“Paul Revere!”
“Yes! Yes, good, ok…so,” he flipped to a new card and blew air out of the side of his mouth in concentration, “this is a kind of um form of transportation for clowns or…uh…damnit…ok, ok, no this doesn’t have two…uh, round rubber things, but only…”
“One?”
“Right right so what is that called?”
“What?”
“What is it called if it only has what you said? Come on, man, don’t look at me like you don’t know what I’m talking about right now.”
“Jim, what does that…a form of transportation with one wheel?”
“Yes! You’re an idiot, yes come on!”
“For clowns?”
“Time!” Larissa called out triumphantly, smiling at Jim’s look of utter irritation. “Oh my God, don’t look so disappointed, you got like sixteen points or something,” she scolded. He sighed.
“Unicycle, Adam. The word was unicycle,” Jim told him flatly, and Adam just rolled his eyes.
“Whatever, I don’t even know what that is,” he murmured, standing to go get a bottle of beer as Anne and Jim’s sister in law, Bridget, started their turn. Larissa handed the egg timer to someone closer to the action and then crossed her arms and stared at the side of Jim’s face, willing to wait as long as it took before he finally turned to look back at her.
“What?” he forced out, annoyed and raising his eyebrows at her as evidence.
“How’s the game?” she asked, her voice a forced kind of casual that made him tip his head.
“It’s good…” he told her suspiciously. She nodded her head at him shortly, her movements quick and irritated.
“Is it good?” she asked, and he shifted on the floor and sighed.
“What…yeah, it’s good Larissa. What is the matter with you?” She scoffed at him and leaned back.
“What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with you, Jim? What. Is the matter. With you?” she questioned quietly, her brow furrowed and her arms crossed. Jim just sighed again, leaning down closer to her and whispering back an impatient response.
“Can you just yell at me for whatever it is you think I did wrong and get it over with please?” he requested and she shook her head.
“You’re being selfish,” she told him earnestly. He froze and she could visibly see him trying to keep the words from fully sinking in. He licked his lips and tossed out a deferral.
“Did you want to be on Adam’s team? I thought you guys hated being on the same team…” he mumbled innocently, and she huffed out a sarcastic chuckle.
“No, ew. Adam sucks. I don’t want to play Taboo with him. I’m talking about Pam. You’re being selfish,” she repeated. Jim turned to look around the room, only just realizing that Pam was missing.
“Where did she go?” he asked.
“Probably somewhere to shoot herself in the face,” Larissa replied curtly.
“What is your problem?” Jim prodded, his voice raising slightly in volume so that Larissa had to shush him and scoot closer on the carpet as Anne attempted to get Bridget to guess something involving Richard Nixon.
“My problem is that while you’re being all weird and pissy because dad invited the she-devil, over there, to your romantic Christmas, poor Pam has just been sitting here. This family can be really overwhelming to an outsider, Jim, and she is not having fun,” Larissa stated, her voice sounding completely avid that this was the truth. Jim’s face twisted into incredulousness and he began to deny it, but then his expression shifted and Larissa could tell he was thinking back and wondering if maybe Pam really wasn’t having fun. She’d said she was, but Larissa knew that didn’t mean anything. “It isn’t my job to make sure she’s ok,” Larissa told him meaningfully. He chewed on the inside of his cheek and nodded his defeat, realizing that not only did he have to go after Pam, but he probably owed her an apology. His family was overwhelming and he hadn’t been paying enough attention to how she was handling it.
“You do know that you should see a therapist about this problem you have of always having to be right, right?” he asked Larissa teasingly and she waved him off with a quirk of her lips.
“Please, I don’t have to be right, I just am,” she promised, “Now get out of here.” He chuckled and ruffled her hair in a way that was blatantly reminiscent of their childhood rapport.
“You’re so pushy,” he accused as he stood, and she chuckled and watched him leave the room with victorious eyes. God, she thought to herself, I have to do everything in this family.
