CHAPTER TEN #2
Sharon reached across and took her hand, and they sat in the booth where it had all started, where a man in a good suit had once eaten meatloaf and lied about Carbondale, and neither of them said anything for a while, and the neon buzzed, the second B still flickering after all these years, nobody ever having fixed it.
"You'll come visit," Sharon said. "It's two hours. That's nothing. You drive two hours for a good estate sale."
"I drive three for a good estate sale."
"So drive three for me."
"I'd drive six." Dolores squeezed her hand.
"You know that. I'd drive till the wheels came off.
" She looked at Sharon with forty years of loving people in her face.
"You did a hard thing, honey. Harder than staying.
Anybody tells you leaving's the coward's way out never had to pack a whole life into three days with a five-year-old asking why.
You stood up. Late, but you stood up. Your daddy never did learn to and your mama never made him, and you broke the thing right there, tonight, you broke it so it doesn't get handed down.
That boy's going to grow up knowing his mother stood up.
" She wiped her eyes, ugly, the way she cried.
"That's worth the whole rotten business. That's worth all of it."
POV: Jackson
He didn't go to the house until she was gone, and then he went and stood in it, and the standing in it was the worst thing he had ever done.
It wasn't empty, and that was the cruelty of it.
She'd only taken what was theirs, hers and Ethan's, and left the rest, so the house was three-quarters furnished and entirely hollow, which was worse than empty, empty you could fill.
The couch was still there. The couch had a Jackson-shaped absence on it.
The kitchen table where she'd made her list and put her hand over his was still there, wobble-free, and he sat at it and could not stop seeing her across it.
He found the things she'd left on purpose, and understood each one as a message, because Sharon communicated in objects the way his mother did, he'd married a woman who filed things and left things, and he was fluent in her now, too late, the way you master a language the week after the person dies.
The blue dress was in the closet. She'd left the blue dress.
He stood in front of it a long time and understood: she was never going to be seen in it, so she didn't want it, and she was leaving it where he'd hung it the night of the gala so he'd have to be the one to decide what to do with a dress his wife bought to be publicly loved in and never got to wear.
It was the cruelest thing she'd ever done to him and it wasn't cruel at all, it was just true, and true was worse.
On the doorframe of Ethan's room, the pencil marks.
She hadn't been able to take those. Jackson knelt in his son's empty room and put his hand flat against the wall, against the small ascending ticks of a boy growing up, ETHAN and a date, ETHAN and a date, four years of them, and the most recent one was three weeks old, and there would not be another one on this wall, and Jackson knelt on the floor of the room and made a sound he had never made in his life, alone, where no one could see, in the only house he'd ever wanted and never once lived in.
He did not have an epiphany. He wanted to.
He wanted the moment where it all became clear and he became the man who drives to his father and blows it all up and wins her back with the grand gesture, and he waited for that man to arrive in the empty house, and that man did not come, because that man had never existed, that man was the fantasy he'd been mistaking for a plan for six years.
What came instead was smaller and truer and would take much longer.
What came was the first hour of understanding that he was going to have to actually change, not perform changing, not promise changing, not stand at a podium and change in one cinematic swoop, but do the slow unglamorous work Sharon had done in three days of boxes, the work of becoming a different man one ordinary choice at a time, with no audience, no camera, no father in the front row to be proud of him for it.
And he might do that work and still not get her back.
That was the part that finally broke something loose in him.
She might be gone even if he became worth staying for.
There was no deal here, no if-I-fix-myself-then-she-returns.
He'd have to change for nothing, for no guaranteed prize, or not change at all.
For the first time in his life, Jackson Scott sat with a problem that money could not touch and effort could not guarantee, and he stayed in the hollow house until dawn, and he did not call his father, and that, the not calling, was the smallest possible beginning of the only thing that might, someday, matter.
POV: Sharon
The first night at her mother's, Ethan fell asleep in twenty minutes with the old dog Biscuit pressed against his back, and Sharon stood in the doorway of a childhood bedroom that was hers again at thirty-one and understood that Robin had been exactly right.
It was both.
It was relief, clean and enormous, the relief of a body that has been braced for years finally setting the weight down.
She had not known how heavy it was until it was gone.
She'd been holding a smile in place for six years, and here in her mother's house nobody needed the smile, and her face did something strange and unfamiliar, which was nothing, which was rest.
And it was grief, in the exact same breath, grief with no bottom to it, because she still loved him.
That was the part the leaving didn't fix and was never going to fix.
She'd left a man she loved. She would go to sleep tonight in her mother's house missing the sound of his car in a driveway two hours away, and she'd wake up tomorrow still missing it, and she'd do the missing while also being free, both at once, forever probably, and Robin had told her and she hadn't fully believed it and now she did.
Her mother appeared in the hallway in an old robe, and looked at her daughter, and looked at the sleeping boy and the ancient dog, and did not say any of the things Sharon had braced for, the I-told-you-so or the you-can-always-come-home or the worst one, the what-did-you-expect-marrying-up.
"Your father," her mother said instead, quietly, "took you for ice cream every time I asked him something hard.
Did you know I knew? I always knew. I let him, because the ice cream made you happy and I told myself a happy girl was worth a coward for a husband.
" She pulled the robe tighter. "I was wrong, and I'm too old to fix it, and I've watched you do the braver thing than I ever did, and I just wanted to say it out loud once before I lose my nerve.
You did the thing I couldn't. I'm proud of you.
I'm sorry it took me till now to know the difference. "
And Sharon, who had held it together through the kitchen and the boxes and Ethan and Dolores, who had saved her spine for all the hard parts, finally came apart in her mother's arms in the hallway of the house she'd grown up in, the two of them holding each other in the dark, a woman who stayed and a woman who left, both of them crying, both of them right, and down the hall a five-year-old slept with his arm around an old dog, in the first night of a life where the sad would not have to hide under the happy anymore.