Pam leans back slightly in her chair, ignoring the stiffness in her back, and sighs. Another year gone by, and again she sits alone at an Anderson family reunion. It is her sixth, as Roy only started taking her to these things three years into their relationship. She secretly wishes he had waited a bit longer. She even more secretly wishes he was still waiting to take her.
After five years, Pam had these things down to a science. Arrive at Roy’s grandmother’s house early, around nine or ten. Watch Roy start drinking about thirty minutes after that. Make small talk with people she hardly knew for ten or twelve hours, and then argue with Roy about who’s driving back for about twenty. Most of the time she doesn’t win, even though Roy’s so drunk he can barely piece two words together.
She’s still in the first hour of the watching Roy drink and make small talk phase, so she isn’t doing much. For her, small talk doesn’t really start until the entire Anderson family is so drunk she can walk out in the middle of a conversation if she needs to. They wouldn’t notice.
So she sits in silence, watching the creepy black cat clock Roy’s grandmother owns swing its tail back and forth, back and forth. She tries very hard not to think about Jim, or casino night, or work at all in fact. They were so close to the wedding...even a kiss with Jim couldn’t ruin things now.
Right?
She must’ve said the “right?” part out loud, because some teenager she’s never seen before is looking at her weirdly. “Did you say something?” he asks.
Pam doesn’t say anything. She’s never seen this kid before. He’s wearing a dark blue sweatshirt and blue jeans and looks about fifteen, but the odd thing is that she’s never seen him before.
She knows everyone in Roy’s family, if only their names and faces. So who’s this kid?
Suddenly his eyes light up, and he grins in a way that reminds her way too much of Jim. “You must be Pam,” he says, sticking his hand out. “I’m Spencer. Roy’s cousin.” The grin fades, and Pam is once again able to push thoughts of Jim out of her head, thank God.
“Spencer?” Now she knows why she’s never seen him. Roy had told her that he had a cousin named Spencer whose immediate family had been estranged about eight years back because of ‘something involving a gas station, two large pizzas, and Kara (Roy’s younger sister) losing her virginity to an Estonian.’
Pam had decided not to pry.
Spencer sits down next to her, staring intently into a a large, red plastic cup. “Yeah. Roy told you about me?” Pam nods wordlessly and Spencer continues to stare into his cup. “Man I’m thirsty.”
Pam frowns slightly. “You could try drinking.”
Spencer shakes his head. “It’s supposed to be fanta, but I’m pretty sure someone slipped tequila in there when I wasn’t looking. But I have to carry it around because if I don’t, then Kenny or Mitchell or one of my other cousins will give me something that’s definitely had tequila slipped in it and then I’ll have to drink to make them happy. So I’m good.”
Pam chuckles. “I thought I was the only one here who didn’t drink.”
Spencer shrugs. “My dad would probably hang me if he caught me drinking, and I’m not very good at lying. So I like to play it safe.”
“Good plan,” Pam says with a grin. She likes kids. And even if Spencer is a little older then what Pam usually considers a “kid”, he seems to be the youngest one here. So he’d have to do.
“So you’ve been engaged to Roy for how long?” Spencer asks suddenly, looking up from his cup.
“Four years. Which is a really long time, I know, but our wedding is really soon, so that’s good.” She looks around. “If you and your parents are un-estranged, will you be coming?”
Spencer shrugs. “Maybe. My parents are still kinda iffy on Roy. He’s kinda...” he shrugs again. “I don’t know a good word.”
“I know what you mean,” Pam says. “I know what you mean.” She smiles to herself. “On our first date, he brought Kenny along with us. And we went to a high school hockey game. And when it was over, they forgot me there. They had to come back.”
Spencer laughs and puts his cup down at his feet, gripping it between his shoes so it doesn’t accidently get knocked over. “Nice try, but you’ve got nothing on me. When I was...seven, Roy took me to a baseball game. He got really drunk, and on the ride home took me to a strip club. I still lay awake at night thinking that if he had just waited a couple years, it would’ve been the best night of my life.”
Pam covers her hand with her mouth. “Wow. Really? What did he do?”
“He ordered a stripper but fell asleep halfway through and she stole his wallet. I sat in the corner and met a really nice stripper named Cherry who couldn’t stop scratching herself and kept calling me Charles. Then we went to Subway. So, bonus.”
Pam snorts, her shoulders shaking from trying to suppress her laughter. “Okay, that is good. But you will never beat our junior prom...”
Turns out that Spencer can beat her junior prom, with a story about Roy “educating” his math teacher. But that’s fine, because she has a story that tops even that, and she’s sure she’s got this contest in the bag until he whips out Roy crashing his first real date. Still, Pam has an ace up her sleeve, and as she finishes telling Spencer about the time Roy got in a fight with a rather obese man in the park, Spencer is doubled over with laughter. There are tears leaking out his eyes and he reluctantly admits defeat, but they don’t stop talking, and for the first time in ever, Pam is enjoying the ‘small talk’ phase of the Anderson family reunion.
It’s a few hours later, and the rest of the family is struggling to play darts and stand up at the same time, but Pam and Spencer haven’t moved. Except now she’s slightly uncomfortable, because their conversation moved from Roy to history, history to sports, sports to art, art to celebrities, celebrities to Kelly, Kelly to Michael, Michael to Dwight, and Dwight to Jim.
