Sharon

Sharon is Mark Abshire’s girlfriend and the woman he plans to marry after she becomes pregnant. Henry DeTamble learns this during his first Christmas with Clare Abshire’s family, when Sharon’s candid account of the engagement reveals the pressure behind it. Her limited but consequential appearance also helps define the household Henry has entered: family members know different things, and what seems settled to one person may be a painful surprise to another.

Identity and Introduction

At the Christmas gathering, Sharon is introduced as a pretty blonde woman sitting beside Henry at the Abshire family table. She is Mark’s girlfriend, though Henry initially understands only that she seems to be with him. The scene is filtered through Henry’s observations as he tries to read the family’s guarded reactions to his presence; Sharon appears within that larger introduction to a family whose relationships and private histories he does not yet understand.

Sharon comes from Florida, where her father owns a gas station in Jacksonville. She tells Henry that she had expected to return there after school because she dislikes cold weather, but now thinks she is staying. The contrast between that earlier expectation and her current situation gives the engagement a practical consequence: her plans have changed along with her relationship and pregnancy.

Engagement and Pregnancy

Henry finds Sharon in the kitchen and asks where she is from. When he asks why she is staying, she tells him that she and Mark are getting married. Henry is surprised that Clare has not mentioned it, and then notices the diamond on Sharon’s finger. The ring makes the news visible, but does not make the decision feel joyful or secure: when Henry congratulates her, Sharon answers uncertainly and appears to have been crying.

Asked whether she is sure about marrying, Sharon explains that she is pregnant. She connects the pregnancy to the wedding through her Catholic faith, saying that, as she understands it, marriage follows. Henry questions whether one necessarily entails the other, but Sharon’s response makes clear that she sees little room to separate the two. The exchange presents her decision not as a simple announcement of happiness but as a choice shaped by religious conviction and circumstance.

Place in the Abshire Family

At the dinner table, Mark and Sharon’s engagement is not common knowledge even within the family: Henry wonders whether Clare knows, and the later dinner scene suggests that the news has not been openly shared with everyone. Sharon’s disclosure thus places Henry in the awkward position of learning a consequential family fact directly from her, while he is still unfamiliar with the household’s conventions and loyalties.

During dessert, the family’s attention shifts to Lucille Abshire, whose distress brings an older family secret into view. Great Aunt Dulcie’s intervention connects Lucille’s past to the current question of Mark and Sharon’s marriage, and Sharon smiles as if she has won at bingo. The reaction suggests that the revelation matters to her, but the scene does not spell out every implication of the family exchange. Its force lies partly in Henry’s growing recognition that Clare knows more about the family’s history than he does.

Narrative Significance

Sharon’s appearance is brief, but it gives the novel a grounded instance of how parenthood can redirect an individual’s plans. Her expectation of returning to Florida gives way to an impending marriage and a life she describes as settled by the pregnancy. The scene does not develop her beyond this moment; instead, it shows Henry encountering a decision whose emotional and religious dimensions he can question but cannot resolve for her.

Her conversation also echoes, without equating, the later difficulties Henry and Clare face when they try to have a child. In their case, the desire for a baby is accompanied by uncertainty about inheritance and the effects of Henry’s time-travel condition; Sharon’s pregnancy, by contrast, arrives as an immediate circumstance around which she and Mark organize marriage. The juxtaposition places different kinds of reproductive choice within the same family story, where love, belief, risk, and limited knowledge do not always align.