EPILOGUE
One Year Later
POV: Sharon ? One year later
The party was Eleanor's idea, which a year ago would have made Sharon suspicious and now just made her tired in the good way, the way you're tired when someone who loves you has once again done too much.
It was the first proper Scott family gathering of the summer, and Eleanor had wanted to host it, and there had been a negotiation, because Sharon was never going to be a woman who let a party get away from her into the realm of ponies and hired entertainers and a hundred people she didn't know.
They'd compromised. It was at the North Shore house, because the house had a yard the size of a public park and Ethan had recently discovered he could run, genuinely run, and needed acreage.
But the cake was Dolores's, driven up three hours in the back of her car, peach, because it was always going to be peach in this family now, peach was the flavor of everything that mattered.
And the guest list was Sharon's, which meant it was small and strange and perfect: Dolores and Earl, Sharon's mother, Margaret from the Circle who had become, improbably, one of Sharon's closest friends, and the family, all of it, the whole reassembled wreck of it.
Sharon stood on the terrace of the house where she'd once been called dear like an insult, where she'd overheard the word procedure through a door that didn't quite close, and watched her five-year-old run across a lawn that would someday, in some form, be his, and did not feel like a woman who had won.
Winning was the wrong frame. She'd stopped thinking in it.
She felt like a woman who had refused to disappear, and who had been, against every projection including her own, proven right to refuse.
"He runs like his mother," Eleanor said, coming to stand beside her. "Straight at things. No hedging."
"He runs like a maniac. He's going to hit the fountain."
"He's going to hit the fountain," Eleanor agreed serenely, and did not stop him, because Eleanor had learned, this past year, the grandmotherly art of letting a boy hit a fountain and learn something from it, which was an art Sharon had watched her acquire clumsily and then well, the way she'd watched her acquire everything, late and completely.
They stood together, the two women, and it was easy now, or if not easy then true, which was better than easy.
Sharon had not forgotten the front room.
She'd told Eleanor she never would, and she never had, and Eleanor had stopped asking her to, and somewhere in the not-forgetting and the not-asking a thing had grown that Sharon didn't have a clean word for.
Not forgiveness, exactly. Forgiveness was too total.
It was more like a decision, renewed daily, to let a person be who they were becoming instead of who they'd been.
She made the decision every time she saw Eleanor.
It got easier to make. It never became automatic, and she didn't want it to, because automatic was how you stopped seeing people, and she'd been unseen enough to know its cost.
Ethan hit the fountain. There was a splash, a shriek, and then delighted laughter, and Richard Scott, of all the people in the world, was the one closest, and Richard Scott set down his drink and waded in, in his good shoes, to haul his soaking grandson out of the fountain, and the boy came up howling with joy and threw his wet arms around his grandfather's neck, and the old man stood there dripping and let himself be embraced by a small soaking boy in front of everyone, and did not check who was watching.
"A year ago," Eleanor said quietly, watching her husband stand in a fountain, "he would have had a member of staff do that. And he would have been annoyed about his shoes."
"He's still a little annoyed about his shoes. Look at his face."
"Oh, he's furious about the shoes. But he went in anyway.
" Eleanor's voice did something. "That's the whole man now, in one picture.
Furious about the shoes and in the fountain anyway.
I was married to him for forty years before I saw him get in the fountain.
It took losing you and nearly losing his son and finding out about his brother, all of it, everything, to get him into the water.
But he's in the water." She turned to Sharon.
"You did that. Not on purpose. But you walking out of this family was the rock that finally moved the whole avalanche.
I hope you know that. I hope you let yourself know it. "
POV: Jackson
He found the two women on the terrace and did not interrupt them, because he'd learned the difference between his wife wanting company and his wife wanting to be left alone, and this was a leaving-alone, so he stood a little apart and watched his family use his father's house the way it had never once been used in his childhood, which was joyfully.
There were people here his father would have found unsuitable a year ago.
