On June 17th, Pam finds herself in New York City, perched on a too small stool in a too tight dress with a too strong drink on the bartop in front of her. It’s seven days out from her would be wedding, twelve days out from the day she sat Roy down and said “I can’t,” and thirty-six days out from the night she’d said the same two words to Jim after he’d said five words to her and shattered her entire world.
It’s not where she wants to be, but then again she’s not quite sure where she does want to be. Her new apartment smells like fresh paint and bleach and it doesn’t feel like home yet. Her home--the one she shared with Roy--isn’t her home anymore. Her parent’s house isn’t home either, and plus it's too far away for commuting to work. And work...she definitely doesn’t want to be there. She hasn’t wanted to be there since the Monday morning she came in with her heart in her throat, petrified and anxious to talk to Jim, only to find out that he wasn’t coming in that day. Or any other day, for that matter. So, yeah, she doesn’t want to be there.
And since she doesn’t really have a choice in where she is at the moment anyway, she settles in on her too small stool in her too tight dress and takes a sip of her too strong drink.
On the dance floor behind her, amid the pulsing music and flashing lights, her younger sister Penny celebrates being young and beautiful and newly twenty-five. Penny is the entire reason behind Pam being in the club and the city and the dress, because Penny all but forced Pam into coming to the city for the weekend (“Come on Pam, it’ll be good for you! And it’s my birthday!”) as well as forced her into the dress (“You have a bangin’ bod, Pam, show it off! We’re not in Scranton, we’re in New York, baby!”) and forced her first drink in her hand.
Despite the fact that she doesn’t much feel like joining Penny and her friends in the middle of the throbbing crowd, she has to admit that it’s been good for her to get out of Scranton. New York offers a lot in the way of distractions: lights, sounds, crowds, drinks. Her sweet, well-meaning sister, who Pam knows is less interested in celebrating her birthday and more interested in making sure that Pam’s okay.
She is, kind of. There are a few things that she can’t stop thinking about: Roy’s face when she told him that she couldn’t marry him. Roy’s heartbreaking reaction when he realized that she wasn’t changing her mind. How hard it was to pack up the last ten years of her life and deposit it in a stark, bare, white-walled apartment.
Jim, tears in his eyes and a waver in his voice as he says he wants to be more than that.
Jim, the way his arms wrapped around her entire body and held on like he would very happily never let go.
Jim, his head bowed and shoulders hunched, walking across the parking lot as she watched from a conference room window, crying harder than she’d ever cried before and for more reasons than she thought her brain could handle.
So. Yeah. She’s okay. Or at least, she pretends to be. Some days she’s better at pretending than others. Today is not one of them.
Because there’s a new thing added to the list of things she can’t stop thinking about. It’s the fact that Jim is 40 miles and only one state line away and they’re the closest they’ve been in weeks.
For the millionth time that night, Pam fidgets with her phone. She flips it open and closed, open and closed, open. She runs her fingers over the raised buttons, trying to decide if she has the courage to call or text, or if it’s worth it trying to contact him at all.
Because she loves him too, of course. She just didn’t know it thirty-six days ago. Or rather, she did know, but she didn’t know she knew, like that even makes any sense. She knew there was something, you don’t have the thoughts and the emotions and the tiny little tugging pangs (that she now recognizes as unabashed lust) for someone and there not be something. It just wasn’t a something that she ever thought she’d be able to have, and when she had it in front of her she panicked.
And what was she supposed to have done differently, really? Take Jim’s hand and run away with him in the night? Not give a second thought to Roy or the future that they’d planned together? She’s never been brave or spontaneous or anything but deliberate and meticulous, and Jim knew that, so what did he even expect?
She flips her phone closed with a resounding snap, because now she’s pissed off. Pissed at Jim for shattering her worldview and running away without giving her a chance to process the emotional nuclear bomb that he’d dropped on her. Pissed at Roy for not being right for her in the first place, which isn’t even his fault. Pissed at herself for not recognizing her feelings earlier and facing them head on instead of stepping back and allowing her life to crumble into the mess it is right now. Pissed at Penny for insisting that her birthday had to be celebrated in quite possibly the loudest club in New York when all Pam wanted to do was curl up somewhere and feel sorry for herself.
Maybe she will call. Maybe she’ll figure out how to tell him that she didn’t marry Roy, because she thinks he deserves to know. Maybe she’ll give him a piece of her mind and tell him how horrible it felt to have him walk away without giving her time. Maybe she’ll rant and scream and cry and give him a taste of how it feels. Maybe she’ll just tell him how sorry she is, that she loves him, that she wants to be with him, that she’d called off her wedding because it was the right thing to do but that it didn’t become important until after he’d pulled the veil from her face and showed her the light of day, so to speak. Maybe, if she calls, they can close the distance between them and she can tell him all of this to his face.
She has her phone open and is scrolling through her contact list when Penny suddenly appears at her elbow, a wide smile on her flushed face. “Pam! Aren’t you gonna come dance with us?”
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe in a little bit."
Penny’s grin falls a little. “Come on, Pam. It'll help you get your mind off things and I think that'll help.” Her eyes fall to the phone in Pam’s lap and one of her eyebrows arches sharply in a way that’s extremely reminiscent of Angela. “Pam,” Penny says sternly. “You are not thinking about calling him, are you?”
Pam looks down at her phone, then back at Penny. She’s confused for a second, because how in the world does Penny even know about Jim? But then it dawns on her: Penny’s talking about Roy. She opens her mouth to say “no,” but Penny interrupts her by grabbing her around the wrist and dragging her off to the bathroom.
