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Jeff’s, telling Jason to go back and enjoy the party, locking the doors, pulling the shades closed. Jason never called her that night and the next day, they had ten inches of snow. If he was there in Babylon at Jeff’s or on his way back to Philadelphia, she didn’t know. She also didn’t know Aaron was living above Jason’s carriage house.
    The first thing she did when she got up the morning after Jeff’s party was look out the bedroom window. The snow was coming down and the waves were churning it up, throwing it on the beach. There was already a layer of brown-foam covered ice on the sand. Remembering years past, there were times when they woke up to snow on a Monday morning and Jack wouldn’t go into the city for work.
    “I think I’ll stick around today,” he’d say, like he was doing himself a great favor. “How about I make pancakes?”
    Pam rolled over in bed to watch him puttering, hanging his suit up in the closet, looking vulnerable in his underpants with a starched white shirt on, the tails hanging down to his thighs. As he loosened his tie, Pam buried her head in the pillow, laughing. Finally composing herself, she spoke.
    “Come to bed for a minute,” she’d demanded, giggling.
    “I can’t pass that offer up,” he said, taking his shirt back off and hanging it in the closet along with the suit. He’d do a striptease for her, pulling his undershirt off and then standing in front of the mirror, he’d do a before/after, alternately sticking his stomach out and sucking it in again. It was something she now doubted he did in front of his other sexual partners, the laid-back, funny, intimate exposure of his weaknesses and his eccentricities.
    They spend the snow day in relative bliss. When the children were still at home, they’d gather in the den and watch action movies all day while Pam knitted, praying that the snow would continue and they’d have more time together. All of these years later, what difference had it made? Jack and Brent were dead and Lisa was ensconced in life in Smithtown with Dan. She couldn’t imagine spending a snow day with Jason. They didn’t have that kind of relationship.
    Pam realized the intimacy she and Jason lacked transcended the few positives; enjoying each other’s company, familiar friends, being comfortable with each other. Maybe Jason felt it, too and just didn’t know how to confront her. It would be easier to stand her up at the altar. Unless he was in love with Sandra. It was an option she tried to stifle, the thought of losing both of them too awful to contemplate just yet.
    The family waited for her to help them understand what had gone wrong, but she was clueless. “Look,” she pleaded. “I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s clear we didn’t love each other and Jason didn’t know how to get out of marrying me. It’s finished. I’m fine; baffled that I could be such a dope again , but I’m okay.
    “Sharon, Susan, you go on home. Lisa and Dan, you too. Tomorrow is a new day. I would like to relax, maybe spend the day on the beach.”
    Murmuring platitudes, they gathered their belongings to leave, Dan and Lisa and Nelda getting the children together for their drive home. Standing at the door as they filed out Dan, holding baby Marcus, was the first to see that they weren’t alone.
    “You’ve got a visitor,” he whispered. Pam strained to look around him and coming up the walkway, was Jason, nodding his head at Pam’s sisters and their families.
    “Mother, do you want us to stay?” Lisa asked. But Pam shook her head.
    “No, Annabelle and Bubby are here. They can call 911 if I attack him.” Dan snickered as he stood aside so Lisa could get through with the baby.
    “I’m so sorry,” Jason said when he could see they’d reached their cars and were out of earshot.
    “For what?” she asked.
    “Can I come in?”
    “Why, Jason? No, you can’t come in. It’s too late.”
    “Let me try to explain where my head is at,” he