October 18, 2011

Pam wrapped her arms around Amelia and lifted her from her highchair.

“We’re not going to talk about this?” Jim asked glumly.

“No,” Pam replied, “we are. I’m just going to put her up in her room…so she can’t hear us.”

“Oh,” Jim said, twining his fingers together nervously. They didn’t very often fight and as a result, they didn’t often put Amelia in another room so she couldn’t hear them.

Jim watched as Pam disappeared around the corner of the stairs and made her way up to the second level of their home; the home that Jim had lived in for a several years, the home that he was now considering leaving for good.

Pam silently descended the stairs and sat down in front of her half-eaten dinner. She refused to meet Jim’s gaze, she simply sat twirling her fork in her hand; the sound of the silver clinking loudly against the ceramic plate nearly drove Jim crazy.

“Say something,” he said quietly.

A long silence passed with five more clinks of the fork against the plate – he counted.

“When were you planning on telling me?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied with a shrug. “I notified them a month ago…”

She shook her head; a month ago she had informed him that she was going to start writing stories as well as illustrating them. She was thrilled about the new job within her company.

“Why did you wait until today?” she asked.

“Michael told me he’s quitting too,” Jim replied.

“I really don’t see why that’s…” she began to say before Jim interrupted her.

“He found this place in Boston,” Jim said.

“What kind of a place?” Pam asked, her eyes narrowing.

“A medium-sized office space,” he replied. “He…we…” he shook his head and stared down at the skin of a baked potato sitting uneaten on his place. “We want to start up our own company.”

Pam’s eyes widened and the fork in her hand dropped with a loud clink against the plate.

“What do you know about starting up a company from nothing?” she asked incredulously.

“I…not a lot,” he replied. “But Michael has done it and I think that it’s promising.”

“How much money are we going to have to invest in something like this?” she asked. “What are we going to do if it doesn’t work?”

“Michael is willing to put the down payment on the office,” he replied. “And it will work. As dumb as Michael can be sometimes, he knows how to run a business. The company we’ve worked for didn’t get to where it is now just like magic.”

“Where will we live?” Pam asked.

“Boston,” Jim replied casually.

“What am I going to do?” she asked, her voice rising slightly.

“What do you mean?” he asked in reply. “You can continue doing what you’re doing.”

“You want me to commute to Manhattan every day?” she asked incredulously.

“No,” he replied. “You can work somewhere in Boston.”

“Yes, because writing and illustration jobs are available everywhere,” she said, rolling her eyes slightly. “At least…I don’t know. I guess I could work from home, but I really love the environment that I’m working in right now. I like working away from home.”

“Well, you can work for our company,” he immediately suggested. “I’m sure that we’ll need some sort of artist…”

“I am not working with you,” she said, a little more harshly than she had intended to.

“Wha…” he cut himself off before he questioned her unwillingness to work with him. The idea of working in the same space as her excited him a bit, but he supposed that she had a point. The last thing that he wanted was for them to become annoyed with one another in the workplace.

He nodded and said, “Maybe the company you work for right now has a branch in Boston. Anyway, you have time.”

“Three months? Well…two and a half months?” she asked loudly. “That’s ‘time’? You realize how much we have to do in that amount of time?”

“Of course…” he said.

“We have to sell this place, we have to find someplace to live in Boston, and we’ll need to find a new nanny for Amelia, and obviously I need to find a new job…” she started listing off everything they needed to do anyway.

“I know, I know, I know,” Jim said. “I’ve been…looking.”

“What?” she asked. “When were you planning on telling me that?”

“I thought that you’d be excited about this,” he replied.

“Maybe I would be if I had more than three months,” she said.

“But you’ll consider it at least?” he asked.

She shook her head, “I don’t think I have any choice, Jim.”

He smiled weakly. He wanted this decision to be a mutual decision – not something that he coerced her into doing. Though the more that he thought about that, the more he began to realize that he hadn’t really given her any choice.