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The rain that had threatened all afternoon finally started coming down as I merged onto 81. The quiet flick of the windshield wipers was the only sound until I finally turned on the radio, unable to bear the silence but equally unable to just tell her I’m sorry.
I’m sick with guilt and regret and I want to apologize even though I didn’t really do anything. But we both know she saw it in my face. She’s quiet, picking at her cuticles, staring out the window, but there’s no accusation in her expression. Instead she looks sad and uncertain and even a little guilty when she should be angry, if anything; should be telling me to stop looking for ghosts and holding on to haunted memories.
She should be doing those things, but she’s not. She’s Pam and she’s so unselfish and she loves me, with the same kind of patient loyalty that she gave Roy all those years. So she’ll put up with my irrational behavior even though it makes her feel weird and awkward when she really has no reason to feel any of those things.
I don’t deserve her.
Right up until the end, though, it was actually a great day.
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I guess I hadn’t really considered exactly how extended our extended-family is until I saw her expression; she was visibly astounded when I told her I had twenty cousins. Twenty-two? I don’t know the actual number; some of them have kids too. But Pam’s family is comparatively small. She has one brother, and a few cousins in Syracuse and Buffalo. Yet after her initial surprise she kept gazing at me in a thoughtful, speculative way, like she was trying to figure out what that meant about me.
“Did I miss a spot or something, Beesly?” I asked finally, stroking my jaw with the backs of my fingers.
She blushed a little but smiled. “Nope.” She reached over to put her hand on top of mine where it rested on the gearshift, and looked out the window with a small smile. And she wouldn’t say more but she knew I was reading her thoughts.
She was anxious about meeting my family, I knew, and I couldn’t be entirely sure how they would respond to her. My dad had been unreservedly supportive about the whole thing, maybe because Mom turned him down the first time he asked her to marry him. (On bended knee. In front of her parents.) For that same reason, Mom was also pretty sympathetic. But Jon got sick of listening to my tales of woe somewhere around the second year, and decided Pam couldn’t possibly be worth it. And Amy is terribly protective. I think there was a time last year that she was genuinely worried that I was going to kill myself.
Which is ridiculous, incidentally. I’m an optimist, I keep telling her—how does she think I survived on nothing but hope for so long?
It was only just after eleven when we arrived, but there were already a few cars out front. I recognized uncle Eddie’s royal-blue Miata convertible right away and wondered if he’d brought anybody. Eddie is my father’s youngest brother. He’s very funny and audaciously, unapologetically gay. It looked like Mom’s brother Mark and his family were here already too. They had four daughters, but Hannah was living in Chicago and hadn’t made it out here in a few years.
“Ready?” I asked with a teasing grin, pausing before the front door.
“Yep.” Pam smiled up at me. “Don’t worry about me, Halpert. I handled Roy’s family for ten years; I’m sure yours can’t be any worse.”
It blunted the edge of my good mood just a little to think how my family would be held up to Roy’s, but I smiled anyway as I led her inside. She hung a step behind me, glancing around the living room as I shut the door behind me and called out, “Anybody home?”
“Jim?” My father poked his head around the wall of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel as he strode into the living room. “I’m glad you’re here, your mother is driving me crazy. One little accident with the teriyaki and…oh, but this must be Pam,” he interrupted himself, reaching out to shake her hand in his quick firm grip.
She gave him a small, nervous smile. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Halpert.”
“Oh, please, it’s Ron.” He’s very unpretentious, my dad. He has a PhD in medieval European history and speaks fluent French and Italian, but you’d never know it to look at him… particularly now, in his utterly clichéd “grillmaster” get-up of wide-brimmed hat and “Many have eaten here…few have died” apron.
“Ron, then,” Pam repeated, looking pleased. My dad has a great way of putting people at ease. I thought it very auspicious that he was the first person she met.
He pointed at Pam’s covered glass dish. “What’s that you have there? Pasta salad? Excellent…let’s just put that in the fridge…” Pam glanced up at me with an amused and affectionate smile as he led the way into the kitchen. “You brought the salsa, Jim?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Yep.” It’s actually my aunt Suzy’s recipe; she made it one year when she and Greg came out from New Mexico. I tried my hand at it for our next party and ever after it sort of became my thing.
“Hot?” he asked hopefully.
“Medium,” I said sternly. We’ve had this conversation before.
