Pam was not sure exactly what time it was when she was awakened by the scream of her cell phone, but it was well after Bob Ross had faded away and been replaced by a series of robotic pitchmen for some kind of kitchen device that, as best she could tell as she scrambled to grab the phone, was supposed to simultaneously clean your pans, sharpen your knives, and destroy most common household waste. Fumbling with the phone she saw the block numbers screaming out at her: 3:32 (A.M. of course).
There was also a name on the caller ID: Roy. Also of course.
She debated not picking up, but her memories of the nights she’d turned off her ringer when Roy was out with Kenny were too strong: Roy, slamming the door open downstairs and yelling “PAMMY” loud enough to wake the neighbor’s dog and it barking; her phone blinking with 15 missed calls alternating between weepy and angry; prickly rides to work the next day, if she was lucky, angry ones on average, and one memorable time he’d told her to call someone else for a ride if she wasn’t willing to take his calls the night before. So she picked up.
Fortunately, this time he was weepy, not angry. Unfortunately, it seemed, he was weepy about the prospect of “good ol’ Kenny” leaving and going back to work the next week. He kept repeating that he needed to know if she was coming up because if she wasn’t Kenny could still put in for time off; every time she asked if he wanted her to come he started off with “I love you Pammy” then followed it up (sometimes quickly, sometimes after a long rambling detour through other things he loved or other things he felt about her) with a “but.” But Kenny and he were having a great time. But he didn’t want to inconvenience her by making her drive up so far all alone. But he just wanted to know what she wanted. But but but.
She got tired of it.
She got angry about it.
She let him know.
He didn’t take it well. Weepy Roy went away and angry Roy came out, and he wasn’t telling her I love you anymore. It felt like talking to Kelly, or to Katy earlier, but instead of a burbling female voice telling her all about their problems with their man, it was Roy telling her how he felt stifled, how she was always ruining things, how he’d been having such a good night until now, how she didn’t appreciate all he did for her, how she was so petty that she was jealous he was having a good time up here with Kenny.
That last one stopped her, because it was true, but not in the way he meant. She was jealous he was up there having a good time with Kenny—but not because Kenny got to be there with Roy, or even that Roy got to be there when she had to work. She was jealous because each of them was up there with someone who wanted them to be there, who valued their presence, and who looked out for their best interests. She was jealous because Roy, her own damn fiancé, didn’t think those things about her. Sure, Kenny was family, but she was going to be family too, wasn’t she? She was supposed to be the family he chose, the family he made, and instead here he was acting like her presence on the vacation she’d planned and arranged was a roadblock in his life. Like she was fun to have around sometimes, but not fun enough, not valuable enough, to prioritize. She let him rant and rave at her, but a newfound sense of determination and self-worth washed over her as she listened. She didn’t feel a thousand feet tall—no one would with someone that important to them lecturing them on all their perceived flaws—but she wasn’t willing to feel like the petty, insignificant speck he was trying to make her be. Because she deserved better. Everyone did. And if the person she had been planning to marry, the person who was supposed to love her more than anything else, more than anyone else, was going to treat her like this, she refused to accept that it was a problem with her, because no one deserved that. It was a problem with him. And if it was a problem with him, that meant it didn’t need to be her problem anymore.
She cut him off mid-tirade with a simple, clipped statement. “Then tell Kenny he can stay. I won’t be coming up. But when you come back next week, you better go to Kenny’s, because you won’t be welcome here.”
Then she hung up and stared at the phone in horror. What had she just said? What had she just done? Even if the pitchmen hadn’t been on—now advertising some kind of soap that would, apparently, remove all her blackheads and also possibly serve as a rat poison if her home was infested—there wasn’t enough Bob Ross in the world to make this evening—or morning, or whatever it was when you were woken up out of too little sleep and broke up with your fiancé over the phone—OK.
Dammit, she wanted her easel. Well, if she wasn’t with Roy anymore, why did she care that he’d told her not to set it up where it could “get in the way” of him watching the game? And it wasn’t like she was going to get any sleep now anyway. She burrowed into the garage and came up with her easel, a tarp, and her oil paints and set them up directly in front of the TV (now advertising an engine-cleaning motor oil that maybe also made the best pancakes known to man). She set up her palette and went to work, channeling her emotion, her frustration, her confusion into the canvas.
By the time she would normally have woken up—well, not even that, since it was a Saturday, not a work day, but close enough—the painting was almost finished. It looked, at first glance, like what it was: a close imitation from memory of the last Bob Ross painting she could remember from before she fell asleep. A towering mountain in the background, dotted with trees extending down its slopes and into the middle ground of the painting, illuminated by a setting sun (or was it rising?) on the left of the painting. But a closer examination, especially of the foreground, revealed a few key differences from anything Bob had painted. There were the suggestions of a frame around the edges of the canvas, as if the whole scene were a painting-within-a-painting, or the view from a window. Confirming this impression were the fingers just visible on the bottom edge of the frame: a woman’s left hand, bare of any rings, and beside it just the tips of someone’s unidentifiable right hand, as if arrested in motion: whether reaching towards the woman or just having released her hand remained unclear. Even Pam wasn’t certain: the bareness of the ring finger in the painting was an intentional mirror of her own, from which she had removed her engagement ring while washing her hands after mixing the paints, but the other was added at the last minute, in a burst of creative energy she couldn’t yet fully identify. At first she’d thought she was painting Roy’s hand, with her own finally slipping free of it, but in the end she’d decided against giving him such an explicit place in her own self-depiction. But she’d left the fingers there, to compliment her own: after all, she thought, I may not be a tree, but everyone should have a friend.