Dolores was holding court by the good silver, telling Earl a story with her hands, both of them entirely at home in a room that cost more than their combined lifetimes and neither of them impressed by it, which was its own quiet victory.
Margaret and Sharon's mother had discovered a shared and encyclopedic hatred of a particular daytime television host and had not stopped talking for an hour.
Biscuit, who had made the trip in the back of Sharon's Honda under loud protest and now considered the North Shore estate his personal domain, had found the one sunny flagstone on the entire terrace and lay across it like a rug someone had spilled, occasionally lifting his head to confirm the party was still beneath his dignity before going back to sleep.
The house, which Jackson had experienced his whole life as a museum of the family's importance, had somehow become, in one year, a place where actual life happened, loud and unmatched and real, and he understood that this was Sharon's doing, that she had walked into the coldest house he knew and simply refused to be cold in it until the house gave up and got warm.
The Hargroves were not here, and Jackson noticed the absence the way you notice a tooth that no longer aches.
Vivian had married that spring, someone in shipping, a wedding Jackson read about in the same society pages that had once tried to seat him beside her, and he'd felt nothing but a clean, uncomplicated gladness for a woman he'd never known and never wronged except by almost using her as a wall to hide behind.
Her father's fund had stayed in the hospitality position after all, because the numbers were the numbers, and Richard, to everyone's astonishment, had said at a board meeting that the alignment had never depended on a marriage and he'd been a fool to imply otherwise.
It was the closest Richard came, in public, to apologizing for anything, and the people who knew what he meant had gone very quiet.
His cousins had come. That was what he still couldn't quite believe, looking across the lawn.
Kate had flown down from Maine, the boat-builder, Daniel's daughter, forty-four and weathered and funny in the dry way that apparently ran in the erased branch of the family.
And Michael had come, Daniel's son, who had hung up on Richard twice before he'd stopped hanging up, and who still watched Richard across a room with a wariness that Jackson respected, because it was earned, because you didn't owe a man your trust just because he'd finally come looking for you after forty years.
But he'd come. They'd both come. Richard had spent the year doing the only thing he knew how to do when he'd decided a thing mattered, which was pursue it relentlessly, except this time the thing was people instead of properties, and he'd pursued his dead brother's children with the same terrifying focus he'd once aimed at markets, and it had been, by turns, clumsy and moving and occasionally a disaster, and slowly, unevenly, it had worked.
"Your father asked me to teach him to sail," Kate said, appearing at Jackson's elbow with a drink.
"Did he tell you that? He wants to come to Maine.
He hates the water. He gets seasick looking at a bathtub.
But he asked me to teach him to sail because it was Dad's thing, my dad's, and I think he's trying to know his brother backward, through the kids, since he can't do it forward anymore.
" She shook her head. "It's the saddest, most stubborn thing I've ever seen.
I keep wanting to stay angry at him and he keeps showing up seasick and trying.
It's very hard to stay angry at a seasick man who's trying. "
"That's the family curse in reverse," Jackson said. "We spent generations very good at not showing up. He's overcorrecting."
"You all overcorrect. Your whole family.
I've noticed." Kate grinned. "Your little boy told me I'm his cousin and then explained the entire concept of cousins to me, incorrectly, for ten minutes, and would not be corrected.
That's your father in miniature. Absolutely certain and completely wrong and you love him anyway. "
Jackson laughed, and watched his cousin walk off toward the fountain where his father was still dripping, and felt the strange completeness of the afternoon settle over him, the sense of a thing that had been broken for two generations quietly knitting, not perfectly, not painlessly, but knitting.
POV: Sharon
That night, after the guests had gone and Ethan had been extracted from the festivities and poured into bed still half-vibrating with cake, Sharon and Jackson sat on the back terrace in the dark, the way they'd once sat on her mother's porch, except this porch was theirs now, or becoming theirs, the way everything was becoming rather than being, which she'd made her peace with, because becoming was just the honest name for a marriage anyway.