“Hmph,” he grunted, disappointed. “Has Jimmy cooked for you, Pam? He—”
“Dad,” I said sharply. I did not want everyone calling me Jimmy today. If he started, it would give the whole clan carte blanche to take us back to 1993.
“Sorry. Has my son cooked for you?” he repeated with exaggerated deference as he moved things around in the refrigerator. “Because he’s lazy as a Bassett hound, but he makes a mean chicken parmesan.”
“He does, and great spaghetti sauce, too,” Pam agreed, winking at me as she handed my father the casserole dish and my bowl of salsa. “It’s just too bad he’s never learned to clean up after himself,” she teased.
I gaped at her. “Beesly!”
“Yeah, spoiled rotten, can you tell he’s the baby?” Dad laughed, ignoring my expression of mock-outraged indignity.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Your mother is changing; there was an…incident…with the marinade. Everyone else is outside. Not a very full house yet but Jon called from the road about an hour ago…they should be here soon. Your cousin Lauren is getting married, did you hear? So she’s with her fella’s folks, but Vanessa and Tracy are here…” Pam edged closer to me and I reached over to take her hand, following my father out into the backyard.
I love my parents’ house. I grew up in this house, played in this yard, fell out of that yellow birch tree and broke my arm when I was eight. Every inch of the place holds a memory. We had backyard “camping” adventures and volleyball tournaments and every summer the battle raged between Mom and That Dog, as she called him—Chance, our border collie, who was perpetually finding ways around the decorative fencing to dig in her flowerbeds. Yet when he came down with canine leukemia a few years ago and we had to put him down, it was Mom who took it the hardest, and she was the one who insisted we bury him in the back yard.
I had a great childhood, I realize now, but even when I was a kid, I knew I was pretty lucky. Half my friends spent every weekend shuffling from one parent’s home to the other like carefully divided spoils of war. My parents have been together for thirty-seven years and they still look at each other with the kind of open affection and eye-rolling, amused tolerance of each other’s quirks that I always thought (hoped) I would find someday for myself.
Maybe that’s why I couldn’t just force myself to give up on Pam. The night she turned me down I drove out here and sobbed on my mother’s shoulder and spent the weekend curled up in my old bedroom, too stunned and disillusioned to function. It was like everything I’d known growing up was a fantasy and the true reality of life was what so many of my friends had lived through, mismatched marriages and broken relationships.
Now Pam’s here with me, and my faith in the basic order of the universe has been restored. It’s one of the reasons I wanted her to come today. I love holidays and family reunions. Every time that we all get together is like a confirmation that people can be devoted and find new things to laugh about even years after they found each other. I am fully aware that this makes me a sap, a hopeless romantic sap, and I don’t care. I blame my parents.
“Jim!” Uncle Eddie sauntered over, cocktail in hand, colorful as always in a bright blue Hawaiian shirt and floppy straw hat. He’d grown a goatee: a vast improvement over that sad little John Waters mustache he had last year. “How’ve you been? And who is this ravishing creature?”
Pam gave me an amused, almost imperceptible quirk of the eyebrow. “How many of those have you had?” I asked, eyeing his glass suspiciously.
“This would be my second, and you… did not answer the question,” he said, looking pointedly at Pam. “You’re very pretty. Out of Jim’s league, I’d think.” He winked at her. She grinned.
“Thanks, Eddie,” I deadpanned. “This is my—girlfriend. Pam.” I hesitated just for an instant before using the word; I’d never said it aloud. My girlfriend, Pam.
It still seemed almost surreal.
“Excellent to meet you, Pam.” He tipped the brim of his hat at her and then glanced back at me. “You’re looking well, young James! You must be feeding him. He was so skinny this time last year,” he remarked to Pam. “His mother was—”
“Oh, hey, you know what, Eddie, we’re just gonna go grab a drink now,” I interrupted, seizing Pam by the wrist and half-dragging her with me to the keg set up by the back door. “Ready for a beer?” I asked brightly.
“Um….maybe just a Coke for now?” Her eyebrows were knit together with concern and something else I couldn’t quite place. “You okay?” she asked in a low voice.
“Yep.” I poured myself a beer and dug around in the cooler for a Coke for her, avoiding her eyes, but her expression hadn’t changed when I looked at her face again. “I don’t want to talk about last year,” I admitted. “I don’t…want to think about last year.”
