Safe With Me
Old ladies on a Sunday drive were faster than Jorgen who carefully navigated his pickup down the country road. Pam didn’t say anything, but it did surprise her a little. Usually, playboys loved hard and drove fast. So far, Jorgen proved to be guilty of neither.
“Bad weather blurs the lines between safe and tricky terrain,” he explained. “I know most of this area like the back of my hand, but a simple distraction like a beautiful woman in the passenger seat is enough for me to forget where I am.”
How could she find fault with that argument? Pam sat still and listened to the sound of the windshield wipers going back and forth as they pushed aside the falling snow. One minute the skies were clear and the next it seemed like nature dumped a bucket of the flurry white over their heads.
Her head pounded hinting at an impending migraine. She forced herself to focus on what he was saying. “Another thing,” Jorgen interrupted her thoughts. “You are safe with me. Nothing is going to happen when you’re at my house. Contrary to what people say about me, I know how to treat a woman.”
She appreciated how he didn’t let what other people said about him get in the way of how he conducted himself. Pam wished she could be more like him.
After a couple of minutes of silence, Jorgen continued his explanation. “I had this friend Gina. She came by the house for dinner one time. Things got hot and heavy. I liked her. She felt the same about me. And, one thing led to another. While we were getting to know each other a little better, William. He’s her father. Was in a rollover accident. I wondered if it was life’s way of saying that it was my turn to take care of her. Anyway, this other guy was interested in her too, and we found out at the hospital that William and his dad had some sort of agreement that his family would take care of her.”
Her eyes darted to the dashboard, and she noticed their speed had dropped to ten miles per hour. She looked out the window and noticed the visibility was worse than before. Sasquatch could have been in front of them, and they would have been none the wiser.
“So, I told her that we should take a break. You know, give us time to sort out the issues. As soon as I said it, I knew it was wrong. But she stopped returning my calls. Stopped talking to me. I found out through the ‘he said—she said line’ that Gina was pregnant. It got complicated. William told me that it was better for Gina if I let her go.”
Jorgen sighed. Pam felt his eyes watch for her reaction. When she remained silent, he continued where he left off. “After that, I promised myself that the next time I bring a woman to my house for anything hot and heavy, it’s for a long-term living situation. If you know what I mean.”
“That’s a lot of truth,” Pam said. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”
She was humbled by how genuine he was with her. He hadn’t tried to present himself as a knight in shining armor. And, her earlier assessment of him was right. There was more to the story, and after hearing Jorgen’s side of the story, it made sense. He was trying to figure out life and messing up like every other person. Perhaps them being friends might have been the right decision after all. Would he have been quick to divulge his truth if they were going to date? She watched the road ahead of them to see where they were going and allowed the silence to absorb the cab of the pickup. Like a thin blanket, it surrounded them and provided just the right degree of comfort.
Jorgen was the first to interrupt the silence. “Why aren’t you married, or at least hooked up with someone?”
“I was,” she admitted. “In a relationship. That is. It’s how I ended up here. My boyfriend, Mark, and I moved here to make a clean start. I got a job, and he didn’t. After two months, he left. He said I was too good for him.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Idaho. I think.” She shrugged and added, “Nancy helped me pull it together. She’s been like a sister to me.” When the nurse known for her no nonsense bedside manner heard about the breakup, she refused Pam the time to wallow in her misery. For the first two weeks, ranging from invites to dinner to outings at the high school sports events, Nancy kept Pam distracted from her loneliness.
“Your family is okay with you being out here by yourself?” He turned the pickup down a road. The snow drifted in swirls around them. How he knew where they were headed eluded Pam. Then a solitary beam of light broke through the flurries. She imagined that Jorgen’s house was attached to the light.
“I never told them. They didn’t think I should have moved in the first place. I didn’t want to hear I told you so.”
“Sometimes 'I told you so’ is a family’s way of saying they love you enough to see the future for you,” Jorgen replied.
He spoke the truth. She nodded to acknowledge what he said and promised herself that she’d call them when she got a phone. With that being the end of their conversation, they rode in companionable silence for a couple more minutes. Jorgen pressed on the remote control attached to his visor. At the same time, Pam noticed the house in front of them. The garage door opened, and the pickup crawled into the haven. When Jorgen shifted the gear to park, he pressed the button, and the door closed behind them.
The first thing Pam saw when they walked in the house was a brown plush sectional. Directly across the room, a large screen television hung on a wall made of wood paneling from the 1970’s. Pictures of farm equipment and people she assumed were Jorgen’s parents dotted the top of a shelf beneath the television. In front of the pictures, he had the controller for the satellite television, a DVD player, and three gaming systems. The room screamed single man without the intention of changing anytime soon—yet it was clean.
"I can show you the guest room, and you can go to sleep. Or, I can make some coffee, and we can play a game."
Before she had time to respond, Jorgen walked to a door at the edge of the room. He opened it to reveal shelves of board games. His eyes traveled the shelves and stopped when they found what they were looking for. He reached in and pulled out a wooden board a little larger than his hand and a deck of cards. “A game of cribbage would get us through this frigid winter night.”
He set the game on the coffee table and crossed the room to grab one of the remote controls beneath the television. He pressed the button, and an in-wall fireplace lit to show the LED flames. The fan blew coziness into the otherwise coolly furnished room. It took everything in Pam to not fall in love with Jorgen Backman then and there.
The last time she played cribbage was when her grandmother was alive. They stayed up until all hours of the night scoring the fifteens and runs. Pam loved the times when she lived them; she missed them even more now that they were gone.
One time after her grandmother had passed, Pam invited her ex Mark to play a hand of crib. Rather than accommodate her request to share a memory, he added the app to her phone. As an explanation, he said, “Now Gigi,” which was her nickname for her grandmother, “is with you all the time.”
Without provocation on her part, Jorgen recreated her warmest memories. As they sat down on the couch and played, she found herself miserably failing at keeping Jorgen an arm’s distance away from her heart. Other than having an unfairly earned a bad reputation there wasn’t much for her to find him disagreeable. Also, fighting the feelings had grown tiresome; like she was carrying an armful of groceries, she’d never use. Pam relented and embraced the fact. She had it bad for Jorgen Backman. The only thing she could do was hope that when the snow cleared, and she went home, he’d feel the same way about her.