For the first few weeks after Ryan's promotion, Toby clings to the possibility that she's suddenly developed an allergy (hey, it happens) and that the near-constant sniffling he hears from the other side of his cubicle wall is a result of the decrepit air-conditioning system's failure to filter out the late-spring pollen. He gets his work done in record time and uses the remainder of each day to search online for training schedules; he wants to run a marathon next spring.
But on the ninth day in a row that he overhears Pam, in her soft, stilted manner, asking Kelly if she'd like to join Jim and her in the break room for lunch, to which Kelly compulsorily responds thanks but she's not hungry, Toby manages to convince himself that he prefers the white noise of Kelly's unfaltering prattle to the unpredictable and non-rhythmic sniffling. Just because her typical chatter makes him press divots into either side of the bridge of his nose doesn't mean it wasn't comfortable and familiar.
He waits for Pam to issue the penultimate "Are you sure?" and stick the landing with "Well, we'll be in there, if you get hungry," during which he takes care in lining up spare pencils along the horizontal edge of his desk blotter. The Pennsylvania Human Resources Association's Grief Counseling certification course didn't prepare him for dealing with breakups of one-sided relationships accompanied by 180-degree personality changes.
Once he’s certain Pam has gone, he lifts his chin so his voice will carry over the cubicle divider and asks, "Do you want to talk about it?"
Kelly sniffles loudly.
He wishes he could leave it there and feel satisfied, but he's never been that guy, and he's been putting this off for too long already. "We can go out. I'll expense it."
He spends an awkward hour across a booth from her at the Greek diner down the road, with only her watery eyes and hunched shoulders to look at other than the pattern of the grooves in the faux-wood paneling on the wall behind her. He munches on the dill spear that accompanied his BLT and watches her pick at her tunafish platter and prepares himself for the deluge he knows will come.
But the most emotion she releases is a tear here and there that she quickly swipes from under her eyelashes before her mascara can sustain any damage, and he's slightly ashamed to admit to himself that he's relieved. She pretends to be absorbed with whatever is on the television mounted on the wall above the counter that he has to turn around to see. It’s a courtroom show with an especially stern-looking judge who smacks his gavel with so much force it causes Toby to flinch. Kelly finally pushes her plate away from her and dabs at her mouth with her napkin so as to preserve her lipstick.
He grimaces at the smiley-face in the “o” in Thanks and come again! Helen scrawled on the back of the check, and shifts in his seat to pull his wallet out of his back pocket. When he starts to slide out of the booth, Kelly says, "Hang on," and reaches her arm across the table towards him to stop him from leaving, the charms on her gold bracelet jangling against the tabletop. "I want to see who wins."
He slides out anyway. "I'll pay and meet you by the door."
When she meets him in the entryway of the diner minutes later, he holds her purple trench coat open for her to slide on. “So who won?” he asks, to be polite.
"The wife," she says, lifting one shoulder in a half-shrug. "Um, the Complainant or whatever."
He nods and opens the diner door for her, and she hurries to the passenger door of his Datsun, even though it’s a sunny spring day that makes him nostalgic for college and those hazy afternoons he’d once spent lounging on the quad.
Back at work, while Kelly listens to multiple voicemails over speakerphone (did that many pile up in just one hour? No wonder she’s miserable), he makes a vague notation on a piece of scrap paper about conducting a career counseling session and files it with his expense documentation. Angela doesn’t scrutinize his expenses the way she does Michael’s, but better to be on the safe side.
The next day, Kelly remains uncharacteristically withdrawn, but at least the sniffling has somewhat abated. Then Ryan appears just before noon and sequesters himself in Michael’s office. Neither Toby nor Kelly would have known of his presence had Michael not come storming into the annex demanding that Toby contact Corporate immediately to inform them he would be filing a "management harassment" claim because Ryan insisted that Michael provide him with sales numbers on a weekly basis rather than a monthly basis, which clearly constituted micromanagement even in big-shot MBA-speak.
Toby merely looks at him, trying to ignore the thumping of his pulse in his temple, and waits him out. Michael glares and heaves sighs and finally stalks off muttering something about incompetence.
Kelly's chair squeaks a little. "Toby?"
