CHAPTER NINE
The Award Speech
POV: Jackson ? The present
He meant to fix it on national television, which should have told him everything about the kind of man he'd become, that his grand gesture required an audience of millions before he could manage a sentence he couldn't say to one reporter.
The award was real, at least. The Hospitality Federation's honor for the year, the industry's highest, and it was going to Scott Hospitality, and by long tradition the CEO accepted it, except Richard had stood at the quarterly dinner and said, in front of the whole board, "Jackson will accept.
It's his generation's turn," and the room had applauded, and Jackson had felt the old thrill and the old nausea braided together as they always were now.
His father handing him the podium. In front of the industry.
On the broadcast. It was everything Richard had been building toward for a decade, the visible passing of the thing, and Jackson had sat there and understood that his father was, in his own airless way, saying I'm proud of you, the only dialect he had.
And Jackson had thought: this is where I do it.
He'd worked it out driving south the next Thursday, the whole architecture of it, and it had seemed, at seventy miles an hour, not just possible but perfect.
He would stand up in front of the entire industry, with his father in the front row and the cameras live, and he would accept the award, and he would thank the investors and the board, and then he would say the sentence.
I want to thank my wife, Sharon, who has waited longer than any person should for me to say her name in a room like this.
On the broadcast. Where Richard could not stop it, could not manage it, could not fold it into a procedure. Public and permanent and done.
It was, he saw now, the same instinct that had ruined the gala and the name reveal and all of it, the instinct to do the enormous cinematic version instead of the small true one, to save Sharon with a spotlight when she'd only ever asked to be seen across a kitchen table.
But he didn't see it then. Then it felt like courage.
He drove down and he told her.
POV: Sharon
He told her at the kitchen table, and she didn't believe him, and then she made the mistake of starting to.
"The awards thing. Next Thursday, they broadcast it, the whole industry watches.
" Jackson had his hands flat on the table, the earnest posture, and she'd learned to distrust the earnest posture, it was the one that came before the disappointments.
"I'm accepting the award. My father's giving me the podium, it's live, and I'm going to say your name.
Out loud. To all of them. I'm going to thank my wife, Sharon, on national television, and there's nothing my father can do about it because it'll already be done. "
Sharon looked at him for a long time.
"No," she said.
"Sharon"
"No, I mean, don't. Don't do that to me.
" She kept her voice even. "Do you know what you're doing right now?
You're asking me to hope again. You know how much hope costs me now.
You've watched it cost me. And you're standing in my kitchen asking me to load it all back up one more time so you can maybe, on a stage, if you don't lose your nerve, if your father's face doesn't do the thing, if the machine doesn't answer for you again like it did at the gala.
You're asking me to bet Thursday on you. "
"I'm not going to lose my nerve. Not this time. This is the whole point, I've set it up so I can't, it's live"
"You could set up a hundred rooms where you can't and find the hundred-and-first way to not." She wasn't cruel about it. She was past cruel. "I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm saying I've seen this exact hope before. It has your face on it."
But here was the thing, the thing she'd hate herself for later, the thing that made her human instead of wise: she wanted it.
God, she wanted it. Six years of wanting it, trained down small, and he'd said national television and say your name and the want stood right back up to full height the way it had before the gala, because that was what hope did, it didn't learn, it was the one thing in her that never learned, and she looked at her husband's earnest face and she felt the yes rising up through all her good sense like water through floorboards.
"If I watch," she said slowly, "and you don't. That's the end, Jack.
I need you to understand that before you make me hope.
I'm already halfway out the door, I have been for weeks, and if you put me in front of a television with our son and you thank the investors and you don't thank us, there's no door left after that.
There's no gala-sized fight. I just go. Do you understand what you're asking me to risk? "
"I understand."
"You don't. But okay." She closed her eyes. Opened them. Said the stupid brave thing, the thing that cost her everything to say. "Okay. I'll watch. I'll believe you one more time. God help me. One more."