“Good plan.” She tapped her soda can to my plastic cup and smiled. “So, are you gonna introduce me to these people?” she asked, motioning toward the table out on the lawn where my uncle Mark and aunt Beth were sitting with Tracy and Vanessa and my grandmother.
“I thought you were shy,” I mocked, but she just smiled again and linked her arm through mine as I walked her over to make more introductions.
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Everybody loves her.
She’s over there on the porch swing, watching me and laughing with my mom, and I’ve never felt anything quite like the pride and relief and absolute joy that’s coursing through me at this moment. I always knew she’d fit in with us; she’s the missing piece of the puzzle. Everybody loves her, and she’s done nothing but laugh and joke with everyone all day, showing scarcely a trace of her usual shyness.
Jon followed my gaze and smirked. “You’re staring again.”
“I can’t help myself.” She was gorgeous today in her short blue-and-white floral halter dress that showed off her tan shoulders and amazing calves, but it was the happiness in her smile that made me grin like an idiot.
Naturally Will and Ben, my younger cousins from Allentown, thought the grin on my face was because Jon and I just kicked their asses soundly in a driveway game of two-on-two. “Fucking tall Jim and his long fucking arms,” Will griped.
“Hey, watch the language,” my mom called reprovingly. Pam, beaming, gave me a little wave.
“Sorry, aunt Larissa,” Will shrugged a halfhearted apology, lifting up his shirt to wipe at his face. “C’mon, let’s go again.”
Jon shook his head, “I’m done. I’m gonna go find my wife and get something to eat.”
“Hmph,” Will snorted scornfully and turned to me. “What about you, old man? Let’s do it.”
I laughed. “Are you kidding? You’re like two years younger than me.”
“Old man,” he repeated, slapping the ball out from the crook of my arm and dribbling it back and forth between his legs, glaring a challenge at me. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing at him. He’s insanely competitive. “You ready?” he taunted. “Need a breather?”
I glanced over at Pam and shook my head. “Nah, I’m done for a while.”
“Chill out, brother, let’s go have a beer,” said Ben, launching at his brother to grab Will in a headlock and give him a furious noogie. Will, howling outrage, dropped the ball and squirmed out of his brother’s grip, tackling him to the lawn.
I sighed and went after the ball, which had rolled into the street and ended up under aunt Susan’s Forester. I had to get down on my belly and stretch my long fucking arm to retrieve it and when I got to my feet, there was Pam, her face radiant with that shining smile, handing me the two-thirds-full beer she’d been drinking. “Thirsty, Mr. Bird?”
“Very.” I took it from her and polished it off in a series of long greedy swallows while she watched in horrified amusement, then laughed when I couldn’t stop the impressive belch that immediately followed. “Nice,” she said dryly, taking back the empty cup. “Way to share, Halpert.”
I slung an arm over her shoulders and kissed the top of her head and she grinned up at me and oh, sweet Jesus, sometimes the way she looks at me just about makes my heart stop.
She loves me. She tells me every day, as though she’s afraid she’ll never be able to make up for not saying it back that first time. I know it’s what shows in my face every time I look at her, and to see it reflected back at me is nothing short of miraculous.
She’s the one. It’s always been her.
I bought a ring.
I didn’t mean to. I didn’t head to the mall a week after our first date and march right into Kay Jewelers thinking I was going to get Pam an engagement ring. It just sort of happened. One minute I was at Foot Locker picking up new running shoes and the next thing I knew I was staring down at a display case full of diamond solitaires. It was right there, gorgeous, simple, delicate, perfect. Just like Pam. My credit card was out and the box shoved into my pocket before rational thoughts like it’s pretty early for this, don’t you think? and are you sure you haven’t completely lost your mind? could make their case. I mean, obviously I can’t ask her to marry me yet. I haven’t even met her parents.
Amy’s right. I’ll take forever to decide to act and then do something totally impulsive. I don’t always understand my own mind.
We wandered into the back yard again, fixed ourselves plates from the grill, and found a place at Jon and Kathy’s table. Kathy, seven months pregnant and increasingly uncomfortable, was fanning herself with a paper plate even though it had turned cloudy over the last hour. Their four-year-old son Cameron was busily scribbling with a green crayon, black eyebrows knit together in concentration, tongue clamped firmly between his teeth. “Future artist,” Kathy grinned, gazing down with amusement at the widening expanse of green covering the page.