He braces himself. "Yeah?"
"Um, can we go to lunch again?"
It's unlikely Angela will overlook consecutive days of expensed lunches, so he checks the contents of his wallet before responding, "Yeah. Okay."
This time they sit side-by-side at the counter, their eyes lifted up toward the television. Today's feuding husband and wife are in their fifties, and there's a lot of over-talking and interrupting that makes it hard to hear exactly how he belittled her and exactly when she took up with their neighbor. Toby regrets not getting here early enough to sit at that booth in the back where he could have made sure she was facing the wall; Divorce Court is probably not optimal programming at the moment. He half-listens to the husband's testimony, watching Kelly's fingers as she toys with the tiny scrap of paper covering the end of her straw. Her cuticles are shaggy and her lavender nail polish is chipped. On TV, the judge takes the case under advisement and the show breaks for commercials.
"I don't know," Kelly says, startling him. It's the first time she's spoken since asking him to lunch. "You'd think they would've just learned to live with each other by now," she says, frowning.
He hesitates, looking into his coffee, not really wanting to engage her in this topic. Eventually he says, "Living together can be hard."
She shrugs. "I don't know," she says again.
He turns his head to the side so he can look at her directly. She's not wearing mascara today, or maybe it's already been wiped off; either way, her eyes look softer and he's surprised to find that it lends her a vulnerability he hadn't previously thought to associate with her. He wonders how much time Ryan actually spent with Kelly, listening to her and talking to her and cuddling with her on the sofa, whether they'd been good at making up after all the bickering or if they'd gotten so used to it that it didn't even register anymore that they were fighting, whether she realized that it wasn't how things were supposed to be in the beginning but only near the end when the other person drifts away before you even have time to realize what's happening or wonder how you're supposed to fix it.
"I mean, things don't have to be perfect or whatever," she continues, shrugging. She's staring at the paper placemat on the counter, looking like she's trying very hard not to be hopeful.
He reluctantly agrees, "No, they don't have to be."
"I mean, who wants perfect, right?" she asks quietly, glancing at him, and he practically flinches at the hope blooming in her eyes.
He leans back slightly on his stool as their waitress slides their lunches in front of them. "Right," he says, over the sudden lump in his throat.
She nods once, emphatically, and scoops a big bite of tunafish salad onto her fork using the side of her thumb. He tries to shake the feeling of pity before picking up half of his turkey sandwich. As they eat they watch the judge as he explains why he's ruling in favor of the husband.
By the time they return to work, Ryan has left, Michael is pouting in his office with Dwight and Andy attending to him, and Jim and Pam are snickering together at Reception. Kelly makes a beeline to her phone, and Toby winces as he listens to her leave a message for Ryan with Hunter. Afterwards she dials into her voicemail using the speakerphone, and when he hears You have nineteen new messages, he picks up the file he's working on and moves into the break room.
Apparently Ryan never calls her back, because at two-thirty sharp every afternoon that week, Toby overhears Kelly affect an overly professional tone when leaving the same message with Hunter, asking him please to have Ryan call her back at his earliest convenience.
His suspicion is confirmed when he arrives at his desk the following Monday and Kelly is already on the phone. "Haven't you given him my messages?" she demands in a shrill voice. "Well please tell him it's totally unprofessional not to respond to phone messages!" she says with rising emotion, and slams down the receiver.
She sniffs, loud and unladylike, and he drops his coat and bag onto his chair and hovers at the wall separating their cubicles. She's sitting at her desk facing away from him with her head resting in her hands, and she doesn't turn around or acknowledge him in any way. Her shoulders jerk, so he finally walks over to her desk and stands behind her, and leans a hand on her upper back between her shoulder blades. She feels fragile and small.
He gives her a little comforting rub, as if she were Sasha and he'd forgotten to stock up on her favorite ice cream before one of her biweekly visits, and waits for her to say something. But all she does is lean back into his hand slightly. So he leaves his hand there a few minutes, feeling a bit helpless and silly, until she sits up straighter and dabs at her eyes with a tissue, still not turning around.