And Jackson took her hand across the table, and she let him, and neither of them knew they were making the last hopeful memory they'd have, the one she'd have to walk back through afterward and see, in hindsight, all the exits she didn't take.
POV: Sharon
They watched it at the diner, which was Dolores's idea, because the diner had the big television that usually showed weather and ballgames, and because Dolores had decided that if Sharon was going to bet her whole life on a man on a screen, she wasn't going to do it alone in a farmhouse.
So there was popcorn. Dolores made it like it was a party, and maybe she was trying to make it a party, trying to fill the room with enough ordinary that whatever happened would have somewhere soft to land.
Earl came. A few of the regulars. Ethan in his dinosaur pajamas even though it was barely past his dinner, because Sharon had let the bedtime go, because tonight Daddy was going to be on television saying their names and a boy should be allowed to stay up for that.
"Where's Daddy," Ethan kept asking, pressed up against the television. "Is that Daddy? Is that the hotel?"
"Not yet, bug. There's a lot of boring first. Eat your popcorn."
Sharon sat in a booth, her booth, the one by the window where a stranded stranger had once eaten meatloaf and argued about it, and she watched the broadcast come up, the ballroom, the tables, the industry in its good clothes, and she found Jackson in the crowd near the front and her heart did the foolish thing, the rabbit thing, the thing that never learned.
She'd worn a nice shirt. She noticed that about herself and felt stupid about it.
She'd dressed up to watch a television in a diner.
Some part of her had wanted to be ready, in case, as if the camera might somehow turn around and find her, as if being named on television meant she should look like someone worth naming.
"He looks handsome," Dolores said, sitting down beside her, not eating the popcorn. "I'll give him that. He cleans up."
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said he cleans up. That's you saying the thing."
"That's me saying he cleans up." But Dolores took her hand under the table, where Ethan couldn't see, and held it, and Sharon understood that Dolores had come to hold her hand through either ending, that this was what forty years of loving someone looked like, showing up to hold their hand when you already suspected how it went.
On the screen, a man at a podium was talking about the state of the industry.
Then a video package about Scott Hospitality, decades of it, buildings rising, Richard young and then old, the whole empire in ninety seconds of swelling music.
Then Richard himself at the podium, silver and certain, saying his generation's line about the next generation's turn, and the camera cut to Jackson in the front row, and Ethan shrieked "DADDY!
THAT'S DADDY!" loud enough that the whole diner laughed, and Sharon laughed too, she couldn't help it, and for one second it was joy, pure and uncomplicated, her son's whole face lit up pointing at his father on a screen.
Hold onto that second, some cold clear part of her said. Whatever happens. That second was real.
Jackson stood. He buttoned his jacket. He walked to the podium and shook his father's hand, and the two of them held it a beat, the handoff, the visible passing of the thing, and the room applauded, and Sharon's heart climbed all the way up into her throat and sat there beating.
"Here it comes," Dolores said quietly. "Here we go."
POV: Jackson
He had the sentence. It was the first card in his hand and he could feel it there, warm, ready.
I want to thank my wife, Sharon. He'd said it to the mirror that morning until the words stopped being words.
All he had to do was get through the investors and the board and then say the card he'd been holding for six years.
He looked out at the room.
That was his mistake. He should have kept his eyes on the middle distance, on the exit sign, on anything, but he looked out at the room, and the room was every face he'd spent his life performing for.
The board. The industry. Men who'd known his father for forty years.
And in the front row, dead center, looking up at him with an expression Jackson had spent his whole life learning to read and had never once seen aimed at him quite like this, was Richard.
His father was proud. That was it. In that moment, at that podium, his father was looking up at him with naked, undisguised pride, the thing Jackson had wanted since he was old enough to want anything, the thing he'd never quite gotten because it was always conditional, always the next quarter, the next deal.
And here it was, finally, unconditional, pouring up at him from the front row, and all Jackson had to do to keep it was not say a name.