Pam tilted her head to look at it more closely. “What’s that you’re drawing?” she asked.
Cameron didn’t look up. “Grass.”
Jon shrugged, smiling. “Can’t argue with that.”
“Pam likes to draw,” I said impulsively.
Cameron’s head snapped up and he stared at her for the first time, dark eyes wide and bright. “Can you draw a dog?” he asked hopefully, pushing the paper toward her.
“Not now, sweetie, she’s eating,” Kathy chided gently.
“Oh, it’s okay.” Pam pulled the sheet closer to her and contemplated Cameron’s selection of crayons before picking out red and black, her brat and potato salad forgotten as she began sketching a huge red dog with big floppy ears, front paws extended down ready to pounce, little lines signifying an excitedly wagging tail.
“It’s Clifford!” Cameron cried, delighted. “Clifford the Big Red Dog!”
Jon stretched over Kathy to look at it more closely. “That’s really good!”
Pam shrugged modestly. “I didn’t know if Clifford was still around,” she admitted.
“I was more a fan of Harry the Dirty Dog, myself,” Kathy remarked.
“Ooh, I can do him,” Pam said, grabbing a brown crayon out of the box and turning the paper over.
“That’s what she said,” I whispered, and she grinned and elbowed me in the ribs without looking up from the paper.
Twenty-one-year-old Troy raced past our table so fast he knocked over the extra chair as he jumped for the football that went sailing over our heads into the yard. His sisters Kristi and Rachel whooped when Troy went into a roll and popped back up on his feet, holding up the ball triumphantly. “Nice try, Ben!” he laughed, cocking his arm to throw it back.
“Hey, keep that in the yard!” my dad ordered from his perch at the grill, pointing his tongs sternly.
Ben slapped my shoulder as he passed by. “Play a little catch, Jim?”
I glanced over at Pam, engrossed in her dual depictions of Harry in his clean and dirty incarnations, and shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Jon?”
Jon jumped up and in a few minutes there were six of us tossing the ball back and forth, until sixteen-year-old Vanessa complained that we should let the girls play too. “There is no such thing as a girl that can throw a football,” Troy declared, tossing the ball over her head to Will.
“That is not true!” Kristi retorted.
Will laughed, tossing it to Ben. “Since when can you throw a football, Kris?”
“I never said I could. Troy said no girl can throw a football and that’s a ridiculous generalization,” she snapped.
“I’ve never met one that could,” Ben remarked, smirking at Vanessa, who stood with her hands on her hips, starting to look more embarrassed than defiant. He sent the ball to me.
She turned to me and her crestfallen expression just killed me. I nodded at her to get ready and ignored Troy’s Oh come on, Jim!, lobbing it to her without much force, and couldn’t help grinning at the delight that lit up her face as she used her entire torso to catch it.
“Thank you Jim,” Van said pointedly, casting a stern look around at everyone else before turning her attention to the ball. Her hands were small and she frowned as she tried to get a grip on it.
“No, you need to hold it by the laces.” Pam was at her side in a few steps, turning the ball in Vanessa’s hand to show her how to grip it. “Now, you kind of use your other arm to aim,” she lifted Van’s left arm and pointed it at me, “and when you let it go, kind of flick your wrist so you get a spin.” She caught my eye for a moment and grinned, her eyes sparkling with pride. For a second she looked as young as Vanessa and I smiled at the vision of what she must have looked like when she learned to throw a football.
She learned that from Roy.
The thought made my stomach clench, the way it did every time I thought of all the years he got to have with her, all the memories she has with him.
Pam put her hand over Vanessa’s to demonstrate, miming the correct form, and laughed in delight when my cousin sent a perfectly respectable, if rather weak, spiral right at my chest.
“Cool!” Vanessa clapped her hands. “You know how to throw a spiral!”
“I stand corrected,” Troy conceded, glancing over at me with an impressed kind of shrug.
“Yeah, Roy taught me…” she began, a light of pleasant-Roy-memory in her smile; but when she turned to tell me the story, she met my eyes and guiltily dropped her gaze. “A long time ago,” she finished vaguely, pushing her hair behind her ear and heading back toward the table.
“No, Pam, stay!” Vanessa insisted.
