CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
"I'm not happy," he said finally. "I want to be honest. I'm not happy, because I miss you every day, I miss the life we had even though I'm the one who poisoned it, and there's a version of every day where I let myself imagine you say yes and it's almost unbearable how much I want it.
" He turned to look at her. "But I'm not waiting you out.
That's the thing I can finally tell the difference on.
Wanting you back and waiting you out are different, and the difference is whether I need it to happen on my schedule.
I don't. If maybe-never is the real answer, then I'll be here Tuesdays for the rest of my life loving a woman who chose not to come back, and I'll be Ethan's father, and I'll be glad, actually glad, that at least I got to be near you both, because near you both and honest is still the best I've ever been.
So no, I'm not happy. But I'm at peace with the maybe-never.
Both. I've learned the both from you. It turns out you can be not-happy and at-peace at the same time, and that used to sound like a contradiction to me and now it just sounds like being an adult. "
Sharon looked out at the yard, the dark, the town too far away to see but she knew it was there, small enough to hold.
"That's the right answer," she said. "I want you to know that.
Not the answer that helps your case. The true one.
And it happens to be the same." She set the dish towel down, the one she'd carried out without noticing.
"I've been waiting to hear you say you were fine, actually.
Waiting to catch you performing okay-ness, because that's how I'd have known you hadn't really changed, if you'd told me a comfortable thing to make me feel unpressured.
And you didn't. You just told me you're not happy and you're staying anyway.
And Jack, that. That's the thing. That's the whole thing I needed for six years and never got.
A man who'll tell me the uncomfortable truth and stay.
You couldn't do it once. Now you can't seem to stop. "
"Sharon."
"Don't. Let me finish, I've been working up to this for weeks and if you talk I'll lose it.
" She turned to face him fully. "I'm not coming back because you fixed the porch.
I'm not coming back because of a press conference, and I'm not coming back because the world decided to love me, and I'm not coming back because Ethan wants two parents in one house, though he does, and he's mentioned it roughly nine hundred times.
" A breath. "I'm coming back because I watched a man become who I needed over months when nobody was making him, with no guarantee I'd ever reward it, and that's the only proof that was ever going to mean anything, and you gave it to me the slow boring unglamorous way, and I believe it.
That's it. That's the whole reason. I believe you now. I didn't for six years and I do now."
Jackson had gone very still.
"I'm not asking you to hear a yes to easy," Sharon said.
"It's going to be hard. I'm still going to be angry sometimes, out of nowhere, about things from before, and you're going to have to sit in it when I am, and not defend yourself, and not build a pool.
And we're going to do the counseling, the real kind, because I'm not raising Ethan in a house that only looks fixed.
And the first time, Jack, the first time you say soon, the first time you manage me instead of tell me the truth, I will leave again and I will not come back a third time, and I need you to know I mean that with my whole spine. "
"I know you mean it. I'd help you pack."
And that, of all things, was what did it, that he'd help her pack, that he finally understood her well enough to know the loving thing was to promise not to fight her if it came to that, and Sharon felt the last of the wall come down, six years of it, gone, and she reached across the porch and took her husband's face in both her hands the way she had in a kitchen a lifetime ago before either of them knew what it would cost.
"Okay," she said. "Come home, Jack. Slowly. On probation. With conditions. But come home."
And he came home.
POV: Jackson
They went back to the Bluebird, the three of them, the first weekend after he came home, because Sharon said some things needed a witness and Dolores had earned the right to be one.
The neon still flickered, the second B still broken after all these years, and Jackson held the door and the bell jangled exactly the way it had the afternoon his car died and his life quietly started over without his permission.
Dolores came around the counter drying her hands and stopped in front of him and looked him up and down the way she'd looked at him seven years ago, the same appraisal, and Jackson stood still for it, because he'd learned that Dolores's appraisal was worth more than any board's.
"You look different," Dolores said.
"I'm told I am."
"Mm. We'll see." But she said it the way Sharon said it now, the way that meant the door was open a crack, and then she hugged him, hard, unexpected, fierce, a woman who'd cried ugly at his wedding and worried through his whole marriage and driven two hours to hold her girl's hand through a broadcast, and she said into his shoulder, low, so Ethan couldn't hear, "You hurt her again and they'll never find you.
I know things about this county. There's a lot of corn.
" And then she let him go and was bright and loud and setting them up in the window booth, the booth, and it was the most complete forgiveness Jackson had ever been given, threat and all.
They ate meatloaf. Ethan had pie for dinner because Dolores declared it a special occasion and no parent overruled her.
Earl came in and pretended he wasn't delighted and failed.
Mr. Petrie sent over a decaf with great ceremony.
The town that had defended Sharon to the cameras folded Jackson back in with the particular grace of people who'd already decided, on Sharon's behalf, to give him a chance, because she had, and her judgment was law here in a way it had never been in any room he'd hidden her from.
He sat in the window booth with his wife and his son in the diner where it all began, and watched Sharon lean across to steal a bite of Ethan's pie, the mouth of it, where the secrets were, and Ethan shriek in outrage, and Sharon laugh her real laugh, the unguarded one, the one he'd fallen for across this exact table before he knew her name or she knew his, and Jackson understood that he had been given back, by grace he had not earned and a patience he did not deserve, the one thing he'd spent six years too afraid to claim.
Not the woman. He'd never lost the woman, not really; she'd been down the road the whole time being magnificent without him.
What he'd gotten back was the right to sit at the table in the light, publicly, permanently, a man at dinner with his family where anyone could see, no caption to get wrong, no name to swallow, no room to perform for.
Just Thursday. Just pie. Just the loud ordinary miracle of a family eating dinner in a diner with a broken neon sign.
"What are you looking at," Sharon said, catching him.
"You," Jackson said. "In public. On the record. My wife."
And Sharon rolled her eyes, because she'd never let him get away with a line, not once in seven years, but under the table she found his hand and held it, and did not let go, and outside the window the broken B flickered over the parking lot where a man had once walked in out of the heat with no idea he was walking into the rest of his life, and inside it was warm, and lit, and everyone could see them, and that, at last, was the whole point.