The silence that stretches across the next few days unnerves him. Pam has stopped coming by to check in on Kelly, and he finds he's more distracted by the lack of Kelly's steady stream of chatter or sniffling. She faces the wall and whenever the phone rings she lets it go to voicemail; he never thought he'd wish, however idly, to hear her chirpy Customer-service-this-is-Kelly voice.
On Wednesday she comes to work in a high-necked brown and aquamarine paisley blouse that looks like a spoil of war from a raid on her mother's closet twenty years ago. The next morning he catches a glimpse of her face for the first time that week as as he's returning to the annex with a cup of coffee and she’s heading for the restroom. She's not wearing any makeup and her bangs are stringy and limp, and there’s a white toothpaste stain near the collar of her navy cotton sweater. But she darts into the ladies' room before he can even greet her.
Friday morning is something of a nightmare, Michael-wise. Apparently a few angry customers had complained to him earlier in the week about problems with their shipments, but rather than addressing the issue he'd charged Dwight with undertaking an investigation, which had the unsurprising result of making the customers even more upset when Dwight blamed the mishap on the customers' non-acceptance of the wrong shipments. This, on top of their complaints about not getting any response to their calls to the customer service hotline, led to two cancelled accounts -- both Andy’s -- and a whole lot of bad word-of-mouth in the Greater Scranton/Wilkes-Barre small business community.
So Michael had called a meeting, everyone in the conference room and Ryan teleconferencing in, which ended in Michael sobbing on Pam's shoulder that Ryan couldn't possibly understand what being a regional manager was like, and Andy having to do some deep breathing over the loss of his customers, and Dwight scolding Kelly for her malfeasance, and Jim trying to step in under the "voice-of-reason" ruse but really just taking advantage of the situation to pick on Dwight. As usual, it’s a complete waste of time. And as usual, he’s got more work to handle as a result. He figures he can put Dwight and his complaint off for a few hours, but he ought to talk to Kelly first.
Toby stands at the cubicle wall looking at Kelly’s back and says, “Kelly?”
“What?” she says, her voice husky from holding back tears.
“Do you... want to go out to lunch today? We can... we can talk about things,” he offers.
She doesn’t immediately respond, but after a moment she nods her head. “Can we go to the place that has Divorce Court?”
They sit at the back booth again, and even though the television is still within earshot, she doesn’t show much interest in it anyway. After the waitress takes their order, Kelly starts tearing tiny strips of paper off her placemat while Toby ponders the best way to address her work performance.
After five minutes of silence, Kelly crumples what’s left of her placemat in her fist. “You know, I didn’t expect a lot from him, I didn’t. But to tear out my heart the way he did? Was really uncool, Toby. It was just like the time that Berger broke up with Carrie on a post-it note. He just left her a post-it. But I didn’t even get something like that to remember him by! At least Berger said ‘Sorry.’ Ryan wasn’t even looking at me when he broke up with me -- and I know I told everyone that I broke up with him, but just between you and me, he dumped me out of the blue. He moved away to New York without even giving me his new number or anything. He couldn’t even be a mature adult about it.” She shakes her head fiercely.
She seems more angry than sad or upset, but Toby reaches into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out a clean handkerchief and offers it to her. “I guess not,” he says, to be reassuring.
She takes it from him, but only stares at it in her hand. "It's not like I expected him to be perfect or anything," she insists. "I have realistic expectations, you know. Guys just want a relationship to be easy and I'm really really good at making it easy. They don't have to guess what I'm thinking, they don't have to wonder how I feel. I tell them. Communication is really important. According to Cosmo and Marie Claire." She pauses, unfolding the handkerchief and blowing her nose.
"Yeah," he agrees.
"I was great at communicating. Okay, yeah, you're right, he really sucked at it, but I was good enough for the both of us! Whatever he didn't just come right out and say, I asked him about!"
"Mmm."
"And it's not like we didn't spend any time together. I mean, yeah he had class like, every night and he even studied all the time on weekends so I couldn't ever go over unless he called me first to invite me, but we were always together at work!"
"Uh-huh."
