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Author's Chapter Notes:
This is almost complete, but not quite. I should have it finished in a couple of days.


As always, these characters don't belong to me. Just playing.
Jim’s not a nosy man by nature. He values and respects privacy, both his own and that of others, and hasn’t once snooped into someone else’s belongings since the time when he was nine and his father caught him rooting around in his parents’ closet. On the shelf he’d found a small chest; inside, a pair of war medals lay atop a crisply folded green uniform and a pile of yellowing letters tied with a faded black satin ribbon.

He didn’t get in trouble, exactly, but he never forgot the distress and pain in his father's face as he re-folded the shirt, placing it carefully back on top of the neatly pressed slacks. “It’s wrong to look through other people’s things without permission,” he was reprimanded sternly. But then his dad sat him down and explained simply that they belonged to his grandfather, who died fighting in Korea, and that the gold star in its small case was a symbol that he’d been very brave and sacrificed himself so others would live.

In the stack of letters was a picture of his grandparents standing in front of their ’49 Hudson. Though Tom was his namesake, it was Jim who looked like him, and for a long time Jim wondered why he couldn’t summon that kind of daring, why year after year he couldn’t get himself to say three simple words to Pam when his grandfather had the courage to throw his body in front of a grenade.

After he did muster the courage, turned it into five words that made retreat an impossibility, he decided maybe bravery was overrated. Either way you ended up eviscerated.


~~~~


That’s all in the past now. Pam’s wearing his ring and they’re making a home and getting ready for the rest of their lives. She’ll be his wife and they’ll grow old together and he hopes that unlike his grandfather, he’ll live to see his grandchildren and read them a story about true love and miracles.

He has the picture of his grandparents in a silver frame on a bookcase in his living room, and Pam commented once how much Jim looks like the man in the sixty-year-old photo. “I bet you’re just like him and you don’t even know it,” she smiled.

Jim doubts it. He doesn’t tell her about the Silver Star or the Medal of Honor. He’s grateful that things have worked out despite the torturous road to get here, but he doesn’t kid himself that any of his miserable survival strategies could be called bravery. It’s a consolation to know she was doing the same thing, but it’s not something they dwell upon, and he prefers it that way. He wonders if maybe courage isn’t about sacrificing yourself so much as facing the future with hope and determination.


~~~~


Jim’s not a nosy man. He is, however, a curious man, and when he comes across an unfamiliar brown box on the shelf on her side of the closet, two weeks after they move into his childhood home, he pulls it down. The flaps are tucked inside one another rather than sealed with tape, and in black marker, in Pam’s neat handwriting, it’s labeled “Memories.”

Inside are two more boxes: a shoebox wrapped around the center with a thick rubber band, and a slightly bigger FedEx box sealed with clear packing tape. Neither are marked and his curiosity is instantly piqued.

Jim has mementos. He has a box full of school-related stuff, an archive of report cards and ribbons and transcripts. And he still has the dozen or so quirky love letters that Julie Ferguson wrote to him his sophomore year in college—random rambling notes that she wrote during classes and left under his door, tucked into his backpack, slipped into his books.

He came very, very close to throwing away the ‘Pam’ collection, a shoebox not unlike the one in his hands now, while he was in Stamford. He first heard about her cancelled wedding on June seventh, in an email from Phyllis that sent him best wishes for a vacation he’d never take; and with each week that passed, every phone call and email and text message from someone not Pam, hope and elation darkened into anger and despair. He’s misinterpreted. Again.

Finally, in November, preparing to move (again), he went through it one last time, ready to throw it away. Or maybe just burn everything. The box was filled with notes and little drawings, matchbooks and coasters, ticket stubs and receipts and other pieces of the things they’d done together; insignificant ephemera, but each random slip of paper held a memory vivid as yesterday, and in the end he decided it was his history, too, and that someday, maybe, he’d be able to look back upon it, and her, as a great friend he’d had once. He sealed it with far more tape than was necessary and shoved it into a corner in his new bedroom closet, high on a shelf where Karen wouldn’t find it.

He knows it’s wrong, but he cannot help wondering if he’ll find any pieces of himself in Pam’s keepsakes. With nervous fingers and a guilty conscience he slips the big rubber band off the old Adidas shoebox and lifts the lid.

On top is a dried white corsage wrapped in a sandwich bag. He picks it up carefully, realizing it must be from prom, and finds underneath it a faded flyer for the Homecoming Pep Rally!

His stomach drops a little as he realizes everything in this box is connected with Roy, and a brief, spiteful thought sears through his heart: why is she keeping this?

Okay, that’s unreasonable. Of course she has a box of mementos from Roy. It’s nine years. A third of her life.

But still.

There are letters. Notes, really, folded in quarters on wide-ruled spiral notebook paper. He knows he shouldn’t, but the temptation is too great.

Pammy,
I’m sorry. Meet me at my locker before 5th?

Jesus,
he thinks, not a little smugly, even then?

Pammy,
Movies tonight?



There are more, about a dozen short little notes, none of them what Jim would call a “love letter,” but he can imagine a sixteen-year-old Pam blushing and smiling when the quarterback slipped her a note in French class and he wonders, not for the first time, what she was like then.


From the day he met her, Pam had met Jim’s every remark with a smart retort that first surprised and then delighted him, but he can’t envision her being like that with Roy. He cannot imagine, cannot accept, that she ever had the same ease with Roy that she shares with him. He’d imagined her lying in Roy’s arms often enough during his masochistic days of pining, but he’s never been able to conjure a picture of her laughing with Roy like she does with him, good-naturedly bickering over what movie to watch or which takeout place was best. He can’t imagine her mocking Roy the way she mocks him, teasing in her voice and affection in her eyes.


The box tells a story, though, and he feels a little ill as he gingerly sorts through the remains of their relationship. There are some movie ticket stubs, mostly action and horror, but a number of romantic comedies and chick-flick dramas as well. A crayon drawing of a sun, hills, and trees, To Aunt Pam scrawled in the corner. Brochures for different inns and resorts in the Poconos. A take-out menu from a microbrewery in Pittsburgh. A child’s school project of a Thanksgiving turkey, made from a paper plate and brown and orange construction paper. When he finds a program for a performance of Les Miserables by the Philadelphia Theatre Company, he has a brief, startling vision of Roy in a sports jacket, bored out of his mind no doubt, but doing it for her; and in his mind he can see her smile up at him, beaming, happy, proud to be on his arm.

Downstairs the door opens and shuts, and a moment later her voice, “Honey, I’m ho-ome!” carries up the stairs in a merry sing-song.

He shoves everything back in the box, not quite as neatly as he found it, and puts it back on the shelf.








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Chapter End Notes:
Thanks for reading. One or two short chapters to follow. :)

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