Once inside, Penny rounds on her. “Look, Pam. I can’t begin to know what you’re going through. You and Roy were together for so long, and it must be so hard.” Pam nods, because Penny’s right. It is hard. “But you made the right decision. He wasn’t right for you. You know that, don’t you?” Pam nods again. “So whatever it is that’s making you want to call him, remember that. He wasn’t right for you. And no amount of loneliness or sadness or whatever it is is going to change that.”
Penny looks so sweet and worried that Pam doesn’t have the heart to confess that it’s not Roy she’s thinking about, but a man that she’s only just recently realized that she’s been in love with for years. Her best friend that ran away. Probably her soulmate, but she’ll never have the opportunity to find out because she told him no and crushed his heart. Plus, she doesn’t trust herself to talk about it just yet anyway, not without dissolving into a puddle of tears while simultaneously wanting to break several somethings. So instead she just pulls her sweet baby sister into hug, so appreciative of the fact that Penny took time out of her own birthday celebration to check up on her.
Pam sags against her sister when she feels Penny return the hug. Maybe it’s the too strong drink, but Pam feels so overcome with emotion that she thinks she might start sobbing. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been like this on your birthday. I’m being so selfish.”
Penny hugs her tighter. “No, don’t say that! You’re allowed to feel however you feel.” Nobody’s ever said that to Pam before. And it’s so silly, because of course a person doesn’t need permission to experience their own emotions, but it feels like that’s what Penny’s given her. Like it’s suddenly okay for her to be confused and sad and heartbroken and not as upset about calling off her wedding and her ten year relationship as she thinks maybe a person should be. It suddenly dawns on Pam that the only person who ever kept her from feeling how she felt was herself. She starts crying in earnest, huge fat tears that she only allows herself to cry late at night when she’s too exhausted to fight them away.
Tears immediately spring to Penny’s eyes, too, as she pulls away to wipe away the ones that roll down Pam’s cheeks. “Pam, listen to me. Do you know what would be the best birthday gift you could ever give me?”
Pam shakes her head, not trusting herself to speak.
“For you to learn how to be okay with being by yourself. So much of your identity has been wrapped up in being with Roy that I’m so scared you’ve forgotten about the things that make you who you are. Pam, I don’t think you realize how great you are. And I’m not just saying that because I’m your sister and I have to. I really mean it.”
Pam has to marvel at how astute her sister is, and then she remembers: “All those psychology classes are coming in handy, huh?”
Penny laughs. “Looks like it, huh? But I’m being serious. You’re funny and you’re smart and you are so talented, and it’s been sad to see you forget those things over the last few years, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d love for you to take some time to figure out what it is that you want in your life. Are you happy with your job? Do you want pursue art more? Go back to school? Just to see you take a chance and try something new would make me so happy. Mom and Dad, too.”
You’ve got to take a chance on something sometime, Pam. It’s like a punch in the gut, because of course Jim saw that she’d lost herself. He knew her better than she knew herself in a lot of ways, and how unfair was it that it took him leaving for her to figure out the things he’d known for years? Well, him leaving and a tear-filled talk with her younger sister in the cramped ladies room of a popular nightclub.
She decides that Penny (and Jim) is right. She has to take a chance on something sometime, so why not start with taking a chance on herself? It’s true that she doesn’t know how to be by herself, or even who she really is. The years of her of her life that should have been spent figuring those things out were instead spent learning more than she ever cared to know about football and striving to perfect Mrs. Anderson’s meatloaf recipe.
So she’s not going to call. Yes, she loves Jim. Yes, she wants to be with him. But she doesn’t trust herself to not submerge herself into being one half of Pam and Jim, as tempting as that sounds. And it would be so easy, and she would probably be really happy.
But.
She owes it to herself to be alone for a little while and figure out what that means. She owes it to Jim, too, if they ever are going to be with each other. But it’s like she’s seeing the world with such clarity now, here in the dimly lit women’s room with her sister smiling at her through watery eyes. Figuring out who she is is something that she needs to do for herself, not for Jim or for Penny or for anybody other than just Pam.
Just Pam. She likes the sound of that. It’s scary, in a good way.
It’s dark enough on the dance floor that it doesn’t matter than she’s cried off all her makeup. And she wouldn't care, anyway. She feels almost like it’s her birthday instead of Penny’s. And it kind of is, in a purely metaphorical sense. She’s sad still, and confused and anxious and a little bit unsure of what the future holds, but it’s okay. She also feels new and excited, like she’s a blank slate entering the world for the first time.
Maybe one day she’ll call. When she’s found herself. Somehow, she knows that the story of her and Jim isn’t quite over, just has a bookmark stuck somewhere in the middle so that she can start writing her own story.
Next to her, Penny laughs and smiles and dances, celebrating being beautiful and happy and newly twenty-five. Pam laughs and smiles and dances, too, celebrating being free and sad and hopeful and giving herself permission to feel all of these things at once.
Later, after they’ve danced their hearts out and had a few rounds of shots purchased for the birthday girl, they climb into the back of a cab and make their way back to their hotel. Penny’s three best friends claim the couch and one of the two beds immediately, so Pam and Penny climb into the other one. Pam feels like she’s a kid again, having a sleepover with her sister. She smiles across the pillow at Penny, who is more than a little bit buzzed and about ten seconds from falling asleep.
“Hey,” she says softly. Penny’s eyes flutter open and she offers a small smile. “I’m gonna give you your birthday gift, you know. The one you asked for.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
“Me too. Happy birthday, Penny.”
