In the end, Pam thought, it all started with that stupid old Mustang. She wasn’t sure how Roy knew the guy who owned it—cousin of a friend of a drinking buddy of a client, maybe, or maybe just a guy he ran into one night shooting pool at Poor Richard’s, it didn’t matter—but somehow he got wind of the thing, and it became something he couldn’t let go of, much like the Flyers chances of winning the Stanley Cup each year and just about as useful, in her opinion. At first she was cautiously optimistic about it; if Roy bought the Mustang from this whoever-he-was, it would be a car she could actually get up into from ground level, unlike the pickup, and her feet might reach the pedals, again unlike the pickup, so maybe it was a sign that Roy was finally ready to commit to her and their future together. Maybe this was Roy’s roundabout way of letting go of the fantasy that he was still the football-playing, hard-living, pickup-driving hero of the Wrangle commercials and country songs he’d grown up with, and driving an honest to god car that his fiancée had a chance in hell of getting home safely from the bar if he got drunk.
Then she remembered two things: first, it was a Mustang, and second, he was still Roy. The former realization came when she actually saw the thing when Roy insisted they go ‘try it out’; the latter when she found out he wasn’t planning to sell the truck to get the car.
No, in Roy’s mind they were both necessary purchases, both vehicles he needed to own and park outside their rented house (not yet bought, just like they weren’t yet married, even though they’d had an option to rent-to-buy and he’d proposed years ago).
Not only that, but in Roy’s mind the Mustang was a purchase they could make because of their savings. Savings they only had because Pam had been scrimping every dollar she could to save for a wedding that still hadn’t happened yet. Savings that would apparently cover the cost of a used Ford in a color she didn’t even like, but barely a penny more, and that once spent weren’t coming back easy. Especially not once she looked up how much gas it took, and considered that somehow Roy was stepping down in fuel efficiency whenever he didn’t drive the truck.
She would have liked, later, to be able to say that was when she walked away, head held high and half of that meager savings clutched in her hands, but it wasn’t.
And if she was as honest about when things started as she was about that, well, they started quite a bit before the Mustang.
But the Mustang was a catalyst (like the converters that were failing on the one Roy wanted to buy) in a way that the delays in setting a wedding date, and the loud jokes about her weight and appearance, and a whole line of other things leading all the way back to leaving her at a hockey game the first time they went out for a date ought to have been but weren’t. It made her start looking at things just a little bit differently, and it was that little bit differently that eventually made all the difference.
Not that she allowed herself to admit at the time that she was looking at anything differently at all. And that was because of another catalyst, one she was even less willing to admit to herself, her best friend Jim Halpert. Now, if Jim hadn’t been there maybe even the Mustang wouldn’t have been enough to get her to think differently; but with Jim there, she was damned if she was going to admit to anyone, herself included, that she was. Because Jim had this habit of pointing out the unreasonable things that Roy did, not directly, not aggressively, not so that anyone could accuse him of pointing them out, but in just a subtle enough way that she knew he was doing it all the same. It was the same technique that he used to great effect on their coworker, Dwight, to drive him into a rage without having anything specific or concrete that Dwight could bring to their manager, Michael—and Pam was more than familiar enough with it to recognize when it was being used on her, and more than stubborn enough to let that alone be a reason not to show that she had noticed whatever Jim was pointing out today.
Come to think of it, the sheer frequency with which Jim was pointing things out should probably also have been a red flag, but then again by that point Roy was plastered over with red flags so much that a colorblind man might have been forgiven for thinking he was on a green screen. And Pam must have been colorblind, because she saw that same color. Later on, she would tell herself it was just the lengthy investment in Roy that made her stay, but that truthfully wasn’t it. She did love him, and she did believe he was always on the verge of change. Just because it was wishful thinking, or that change was not in the direction that she wished for it, didn’t make her love any less real, or any easier to overcome.
And she was fairly certain, even after all of it, that Roy loved her to, or at least had loved her. Perhaps for him too the Mustang was a turning point—not that he realized it then, even less than she did—not from love to anything so moving as hatred or even so banal as indifference, but from a love that was worth orienting his life around to one that wasn’t. Or perhaps, like with Pam, that had actually happened much earlier. But in either case, one must start a story somewhere, and when Pam tells this one, it starts with the Mustang—and so it does here too.