It is like the universe is taunting her. The sky is blue. Tomorrow is the day after today. All roads lead to Rome. All conversations lead to Jim.
“With his stuff in jello?” Spencer asks. He hasn’t noticed her discomfort, so wrapped up in learning more about this ‘Jim’. “How did he even do that?”
Pam chuckles, like she has a million times so far today, but it’s a nervous chuckle - a wary chuckle - and Spencer notices it, and he bites his lip and leans back a little, giving her some space. Which is nice, so Pam is nice back and answers his question, or at least tries to, to the best of her ability. “You know what? I don’t even know. It’s so frustrating because even though we’re best friends he won’t tell me and every time I ask about it he just looks smug and waggles his fingers like he’s a magician.”
But Spencer doesn’t seem to be thinking about Jim anymore. He’s looking at Pam and frowning. “He’s your best friend?”
And suddenly Pam is sweating, just a little bit, but she’s still sweating, and she knows she shouldn’t be, because really it’s an innocent question, it’s just the way he’s looking at her and the tone of voice he’s using that’s giving her the completely irrational thought that he knows about friday, about casino night, and the kiss, and about how good it felt, and about how she can’t seem to stop thinking about it, and Jim, and the screwed up mess her life has become.
And she starts to cry. It’s completely ridiculous and embarrassing, but she starts to cry, and thankfully Spencer knows that now would not be a good time for Roy to see her and so he sort of grabs her by the wrist and half leads half drags her out of the living room and into the kitchen. The rest of the family is outside and they’ve kind of forgotten about Spencer and Pam but you can never be too careful and Spencer goes from the kitchen to the den and sits Pam down on the couch and then sits next to her and waits for her to stop crying.
“Have you ever felt...” she says after a few minutes, “that you’ve thrown your whole life away?”
If it were Jim instead of Spencer, standing here, then Jim (not Spencer) would crack a joke, and grin, and put his arm around her and comfort her and maybe they’d kiss again and Pam isn’t sure if she’d like that or not but right now she wants it very much.
But it’s not Jim sitting beside her. It’s Spencer, and she can see he feels a bit out of his league here, trying to comfort his cousin’s fiance and make sense of the giant stinking pile of garbage that is Pam Beesly’s (Soon to be Pam Anderson’s) life.
Finally he pats her awkwardly on the shoulder and says “No, I’ve never really felt that way.” He sighs. “But my mom told me if I ever make a girl cry then I’m obviously doing either something really really wrong or something really really right, and I need to hurry the hell up and figure out which one it is so I can act accordingly.”
Pam sniffles. “That’s good advice.”
Spencer nods solemnly. “So I don’t know who’s making you cry,” he says, “whether it’s Roy or this Jim guy, but I think you need to take my mom’s advice and hurry the hell up and figure out which one it is and whether he’s doing something really really wrong or really really right so that you can act accordingly. Maybe it’s both, in which case it’s some sort of double whammy and you need to do something drastic.”
Pam sits in silence and tries to wipe her eyes only to discover that her mascara’s run all down her face. But she just curls up into a ball and Spencer shakes his head and turns on the television and they sit there and watch Seinfeld in silence until Roy stumbles drunkenly in, gives Spencer a noogie, and drives Pam back to their home. Pam doesn’t even bother to argue over who’s driving and decides to devote all her energy to praying Roy doesn’t crash the car, except halfway through she figures out she doesn’t really care what happens to her or Roy for that matter and just stares at a stain in the seat and thinks about what Spencer said. She and Roy arrive home and Roy makes a halfhearted attempt to “fool around” with her before falling asleep in his clothes.
She wakes up a few hours before Roy and looks around her before sighing and packing her bags. She’s systematically going through her drawer when she finds an old picture folded up and stuffed into one of her pockets. It’s of her, and Roy, and the first thing she notices is that her hair is long, much longer than it is now, and up - the way she wore it when she was in high school and had enough time and patience to devote to it every day. The second thing she notices is that she’s laughing, and so is Roy, and he’s carrying her bridal style down the street.
She remembers that day. Not vividly, but well enough. That was the day Carrie had decided to stop speaking to her because “I can’t be friends with someone who’s deciding to throw their whole life away just for some guy.”
Pam puts her head in her hands. Marywood University had been plenty good for her. She hopes Carrie had had fun at South Carolina, with a new roommate. She was doing well for herself now.
Pam wonders why that was. They had been so similar in high school - same grades, same dreams, same friends. But now she’s answering phones and Carrie’s a lawyer.
Another drawer, and this time the picture is sitting next to the lamp, surrounded by a simple wooden frame. Pam is showing off her brand new engagement ring to the camera, doing her best to smile pretty. It hadn’t mattered that the diamond was small, just that it had come from him.
She had been so young. But she wasn’t young anymore. The magic had faded out of the world, replaced with cancelled weddings and family reunions.
“No,” Pam says to herself, her voice barely more than a whisper. “No...”
A teddy bear, the stuffing replaced with Jolly ranchers. A scavenger hunt, taking her all around the office. An “important buisness call” that got her out of another one of Michael’s pointless meetings.
“No, there’s still magic in the world,” Pam says again. Louder this time, more confidently. “I’ve just been looking in the wrong place.”
