For Pam, the evening was rather less pleasant than the workday had been, and that was saying something since, the initial pleasure in discovering Jim’s prank aside, the workday had been remarkably flat. Roy was still grumbling about a headache on the way home, but that didn’t preclude him from socking back two and a half beers by the end of dinner, and finishing the sixpack with the Phillies on in the background afterwards. It was a good thing Pam didn’t actually like Yuengling, or she might have been annoyed at not getting even one. As it was, she mentally added beer to the shopping list in her head and winced at the total she could already see climbing higher and higher between Roy’s drinking and the ragout she’d made two nights before that he’d refused to eat even after she corrected the misstep of calling it by a name he didn’t know and just referred to it as stew. That wouldn’t have been a problem—she liked it fine, and she ate five lunches a week without him anyway—except that he dumped the whole potfull into the trash when “washing the dishes.” That had been several vegetables and a whole chuck roast down the drain. It wasn’t that they were actually poor or going to have to miss a meal—but not much was going into the wedding savings this week.

Which was OK, because they didn’t have a date set.

Which was OK, because they had to save up anyway.

But thinking about it that directly made the part of her brain that liked logic puzzles and Sudoku start to twitch about neverending circles, so she didn’t think about it directly.

Instead she thought about the day she’d had, a day which Roy, as usual, hadn’t asked her about. It had been a strange day: usually when Jim pulled a prank, they got to air-five about it and laugh and debrief, but today it had just dragged on, and Steve-Jim hadn’t seemed to know what to do about her. Did that mean Jim hadn’t told him about her? Except he’d said Jim had. And what did she want Jim to have told his friend about her, anyway?

Feeling vaguely guilty about the way her thoughts kept orbiting Jim and his absence today like a tongue around a missing tooth before the adult teeth came in, she perched next to Roy on the couch—now watching old reruns of The Price Is Right, since the Phillies had won a quick game 3-1—and asked him about his day instead.

As she’d expected, this lead mostly to a report about all the various things in the warehouse that were unfairly hard to do when you had a headache, like lifting boxes, driving the truck, and apparently also inventory recording. To her pleased surprise, it also produced a grunted question about her day, and whether “anything interesting” had happened.

Aware that her vague feelings of guilt about obsessing over Jim’s absence would exponentially intensify if she kept her thoughts about Jim from Roy, as they had that time he’d caught her holding hands with Jim completely innocently after his “alliance” with Dwight, she made sure to mention it right up front.

“Well, Jim had a friend come in and pretend to be him, so that was interesting, I suppose.”

“Huh.” Roy grunted and leaned back on the couch. “Did he get away with it?”

“I guess so? Dwight got pretty mad but he couldn’t do anything about it, and Michael wasn’t there.” This was nice, she thought. She and Roy were having an actual conversation about her day. They’d done this a lot more back when she first started at Dunder Mifflin, but somehow it had gotten away from them.

“Nice.” Roy nodded. “Wish I had someone who’d take a shift from me down at the warehouse, especially if I still got clocked in for the day.” He finished the last beer and set it down with a thud next to its fellows on the optimistically-named coffee table. “Fucking Halpert, man. Some guys have all the luck.” And with that he got up, scratched his butt, and headed for the bathroom.

Conversation over.

But not thoughts over, because Pam was left pondering, as she washed out the bottles to put in the recycling, why it was that Roy’s focus was on Jim skipping out on work, rather than on her day. Sure, she’d agree that Jim’s prank was the most interesting thing to happen—that was why she led with it, that and the amorphous guilt thing she was decidedly not thinking any more about—but she’d been prepared to tell him how it had impacted her day in the way he’d told her how his headache had impacted his. How it had felt like the day plodded along while Steve-Jim did some kind of spreadsheet and Dwight stared at him first suspiciously and then with growing respect for his apparently increased work ethic. How she had begun to suspect that her computer was holding a grudge against her as solitaire game after solitaire game had ended in defeat. How she’d almost hunted down Toby and forced him to tell her whether there was anything more to the prank, anything she could be involved in. OK, she probably wouldn’t have told Roy about those last two, but the basic idea was still there. She’d wanted to share, and all he’d taken from it was that Jim had found a way out of work.

That was, she realized, typical of Roy. He often called Jim and the rest of the upstairs office workers lazy, because they didn’t have to lift and carry like the warehouse workers (leaving open, she noticed, the question of whether she too resembled that remark). But he was fundamentally lazy himself: only the physical gifts that had made him a high school football star and still lingered into his twenties made him capable of the warehouse work. He didn’t put in any extra effort to maintain himself, and she knew (because he boasted about it) that he put in the least work possible on the job. Of course his mind went straight to not having to do work. It was his main focus anyway.

Just as it was hers, she had to admit, but in her case it was because too often “work” meant cleaning up after Michael Scott or undergoing the third degree from Dwight or Angela about something minor. Which reminded her: if she really wanted to help with Jim’s prank, she needed to make sure that that photograph of Steve wasn’t on his desk when Dwight came in tomorrow, or if there was a fourth degree, he’d use it.

Glad to have a purpose to tomorrow’s workday, even if it did mean dragging Roy to the office early, a prospect they both usually abhorred, made the cleaning up go by much more quickly, and she fell asleep with a smile on her face.