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He was waiting…leaning up against the side of his car, hands obligatorily buried in his pockets. She slowed down and drew out the time it took to pull into a parking space. As her headlights illuminated the darkening space between them, she saw him quickly straighten up and blow out a breath of air. The corners of his mouth were turned up in a half-smile, but even in the dusky twilight she could detect apprehension and nervousness in his posture. The knowledge that she had done this to him…that she had made him unsure and afraid caused tiny bubbles of her own fear to churn up the stream of resolve that had been coursing through her since she left her apartment.  She wanted to tell herself that it was the brightness of her headlights and not the dark uncertainty between them that caused him to look down…caused his gaze to avoid connecting with hers.

As she put her car in park and climbed out to meet him, his whole reticent being was in marked contrast to the forthright and direct presence in which he had written his letter.  She was unsure as well. She had no idea where this night would take them…what doors this talk would open or slam shut, but he had mentioned that he had hope, so she had to try.

-----

She was moving towed him with quick, sure steps and it scared the hell out of him. Though he had asked her to this little “meeting” he still wasn’t sure what was going to happen…what he wanted to happen. He could come up with hundreds of scenarios that could merely begin the conversation he knew they would have. He could accuse her of playing games with him or thank her for helping him to realize some things about himself. He could shout at her with anger-colored curses and demand to know why she couldn’t have just left him alone or he could plead with her in velvet-shaded whispers to tell him exactly what he had heard her say to him time after time in his dreams and fantasies. He could reach out in either hope or in hurt and though he still didn’t know which to run with, he knew either emotion would be an accurate reflection of where he was.

He didn’t know how to start this, so he was glad when she spoke first.

-----

“Hey.”

“Hi. I um….” 

“Listen…Jim….” She had been running on adrenaline since she had finished reading his note and though that surge was fading, she gripped the letter in her hand and drew strength from knowing how hard it had probably been for him to write down what he did.  “I ah…I got your letter. Um…obviously, because that’s why I’m here, I mean I wouldn’t have known you were going to be here if I didn’t….”

“Pam…I don’t…I don’t know what….” His words tripped over his tongue finding out the hard way that it’s easier to say things on paper than in person.

“Just, please, Jim. I need to say this. I wrote the letters because I missed you. I missed you and me. I missed…I missed us. And when I wrote them I could still feel connected to you even though you left. I know I could have called or emailed or even signed my name, but I felt like I didn’t have that right anymore. I was the one who broke what we had. I realize that, I do. I blamed you for most of the summer, but all you did was tell the truth. And I’m sorry if you thought I was playing games with you. I knew you had moved on but I couldn’t let you go. I know it seems silly and pathetic, but I’m sorry if it hurt you. I had no right.” She realized she had been speaking without breathing. The acceleration of her feelings came slamming to a halt.

“Pam.” This time when he spoke her name she was quiet. She had spoken her piece and knew that filling up the space between them with more words than necessary wouldn’t accomplish anything. There were already too many words between them…words that had been spoken and those held hostage in the depths of both of their hearts. She knew he’d speak when he was ready. After a long pause he did…softly.

“When I got the letters, I wanted them to be from you. At the same time, though, I wished they had come from someone else. I needed to hear what you said and it gave me hope, but when I didn’t hear from you in person…when you didn’t call or write? It just hurt less to think they were from some random fan, you know?”

“I’ve hurt you so much.”

“Well, I’m guilty too. I didn’t…I didn’t say goodbye and I cut off contact. I just couldn’t anymore. I couldn’t.”

She caught him looking over at one specific spot in the parking lot. It was a slab of asphalt that haunted her as well. She knew the exact spot where she had been standing…knew the contours of the cracks and bumps from looking down at them. On most days, she could see ghosts of themselves still clad in shiny blue dresses and dress-sweaters haunting that spot, reluctant to leave until the events of that night were put right. She hoped that talking about things that they had avoided for months would set their ghosts free.

“I know. I get it.  Everything changed that night. My whole world got turned upside down and knowing how it felt I had no right to do that to you with my letters. You’re with Karen now and it was wrong of me to even hope that….”

“I’m not with Karen.”

“Oh? I thought….”

 “Let’s just say that she is no longer one of my fans.”

They both chuckled and for the first time that night, the darkness lost a little of its weight.  

“It was for the best. It wasn’t right.”

She wanted to tell him that she was sorry, but she was tired of lying.

“Then it was for the best.”

“Hey, how did you…how did you get the letters to me from all of those different places?”

“You didn’t figure it out?”

“Should I have?”

“Halpert, you’ve let me down!  I thought you were better than that. I used inter-office mail. Albany, Camden, Utica, Akron?  I thought for sure you’d figure out the connection.”

“I guess I need to bone up on my corporate directory. Wait, they had postmarks! How did you…?”

“You just put it in a brown envelope with a post-it note on it asking the receptionist to stick it in their outgoing mail.  We’ve done it before for each other.”

“Wow. I did not realize receptionists needed to send a lot of covert mail.”

“Well, Jasmine in Camden doesn’t want her crazy ex to find her, so we do it for her sometimes and Marva in Nashua does all of these mail-in contests and she can send in more entries…why are you laughing?”

“I just didn’t know we’ve had access to back-ops receptionists all of this time. We can use this system to pull something on Dwight. I’m sure of it.”

“Ooooh. You’re right. It’s too bad George Lucas doesn’t live in Albany!”

They laughed then and it felt like old times and new times and all times rolled into one.

“I missed this,” he confessed.

“Me too.”

“I missed us.”

“Jim, I know that one of the reasons we’ve gone through all we have is that I’m not the best at words and I sometimes get afraid to ask for what I want. But…I want there to be an ‘us’ again.”

“Me too.”

“I mean, even if it’s just as friends as long as we can talk.” She was doing what she had resolved not to…speaking nervously when she didn’t need to, but her hope was a fragile butterfly and she was afraid to hold it too close for fear of crushing it.

“I told you that I needed more than that, Pam.”

She looked back over at that spot of asphalt and wondered how it had happened that their place of confession, of beginnings and endings was a drab parking lot in an industrial park in Scranton. This wasn’t a romantic restaurant or a sunlight-dappled meadow. There were no fountains or statues or violins. She could smell tar and exhaust and she could hear a forklift backing up somewhere in the distance. This was their spot, though, and she wondered if one day there would be children to bore with descriptions of this place, to bring here and have them stand where they stood while they tried futilely to explain how this was their spot…where they became an us. She knew if that were to happen, though, she’d have to speak.

“Okay.”

He snapped his head up, popped an eyebrow at her. “What?”

“I can do more than that. I need that too. I just don’t know how we get there.” And it was odd to think about it…about how two people went from friends…to nothing…and then to everything.

“ I um…I have an idea.”  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a square white envelope. She could tell that its edges were worn and she thought she saw a small sprig of holly imprinted on one of the corners. He held it out to her without hesitation; his eyes were locked on hers.  

“Actually, I wrote you another letter….”