go still beside him, her hand light on his arm, waiting to hear her own name said out loud in a room full of people for the first time in six years.
He had every word available to him. My wife. Two words. This is my wife, Sharon. He'd rehearsed harder sentences than that. It was right there.
"A family friend," Jackson said.
He heard it come out of his mouth. He heard the reporter write it down, four syllables, family friend, and move on to the next name, satisfied, and he felt Sharon's hand lift off his arm, not dramatically, not a snatch, just a quiet lifting away, the warmth of it gone, and he understood in the same instant that he had done the one thing, the exact one thing, and that no version of I panicked was going to be big enough to hold what he'd just broken.
He'd meant to say wife. That was the worst of it, the thing he'd never be able to make her believe.
He'd genuinely meant to. And when the moment came, six years of the other reflex, the protecting reflex, the folding reflex, had spoken before the man could, and the machine his father built had answered the question instead of the husband.
"Sharon," he said, turning.
But she was already smiling at the reporter, the diner smile, the one she gave to strangers, the warm bright nothing of it, and that smile turned on him was the most frightening thing he'd ever seen on her face.
"Family friend," she said pleasantly. "That's right."
POV: Sharon
She got through another forty minutes of the party, and she'd wonder about that later, where those forty minutes came from, what reserve she'd drawn on to keep standing in the blue dress making a hospital administrator laugh after her husband had introduced her to a stranger as furniture.
She knew where it came from, actually. It came from the diner.
It came from twenty years of keeping a room warm while your own life fell apart in the back, from serving pie with a smile the day after your father died, from the particular working-class competence of women who are never allowed to fall apart on the clock.
She'd learned it at Dolores's side. You finish the shift.
You cry in the car. She'd just never thought she'd need it at a party in a ball gown, need the exact same muscle she'd built waiting tables, and something about that, about her hard-won grace under pressure being the thing that let her stand there and be erased politely, made her angrier than the words had.
She didn't make a scene. That was for him, she'd realize. Not making a scene was the last gift she gave him, and he didn't deserve it, and she gave it anyway out of the same reflex that had handed him a doughnut on I-57, and she hated the reflex and couldn't switch it off.
They didn't fight in the ballroom. They didn't fight in the car, the first twenty minutes of it, the valet and the exit and the merge onto the highway all done in a silence that Jackson kept trying to break and she kept not letting him.
"Sharon. Please. Let me"
"Don't. Not while you're driving. I'm not doing this at seventy miles an hour."