She smiled tightly. “You’ve got it, just keep practicing,” she said, walking backward toward the patio door. “I, uh, have to use the restroom.”
Shit. Shit shit shit.
I hated that she saw it in my face, my jealousy, my insecurity. I don’t want her to feel bad about her old life. She was with him a long time. She has a right to her pleasant Roy memories. Yet I can’t help the twisting in my gut, the sudden dryness in my throat, when I so much as think of him with her… touching her, smiling with her, laughing with her. I make her laugh, goddamn it. I make her smile, her real smile, the one I never once saw her give Roy. Believe me, I watched.
It’s not as if I don’t know how immature and ridiculous it is to feel this way. I do. I keep thinking that in time it will go away. And it probably will. But what if it takes too long? Now she’s upset and it’s my fault. She already had a possessive, controlling, jealous prick for a boyfriend. A fiancé. She doesn’t need another one, very well might not tolerate another one.
I tossed the ball over to Jon and plastered a smile onto my face but I couldn’t take my eyes off the door. She didn’t come back right away and after about ten minutes I couldn’t stand it anymore; I mumbled an excuse about needing to use the john and went to find her.
She was in the upstairs hallway outside the bathroom, staring at a collage of photos from Jon and Kathy’s wedding. “Hey,” I ventured.
She jerked up sharply at my voice. “Oh. Hey.” She smiled, and met my eyes, but only for a second before she looked back at the pictures. “Look how young you are,” she said.
I followed her gaze to the shot of me twirling my cousin Heather’s eight-year-old daughter on the dance floor, and had to chuckle. “I was twenty-two.”
“Hmm.” She kept staring at it, wouldn’t look at me.
“Are you okay?” I asked softly.
She nodded. “Just a little tired, I guess.” Her smile was strained, but not visibly upset. “Do you think we could go in a while?”
“Yeah, of course.” I reached for her hand and was reassured when she laced her fingers through mine, leaning against my arm a little. “Twenty-two, huh?” she murmured, bringing her index finger up to my profiled face. She was right; I looked about eighteen in that picture. I had a terrible haircut and my ears looked huge at Jon’s wedding. I hate every one of those photos.
“Let’s just go say goodbye to everyone, and we can go,” I said quietly.
She smiled gratefully and followed me back downstairs. The clouds were really starting to roll in; half the party had moved into the kitchen and were spilling down into the basement, where Dad had put in a pool table a couple of years earlier. My mother was in the kitchen with Kathy and Cameron, and I strolled over to give my mom a kiss on the cheek, praying I didn’t look as uneasy and uncomfortable as I felt. “We’re gonna take off before the storm gets here,” I said.
“Yeah, us too,” Kathy said. “Hey Pam, it was really great to meet you! You guys have to come down for Cam’s birthday next month.”
Pam nodded and smiled. “Sounds good.”
Cameron piped up, “Will you draw me another picture auntie Pam?”
Cameron calls every adult that isn’t one of his parents auntie or uncle. But Pam didn’t know that, of course, and she stared at him, smiling as she turned successively deeper shades of pink. “Yes, of course.”
Jon stepped in from out back, scowling. “I can’t find my keys.”
“That is because I have them,” Kathy said, holding up the keychain. “Jim and Pam are leaving too.”
“Sorry Ma,” Jon apologized. “I guess we’re all abandoning you at once.”
“Oh, it’s all right, I’ve still got a full house,” Mom gestured into the air with her wine glass. “I’m just sorry your sister couldn’t make it. ‘Girls’ weekend in Atlantic City,’ my foot. She’s off with that new boyfriend of hers.”
I laughed. “You think?”
“It’s what I would do,” Jon grinned.
“Ungrateful child,” Mom sighed with a smile. “Drive safe, all of you.”
She made us promise to call when we got home and Pam took my hand as we headed for the car. I opened her door for her and she smiled up at me as I shut it, and it was almost like everything was normal.
Still, we hardly spoke on the way home.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Disclaimer: not my characters.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Thoreau
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Thoreau
Chapter End Notes:
"Night Out" confirmed my longstanding belief that Pam knows how to throw a football.
Thanks to everybody who's been reading. Hope you're enjoying it, and I appreciate all your comments and reviews!
Thanks to everybody who's been reading. Hope you're enjoying it, and I appreciate all your comments and reviews!