"We had a really great relationship! We did! I just wish I had communicated my professional goals before he just went off and made some for himself without me. Maybe if he knew I'm not just all about getting married and being a mom -- I have a career, you know! I want it all. Like Angelina. She has a career, it's just not what's most important to her, her family is. And I'm just like Angelina! But he didn't want to hear about that, Toby, I guess I failed at communicating after all and I could have avoided all this if I had just let him know..."
He's got to put a stop to this if he expects to get back to the office before mid-afternoon, so he says the first cliché he can think of: "Communication goes two ways."
She instantly deflates. "I know," she says miserably.
"Look. It hurts right now, but maybe it's better this way," he suggests gently.
She looks up at him, her eyes filled with tears that she's struggling not to spill. "But he was the one," she says, and hiccoughs.
"You deserve better, Kelly," he says, and it surprises him that he actually means it. She looks surprised too, so he adds, "You're special, and you deserve someone who gets that."
She regards him skeptically before her eyes dart away. "Special is just another way of saying weird-ass," she says, shaking her head and frowning at her drink. "But I know what you mean."
"No," he says firmly, and he waits for her to meet his eyes. "I mean you're special, and there's someone out there who will appreciate you. For who you are."
He holds her gaze so she'll know he means it, and it's not until a few moments pass that she breaks eye contact by glancing up at the waitress who's come to deliver their meal. He salts his burger, takes off the onion and reaches for the Heinz when he notices she's staring at him, her fork clenched in her hand. "Thanks, Toby," she whispers.
He nods and smacks the ketchup bottle with the heel of his palm.
All of the sudden she's sliding into his side of the booth and burrowing her forehead into his chest just below his collarbone. Before he realizes what he's doing, he's already put the ketchup down and snaked his arm around her shoulder. He lets her cry into his suit jacket while his fries go cold.
When he returns to his desk with his 4 o'clock cup of warmed-over coffee, he spots a pink post-it note next to his phone with "xxx" written in purple ink and three Hershey's kisses on top.
On Monday he comes in to work to find a package of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee beans on his desk. He asks Kelly if she happened to see who left it for him, but she merely gives him a small smile and turns back to her computer, adjusting the hem of her pink skirt over her knees. As he thanks her he realizes it’s the first time he’s seen her smile in a month.
She interrupts him twice that morning, once to ask if he’d watched Desperate Housewives the night before (which he did, but he tells her that he didn’t), and once to ask if Michael had put a note in her personnel file about losing the two customers last week. He tells her only that Michael hadn’t mentioned anything about it to him, and keeps to himself the fact that he knows Ryan had heard about it and had instructed Michael to “take care of the lost customers” or risk Ryan stepping in.
Michael’s idea is to send Andy to call on the customers and offer them significant discounts on any orders for the next six months. Andy is surprisingly successful wooing back one client, but when he discovers the following day that Dwight has adjusted the amount of the order downward to reflect the discount, thus bringing his sales total for the second quarter below Dwight’s, he informs the client that the discount has been revoked and complains to Toby for the rest of the morning about “internal controls” and the lack of management structure below the Assistant Regional Manager position. Toby listens silently until Andy loses steam and finally is calm enough to return to the bullpen.
Kelly leaves him two aspirin on the top edge of the cubicle divider.
That afternoon, Toby is copied on an e-mail from Ryan to Michael that instructs him to inform Andy and Kelly that they must attend customer service training before quarter-end. The e-mail includes a link to a Friday-to-Sunday seminar in Philadelphia and asks Toby to get Accounting to cut a check and distribute per diem funds to Andy and Kelly. He prints out the e-mail to attach to the request, knowing Angela won’t cut a check without supporting documentation. Internal controls, he thinks.
"I have to go to this seminar," Kelly tells him, stabbing a french fry from his plate with her fork.
"I know," he says over someone being sworn in as a witness on Divorce Court. "I had to sign off on the expense form, since it's training."
"Like Walt Disney is some sort of customer-relations genius or something."
"Actually, I read somewhere that it's a very highly thought-of program."
"It sounds silly. Like, I work at a paper company, and they're going to make me dress up in a Cinderella costume and teach me how to take pictures with little kids?"
