CHAPTER SEVEN #2
So he drove, and she looked out the window at the city letting go of them, and she did the thing she did, the counting, except this time the counting was different, because this time she wasn't giving the promise a new date.
This time she was totaling it up. Six years.
The house. The procedure. The birth certificate half-second.
Family friend. She laid them out like a check she was finally adding up, and the number came clear and cold and total, and by the time they hit open dark road she wasn't angry anymore, which was so much worse, and she knew it was worse, and she saw Jackson glance over and register the calm on her face and go pale, because he'd learned too, over six years, that her calm was the thing to be afraid of.
"Pull over," she said, near the halfway mark. "There. The gas station."
The border. His border. She didn't know he called it that. He pulled in anyway, under the white lights, and cut the engine, and the silence changed shape.
"I want to say it where I can see your face," Sharon said. "Not the side of your face. Turn."
He turned.
"You meant to say wife." She watched him flinch that she'd known.
"I could see it. I can always see it, Jack, that's the whole tragedy of us, I can read you like Dolores reads weather.
You meant to say wife and you said family friend, and here's the thing I finally understand tonight, so I need you to hear it, because I'm only going to be this clear once.
" She kept her voice level. Level was the only way she'd get through it.
"It doesn't matter what you meant. I've spent six years living on what you meant.
Meant to tell them. Meant to fix it. Meant to say wife.
You are a good man who means things, and you have built a whole life out of meaning things and not doing them, and tonight I stood in a room and found out what your meaning is worth when the reporter's actually standing there with the pen.
" She took a breath. "It's worth family friend.
That's the exchange rate. Six years of meaning it, and when it's real, out loud, in front of people, I'm a family friend. "
"Sharon, my father was thirty feet away, if I'd said"
"I know he was. I know exactly where he was.
You always know exactly where he is. You've known where that man is standing your whole life.
" She wasn't crying. She'd expected to cry.
"That's not the excuse you think it is, Jack.
You're not telling me why you couldn't. You're telling me he'll always be thirty feet away.
There is no room in the world he won't be thirty feet away in.
You just told me that. You think you told me about tonight and you told me about all of it. "
Jackson had nothing. For the first time in seven years the man who was good at rooms, good at words, good at the true thing at the right moment, sat under the white lights of his own private border and had absolutely nothing, and Sharon watched him have nothing and felt the last of it go quiet in her chest.
"Take me home," she said. "I have to relieve Dolores. Ethan has school."
The ordinary words. The ones that keep a woman upright. Ethan has school.
POV: Sharon
The magazine came out eleven days later, and Sharon saw it before Jackson could warn her, because of course she did, because the universe had a sense of timing as cruel as Dolores's was kind.
It was at the dentist, actually. Ethan's checkup.
She was in the waiting room with a stack of glossy months-old magazines, flipping without reading, keeping half an eye on the fish tank Ethan was negotiating with, and she turned a page and there they were.
A half-page photo. The gala. Jackson in the tux, herself in the blue dress, both of them lit gold and laughing at something, looking, she thought distantly, like exactly the couple she'd let herself believe they were becoming for one hour.
The caption was small. You'd miss it if you weren't in it.
Jackson Scott of Scott Hospitality with a family friend.
She sat very still. Ethan tapped the glass at a fish.
A drill whined somewhere behind a door. She looked at the two beautiful laughing people and the four small printed words under them, and she thought about Micah's dad seeing his own version of this at his own dentist, and she thought about how many waiting rooms in how many cities held this exact page, her own face, her own erasure, printed and distributed and left out for strangers to thumb past on their way to a cleaning.
She did not tear the page out. She wanted to.
She wanted to tear it out and she wanted, more than that, to not be the kind of woman who tore pages out of dentists' magazines, so instead she closed it and set it on the bottom of the stack where the next person wouldn't reach it for a while, a small pointless mercy for some future woman, and she called Ethan away from the fish, and her voice was completely normal.
"Family friend," she said quietly, to no one, in the car, before she started it.
She'd say those two words to herself a lot over the following weeks.
They'd become a kind of key. Every time the reflex rose up in her, the old one, the one that wanted to smooth it over and finish the shift and hand him the doughnut, she'd say family friend under her breath and feel the reflex let go, one finger at a time.
He'd given her, without meaning to, the one thing that could finally make her stop meaning to stay.
POV: Jackson
He drove her home and she was asleep, or pretending, before Champaign, the way she'd pretended six years ago on the drive back from his father's house, and Jackson understood that they'd made a full circle, that he'd spent six years and ended exactly where they'd started, in a dark car with a sleeping wife and a promise he hadn't kept, except that this time there was no new date, no soon, no receipt she was filing for later.
This time she'd added it up in front of him and read him the total.
He carried the blue dress in from the car when they got home, because she went straight in to Dolores and forgot it, and he hung it on the back of the closet door where he'd later learn it had hung for two weeks like a promise.
He stood in the dark bedroom holding it for a second, the weight of it, the deep blue she'd driven two hours and tried on eleven dresses to find, the dress she'd bought to be seen in, and he thought about the diner smile she'd turned on him and understood that he'd taught her, tonight, to smile at him the way she smiled at strangers.
Downstairs he could hear Dolores gathering her things, and Sharon's voice, low, and Dolores's voice, lower, and then the front door, and Dolores's car, and then the house was quiet except for the sound of his wife not coming upstairs.
He didn't go down. That was the coward's mercy, the only kind he had left to give her, letting her have the downstairs and the dark and the not-coming-up.
He sat on the edge of the bed with the blue dress across his knees, in the house he visited but had never once lived in, and for the first time in six years he let himself think the sentence all the way to the end, the one he'd always stopped halfway through.
If I have to choose between them and her, I will lose her, because I already have, one week at a time, and tonight was just the week I finally did it out loud.
The dress was very soft. Somewhere down the hall his son was asleep and did not know that anything in his world had changed, and in the morning there would be pancakes, badly made, because it was nobody's fault yet that a five-year-old still believed in Saturdays.