CHAPTER EIGHT #2
"Then it's just your life." Carol smiled, and it didn't reach anywhere.
"He gave me a good life. I want to be fair to him, because the women in there aren't always fair and I understand why but I try to be.
He gave me a condo and a car and thirty years of Thursdays and he held my hand when my mother died, in a hospital, in front of nurses, he didn't care who saw that day.
One day. My mother's deathbed. That was the day he didn't care who saw.
" She pulled her gloves tighter. "I built a whole life out of that one day.
I told myself the other three hundred and sixty-four didn't count because of the one.
You can do that. You can live a long time on one day a year if you're the kind of woman who can make a little go far.
And you look like that kind of woman. That's why I came out here.
Somebody should tell you that being able to make a little go far is not always a gift.
Sometimes it's just the thing that lets you starve slowly enough that you don't notice you're starving. "
She got in her car. She rolled the window down before she pulled away.
"I'm not sorry," Carol said. "I want to be clear.
I'd do it again, most of it. I'm just telling you what's down the road, in case you thought there was a version where staying stops hurting.
There isn't. It just gets quieter. Decide whether you want the loud kind of hurt or the quiet kind.
That's the actual choice. Nobody gets the no-hurt door. There isn't one."
And she drove off, an elegant woman in a good car heading back to a life built on a single afternoon, and Sharon stood in the parking lot a long time, because she'd just met, she understood, the thing she was most afraid of becoming, and it had been kind to her, and that was so much worse than if it had been bitter.
POV: Jackson
He knew something had changed and he couldn't find the shape of it, which frightened him more than a fight would have.
Sharon was not cold to him. That was the disorienting part.
He'd braced, after the gala, for ice, for the silent treatment, for the slow war he probably deserved, and instead she was.
Pleasant. She was pleasant to him, the way she was pleasant to the propane guy, and it took him three weekends to understand that pleasant was the ice, that she'd filed him somewhere new, somewhere out past the reach of a fight, and that a fight would actually have been hope, would have meant she still wanted something from him worth fighting for.
She started having somewhere to be on alternate Tuesdays.
She didn't hide it, exactly, she just said "I've got a thing" in a voice that closed the subject, the same voice he'd used on her about Carbondale seven years ago, and he recognized his own tool being used on him and had the grace, at least, to say nothing.
It was Ethan who told him the truth, the way it was always going to be Ethan, because Ethan was five and had not yet learned which truths the family didn't say.
They were building something out of blocks on the living room floor, a tower that was supposed to be a hotel because Ethan had decided all towers were hotels now, a small mercy of a boy wanting to be like his father, and Ethan set a block on top and said, not looking up, in the flat reporting voice of the very young:
"Mommy cries in the car sometimes. But she stops before we get to school so I'm not supposed to know."
Jackson's hands went still on the blocks.
"She does the happy voice," Ethan went on, adding another block, "but her eyes are still doing the sad.
She thinks I can't tell. I can tell. I always can tell.
" He looked up at his father then, with Sharon's eyes exactly, the brown of them, minus the lighter ring, because Ethan didn't have the ring yet, hadn't lived long enough to grow the thing that came from saying words you shouldn't. "Daddy, is it because of you?"
Five years old. Is it because of you.
And Jackson, who lied to reporters and boards and his own father with the smoothness of a man born to it, could not make himself lie to the small serious face with his wife's eyes, and could not tell the truth either, and so he did the thing he'd sworn he'd never do, the thing his own father had done to him a thousand times, he changed the subject.
"You know what this hotel needs? A pool. Let's build a pool."
"Okay," Ethan said, and went back to the blocks, and let his father off the hook the way children do, generously, temporarily, filing it, and Jackson understood with a cold falling feeling that he'd just taught his son the first lesson of the family, the one Jackson had learned at the same age in the same way: that when you ask the real question, the people who love you build a pool.
He got up that night after Ethan was down and found Sharon at the kitchen table, not doing anything, just sitting, which she never did, Sharon was always doing something, and he sat across from her at the wobbly-no-longer chair and he tried, clumsily, to find the shape of the thing.
"Ethan says you cry in the car."
Sharon looked at him for a long moment. "Ethan needs to learn to keep a confidence. I'll talk to him."
"That's not. Sharon, that's not the part I meant."
"I know what part you meant." She wasn't unkind.
That was the worst of it, the not-unkind.
"You want me to tell you it's okay. You want to have the conversation where you feel bad and I comfort you about how bad you feel and we both feel close because we survived your feeling bad.
We've had that conversation a hundred times, Jack.
It's a good conversation. You're wonderful in it.
" She stood, and put her hand briefly on his shoulder as she passed, the involuntary kindness, the doughnut on the highway, she couldn't switch it off even now.
"I'm not having it anymore. Not because I'm angry.
Because it doesn't change anything, and I finally noticed. "
She went up to bed. He sat at the table in the house he'd never lived in, and did not follow, and the wobble he'd fixed six years ago stayed fixed, and everything else came slowly apart in the quiet.
POV: Sharon
That second Tuesday she told the Circle about the blocks, about is it because of you, about the pool, and this time she didn't tell it in the funny voice, and she didn't cry either, she just told it flat, the way Ethan had said it, and when she finished, Margaret said the only thing anyone said.
"How old were you? When you first noticed your father building pools?"
Sharon hadn't expected that, and it went straight through her.
"Six," she said. "About. My mom would ask him something real and he'd take me for ice cream. I loved it. I loved the ice cream. I didn't know for years it was a pool."
"And your mother stayed."
"Until he died. She's still. She acts like she got the whole thing she wanted. Maybe she did. I don't know how to tell anymore, with her, where the acting stops."
Margaret nodded slowly. The radiator ticked. Around the circle the women held it, the way they held everything, at exactly its real weight.
"I'm not going to tell you what to do," Margaret said.
"You know that's not what we do. But I'll tell you the one thing that's mine to say, because I watched my own girl learn to build pools, and I stayed so long she thought that was marriage, she thought that was normal, and now she's thirty and she picks men who forget her because forgetting is what love looked like in our house.
" She leaned forward. "You're not just deciding for you, Sharon.
You've got a little boy who's already learning to read the sad under the happy voice.
He's learning what to expect from the people who love him.
Right now. This year. Whatever you decide, decide it knowing he's taking notes.
That's not pressure. That's just the part nobody told me, and I wish they had. "
Sharon drove home the long way, the two-mile way, past the rise with the picnic table where she'd told a man seven years ago not to tell her his last name yet.
She pulled over. She sat in the dark and looked at the town small enough to hold, the water tower, the grain elevator, and she thought about a five-year-old building block hotels and learning already that when you ask the real question the people who love you take you for ice cream.
She didn't cry. She was almost done crying, she could feel it, the crying giving way to something with a spine in it.
Tomorrow was Thursday. He'd come. Ethan would watch the microwave for fives.
Not this Thursday, she thought. She wasn't ready this Thursday. But soon, and she caught the word and almost laughed, soon, his word, the word she'd hated for six years, in her own mouth now, meaning the opposite thing. Soon she was going to stop building pools.
She just had to figure out how to leave a man she still loved, which was, she was learning, an entirely different problem from leaving a man you'd stopped.