He can't imagine that's what the training is about, considering the cost. But she looks horrified at the possibility, so he hastens to reassure her about one thing, at least. "Well, Sasha likes you," he says. Kelly had let Sasha answer the phone and play on her computer on Take Your Daughter to Work Day a few months ago. Of course, it had been a production for Ryan’s benefit, but he had supposed interaction with Kelly was preferable to most others in the office. Particularly Michael.
"Oh! I totally love her. She is so. Adorable. Your ex-wife must be so pretty."
He blinks, taken aback, but she doesn't notice, so he figures she must be feeling like herself again.
"But I mean, if I have to be like, Sleeping Beauty, and they make Andy be Prince Philip just because we're from the same company, I'm going to die. Seriously, like, die. Totally perish."
"Andy's okay," he says, and she stares at him disbelievingly, eyebrows raised. "So he... he tries a little too hard," he relents.
"He's freaking psycho! Hello, hole in the wall?"
Toby shakes his head. "I'm sure the whole weekend will be as good an experience for you as possible."
"Maybe," she says, rolling her eyes and tucking few strands of hair behind her ear. He thinks she's deliberately not wearing mascara today, because he hadn't heard her sniffling at all this entire week. He decides he kind of likes the way she looks with just a little bit of lip gloss. She seems... friendlier. Prettier.
"And you get a free trip to Philly," he adds. "For a three-day weekend. You could see a show, go out dancing one night or something."
A sudden image appears in his head -- Kelly in a form-fitting red v-neck top, short enough that there's a tiny strip of dark skin showing between the shirt and her low-riders, dancing under a strobe light with her hands above her head, singing unabashedly to pounding music. He pictures her smiling seductively as she reaches out and slides a hand around his waist, tucking her fingers into his waistband and pulling him towards her without resistance.
"I guess," she says doubtfully, jerking him out of his daydream, and he can feel the blood rushing into his cheeks. She shrugs. "Maybe I'll get to keep the costume. Or at least the glass slippers. You think?"
He swallows hard. "Maybe," he says.
Toby has to drag himself to work on Monday morning. Weekends with Sasha are always great, until the moment he has to drop her off at his ex-wife’s. He yearns to follow his daughter through the front door into the light and warmth of what used to be his home, kiss his wife hello and stay there with his family. Returning to his dark and lonely apartment every other Sunday night leaves him cold and empty.
Kelly breezes in a few minutes later and starts telling him right away all about the seminar that weekend. She is downright cheery, describing the snacks that were set out during the mid-afternoon breaks, and how proud of herself she is that she didn't eat any of the ginormous cookies with the M&Ms (well, except she did have half of Andy's after he insisted she try it, but he had completely insisted and she didn't want to be rude or anything); and oh my God, driving in Philly is so crazy -- they were almost an hour late arriving on Friday morning because of rush hour traffic on the Schulkyll (and isn't that a funny word? In Philly they say "Skookull" and it's supposed to be Dutch or Flemish or something like, ancient European); and they got so totally lost Saturday night trying to find the cheesesteak place. They they they.
He wheels his chair back so he can look at her around the cubicle divider. She's kneeling backwards on her chair so she's facing their divider, and she's wearing a filmy lavender scarf around her neck that's tied jauntily at the side, and her eyes are sparkling. "Kelly? Can we -- just, can you tell me about it at lunch?"
"Um..." she says.
"I have this report to finish for Corporate by noon."
She nods absently, her eyes sliding away from his, and he feels guilty for being annoyed with her now that she's clearly feeling more like her normal self, but before he can apologize, Andy appears at Kelly's desk.
And she smiles widely at him.
"Good morrow, Ms. Kapoor," he says.
"Good day to you, Mr. Bernard," she returns, and they're just looking at each other and grinning while Toby glances between the two of them like he's a tennis spectator.
"Coffee?" Andy asks.
Kelly rolls her eyes and stands up. "Like, duh, do you not remember what happened yesterday morning?"
"Indeed I do," Andy says, stepping aside so Kelly can exit through the annex door first. As the door swings closed behind them, Toby hears Andy say, "Why do you think I had to make sure you've caffeinated sufficiently today?" and Kelly giggles.
Toby cranes his neck to watch them as they walk through the kitchen away from the annex and tries to ignore the stab of Sunday-night déjà vu that washes over him.
