Pam has had weekend from hell—not because of her family, but because, as always, of Roy. He tries to apologize for “whatever’s bothering her,” but when she taps her foot and looks at him for more details he fumbles to a halt and just asks her if “they can start again” and “she’ll forgive him,” and she can hear Marlene Anderson’s voice echoing inside his, and that’s when she knows he has no idea what he’s apologizing for. She loves Marlene, she really does—sometimes, when she’s being entirely honest with herself, as she has been for the last two nights sleeping alone in her old room at her parents’, she wonders whether she’s more interested in marrying Roy or in having Marlene as a mother-in-law—but she needs an apology from Roy, not one from his mother. She needs him to understand that he was wrong, what was wrong, and she definitely does not need to start over again.
If she’s going to start over again, she’s not doing it with Roy.
That thought shocks her out of her anger and into a kind of calm that she thinks might be what they mean by zen. She’s suddenly above the whole thing; it’s not that it’s become unimportant, it’s that she no longer thinks of this particular disagreement as the most important piece of anything. Roy has been letting her down for a long time, but more than that, she’s been letting herself down. She’s let Roy become this—and she’s not taking responsibility for what is his own job to work on himself, but she’s let her and Roy become this. Somewhere along the line he stopped doing the work, but somewhere along the line she stopped caring that he had stopped doing the work. He’s putting in minimal or subminimal effort, but while she’s putting effort into making their day to day lives work, she’s not putting effort into their relationship anymore either. She’s been letting Roy coast, and she’s been telling herself that being the only one who pays the bills, who cooks dinner, who remembers either of their family’s important days and dates, is enough work, that she doesn’t need to connect with Roy if she’s being the good fiancée in the abstract.
She’s going to stop that.
Saturday is a bad day, because it leads her to this conclusion, and that hurts. It hurts to realize things haven’t been working for longer than she’d realized, that this thing with Roy and Jim’s prank and Katy and not remembering her at work and all of it is just a symptom of a much larger abscess in their relationship. Saturday also features an epic screaming match between her and Roy, one which her father’s presence (he drove with her and Penny back to Scranton for this) probably saves from being worse than it is. He meets her eyes behind Roy’s back and the question is still there in his eyes—do you want me to kill him for you?—but now the answer in hers isn’t “no, I love him,” but “no, it’s over anyway.” It’s a deflating feeling, but it lets her get through the fight and into the aftermath without backing down.
Sunday is worse, because it involves actually moving out. She’s going to have to look for a place, she realizes, but they’ve agreed (in the most amicable discussion about their relationship she’s ever had with Roy—somehow all the yelling from Saturday must have exhausted his reserves, because now he’s just as calm as she is) that he’ll keep the house and the big stuff, like the couch and the bed, and she can take all the smaller things she wants and most of the money they had saved up for the wedding that isn’t happening. It’s less money than she thinks Roy thinks it is, but she also has no interest in the bed his mom bought him for college or the stupid couch he watches sports from, so it’s a wash anyway.
She can’t really commute from her parents’ place, and neither Penny nor her best friend Izzy have a couch you can really crash on, so her dad checks her into an extended stay hotel. She decides she needs one thing that’s definitively hers, not hers-and-Roys, so a trip to the Steamtown Mall produces a waffle iron that she cradles to her chest as she walks into the little hotel room and reverently plugs into the socket by the tiny little burner and microwave that mark the suite as “extended stay.” She thinks she saw Jim and his new girlfriend at the mall, but she didn’t stay to chat, and anyway this isn’t about Jim, even if Roy did try to suggest it was when he was yelling at her on Saturday. Her thoughts are interrupted when her father pulls out a box of Bisquick that she’s not sure where he got it from and kisses her on the head.
“It’s going to be OK.” He walks to the door and opens it, then turns to her again. “Really, it is. But I have to go calm your mother down or I may find your ex’s dead body on our front porch come morning.”
She smiles weakly at his joke. “Thanks, Dad. Love you.”
“Love you too, Pam.” And he’s gone.
She mixes up the waffles as her mind wanders back to the question of whether Jim had anything to do with this. Not really, she thinks at first. It’s about her and Roy and their failures as a couple, and to be fair (not that she’s super interested in being fair the first day after her first real breakup, but this is fair to her not Roy so she’ll allow it) a lot of it is about his failures, and her reactions to them—which are also failures, but still. It’s about them, not about Jim.
But then she thinks about the failures some more, as the waffle timer dings and she flips it out onto a plate, only realizing then that while her father brought her Bisquick he neglected butter, or syrup, or anything to put on the waffle. As she digs into hot unadulterated waffle content, she realizes that her failures in her relationship were all about not putting emotional weight on Roy, letting him skate by, never worrying that she ought to turn to him or look to him for support, and never noticing as they slipped farther and farther apart. And while that’s on her—it’s her who did it, after all—it’s not entirely divorced from Jim, either. Because while she wasn’t leaning on Roy, she has a damn good idea who she was leaning on, and he has tousled hair, shining eyes, and disgusting sweet tooth.
He’s also definitively not Steve, and even Dwight knows it.
But he also has a girlfriend now. Suddenly the waffle without anything on it is just too much for her, and she scrapes her plate into the trash. He has a girlfriend now, and she’s going to have to figure out how to shoulder that weight not only without Roy (who wasn’t helping) but probably without Jim (who was)—because in all the time she’s known him he hasn’t really had a girlfriend, and she can’t help but think that even though he clearly doesn’t think of her that way, he’ll probably have less time for her now that he has one. Not that they saw each other outside of work, much, but still. Something is going to change, and she’s suddenly alarmingly sure of one terrifying fact she hadn’t let herself realize before:
She’s more afraid of losing her friend Jim than she ever was of losing her fiancé Roy.