*** ***
Jim felt like someone had reached down into his lungs and pulled the air out of them like it was made of something solid and tangible. He felt like someone had grabbed onto all of his senses and tugged until his ears were sort of ringing and his eyes were sort of watering and his hands were tingling and his mouth was suddenly dry. He felt like he was in a waking dream and this dimly lit scene in front of him was a complete manifestation of his overly-emotional imagination. But the doorframe was solid against his back, and the heat from the furnace was pushing against the skin of his arms, and someone in the kitchen coughed, and everyone in the den laughed and it echoed against the walls of the hallway like the roar of a crowd.
This was real…
And he was totally in love with her.
Like…he felt like there was no way she actually existed so perfectly and so precisely in his universe. Shoving his hands into his pockets he crossed one ankle over the other and grinned, shaking his head a little in a mixture of amusement and helplessness.
Pam was stretched out on the floor, her knees bent so that her feet kicked at nothing in the air above her, an array of crayons spread out in front of her, and Jim’s second cousin Jessie was nestled up right against her side like glue had attached one hip to the other and there was no way Jess could be pried away from Pam even if she tried. Pam was nodding and smiling and she pointed a long gentle finger down at the coloring book Jessie was working at with intense concentration. She murmured something about making a doll’s dress lilac instead of green and Jess nodded and replied softly with something Jim couldn‘t quite hear, licking her lips and switching crayons with chubby fingers. Jon was at the piano playing a slow and nostalgic version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and as Jessie bent her head low and filled in the book with a dusting of light purple, Pam’s lips moved and Jim could tell she was singing along, even though he couldn’t hear her voice.
He’d always been sentimental, and he guessed he’d always wanted a family, but this was like someone had zipped open time and pulled his future out of the closet…this was like someone had tapped into his subconscious and made real the quiet secrets he hadn’t even gotten around to telling himself. He couldn’t catch a full breath and he couldn’t clear the haze from his eyes, so he blinked and ran a hand down his face like it could wipe away his astonishment and emotion.
“Then one foggy Christmas eve,” Pam murmured, her voice barely on a pitch, and her mouth only moving as much as it absolutely had to while Jess’s feet kicked beside her in a childish form of keeping the beat.
“Santa came to say,” Jess filled in, “Rudolph with your nose so bright, come ride in my sleigh tonight,” she sang, and Jon chuckled at her invented lyrics, a smile twisting Pam’s lips as she picked up an orange crayon and filled something in on the page in front of her. Jess smiled up at her with excitement, and Jim had a sneaking suspicion it was just the look Jess got every time anybody mentioned Santa Claus. He crossed his arms and stood stock still until the song ended and the room was filled with silence. “Jim, come color with us!” Jessie suddenly exclaimed, and Jim practically jumped out of his skin, not realizing that anybody in the room had noticed his presence. But of course Jessie had, she was pretty much the most intuitive and intelligent kid in the family. Pam also started, turning to look over her shoulder in surprise, her eyes wide and her cheeks turning an embarrassed shade of red.
“Hey, sorry,” she muttered softly, “is the game over?” she asked, and Jim lifted one side of his mouth, hoping his voice and his face didn’t give away the tightness in his chest and the way that he basically wanted to take her upstairs and have his way with her.
“Oh I don’t…um…” he inhaled noisily and stood up straight, glancing back over his shoulder toward the den with a frown, before turning back and locking his gaze with hers, his voice softening more than he’d intended. “Come for a walk with me,” he requested, and she blinked at him, her eyes shining with understanding and something almost like gratefulness. She nodded and turned her attention back to Jess.
“I’m gonna go with Jim, but we can color more tomorrow, ok? You better go to bed or Santa won’t come,” Pam told her excitedly, raising her eyebrows and smiling. Jess raised her eyebrows back, her face breaking into a wide grin and her feet kicking idly in the air of the living room.
“Ok, Pam, you better go to bed too!” she told her, the smile on her face coming through her voice in a way that was often identified with the Halperts. Pam chuckled and brushed some hair from Jess’s face, hoisting herself up and giving an easy kind of wave to Jon, who just nodded at her and glanced at Jim with a knowing kind of look in his eye.
She followed him out into the hallway and when he turned back to look at her over his shoulder she had a sad kind of look on her face, a little-girl melancholy, and all he knew was that he wanted to make it disappear. So he kissed her, and he told her to put on her coat.
Because this was what he loved about her.
