It is a good thing the next morning is a weekend, because there is no way in hell Pam is making it into work from her parents’ house. Not with the two-hour drive, and especially not with the four-hour talk with her mom and Penny, while her dad grills on the back patio and tries not to eavesdrop too obviously (lunch is delicious, and far too extravagant, but hey, he was stuck out there for four hours).
She starts the morning afraid that her mother is going to tell her she’s being silly and make Penny drive her right back home to Roy today, and she’s not sure she can deal with it. She ends it eating a delectable brisket sandwich with one hand and practically holding her mother back from driving into Scranton to “give that boy a piece of my mind” with the other. Fortunately Penny has already finished her sandwich and is able to use both hands, so between them they restrain Helene and convince her to do justice to Bill’s enticing spread instead.
If there was any chance Pam was going to simply forgive and forget Roy’s behavior, her mother’s incandescent rage puts paid to it immediately. She’s seen her mom frustrated, sad, and annoyed before (she has to admit, her parents do not have a perfect marriage, nor have she and Penny been perfect children). She has never seen her this angry.
“He said he wanted to cheat on you, Pammy.” She hates it when Roy calls her Pammy, but she can see this is coming out of her mother’s need to protect her child, so some backsliding to childhood names is acceptable. “In front of everyone. That’s just…he can’t do that! Bill, back me up here.” She gestures to Pam’s dad, who’s calmly eating ribs. “I don’t see how you can be eating ribs so calmly right now!”
“I can hardly eat ribs in an agitated manner,” Bill replies, setting down a bone. “It gets sauce on my cuffs.” He picks up another rib. “But your mother is right. That isn’t acceptable.” He continues in a placid voice that belies the angry content of his words. “Do you want me to kill him for you?”
This has been an ongoing joke in the Beesly family for years: Roy, or one of Penny’s rotating cast of boyfriends, will do something wrong, and Bill will offer to “kill that guy for you.” Pam usually laughs it off, but right now her dad sounds serious. “No, I think I can handle it, Dad. Thanks anyway.”
“My pleasure.” He takes another rib, and his wife rolls her eyes.
“So what do you want to do, Pam?” Now that her spouse has acknowledged the justice of her indignation, apparently, Helene is calm enough to return to using Pam’s preferred name.
“Yeah, Pam.” Penny chimes in for the first time in a while. “I mean, you seemed pretty pissed last night…” she holds up a hand as Helene opens her mouth. “I’m not saying she shouldn’t be, mom, hold your horses. You seemed pretty pissed last night…how pissed are you today?”
Pam takes a deep breath and looks inside herself. How pissed is she at Roy, and how much has having her mother take her side so vehemently assuaged whatever anger she was feeling? Often, she knows, just like her mother, she really only wants validation that her feelings are reasonable, and then they dissipate. Is this one of those times?
Maybe it is, she decides, but it’s not validation from her loving family that she needs. If Roy were to come to her and tell her he screwed up…maybe that would fix it. But oddly, it’s not the stupid shit he said in the break room that she can’t get past. Roy is…well, a decade with him, give or take, has taught her that Roy will say stupid things, a lot, and she doesn’t quite feel fair blaming him the way her mom is for saying one more stupid thing. Why should this be the straw that broke the camel’s back, even if it was the worst thing he’d said in a long time? Maybe that’s enough of a reason, but she’d probably still be wobbling if it weren’t for the twin whammies of the tickling and the abandonment. Those are where she’s stuck. She could forgive words, but actions? He knows she hates being tickled. He knows she hates it even more when tickling substitutes for a real conversation. And he clearly wasn’t thinking about her—wasn’t thinking about making anything up to her, or about what he owed her, or any of it—because he didn’t even bother to stick around and drive her home. Those two incidents, the ignoring her feelings and the ignoring her—those are what go to her real worries about this relationship. Not that Roy will choose someone else over her, though the stupid cheating thing is, she admits, just as bad as her mom says. But that Roy won’t choose her even when there isn’t someone else: that he’s not actually paying attention to her at all. That’s the worry that keeps her up at night, as her engagement ticks on from two years to three without a date set and her fiancé forgets they’re even engaged at all.
OK, she’s also still pretty annoyed that his little fantasy of dating the purse girl (Katy, her mind insists: don’t be like Roy, don’t reduce her to a symbol) involved having someone else do the “work” of dating her, as if she wouldn’t fucking notice. Actually, now that she thinks about it, that’s all of a piece with the rest of it, isn’t it? He thinks she’d somehow not notice if someone replaced him with Steve: does that imply she could just duck out and have someone else hand him beer and not talk about their day, and he wouldn’t care?
She’s about to respond to Penny’s question when her phone buzzes in the kitchen. She had to plug it in there, in the little nest of cords her parents keep next to the toaster oven, because of course she hadn’t planned to be visiting today, and since she dragged Penny out here too it was only fair that she had to let Pen use the one spare phone charger you could actually take up to one of their childhood rooms, leaving her phone downstairs. Because it wasn’t with her, she’d forgotten it this morning when her mom and Penny descended on her for The Conversation, as she thinks of it already, and now she’s wondering how many missed calls she has from Roy. She never told him she wasn’t coming home, because she was too annoyed at him, and so he has to have been going crazy wondering where she is.
Or not. This buzz is, she notices, her only missed notification, and while it is from Roy it’s not exactly anguished.
Can you pick me up @darryls thx
She folds into one of the stools by the kitchen island her parents put in last year when they remodeled and stares at the phone. He’s not wondering where she is. He’s not worried. He’s not even aware that she didn’t come home tonight because he’s at fucking Darryl’s after what has to have been an epic night out, given that it’s 12:30 and he’s only texting her now.
She tosses the phone to Penny.
“Pretty pissed,” she says, and goes to refill her coffee.
