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Disclaimer – I don’t own anything, just for funsies.





My Best Friend


Around the time that my daughter Cecelia was born, this song, “The Good Life,” by One Republic came out, and for some reason I remember it so specifically because it was kind of a theme song for Pam and myself. I sang the verse about it being a good life over and over again, I’m sure I had the words wrong, but I didn’t care. I was holding my baby girl and rocked her to sleep for the first time and it was by far the most amazing thing I’ve ever done. Cecelia is four now, and reminds us every day that she’s a super big girl, though I’d be completely fine if she stayed this age for a little bit longer. I’m not ready for her to grow up. I doubt I ever really will be.

I really could not be any happier than I have been over the last five years of marriage, eight years over all of being with Pam and we’re closing in on the best decade of my life. The good life, the one I always wanted. I’m always worried that something is going to come along and take all of this from me, but that’s in the early morning hours when the baby is up and fussing and I hold her and just… let my mind wander, maybe it’s a way of not losing it when I’m up at three in the morning with a crying baby on my shoulder, a way to remind myself that I almost never had this.

Another good reminder of how I almost never had these three women in my life has been watching the documentary. Years ago someone somewhere for some reason we still to this day can’t figure out thought it would be a fun thing to film us while we worked. Maybe they’d heard about our old boss Michael and his incessant need to be in the spotlight. We still don’t know where the crew came from, and a lot of times they got in our way, and a lot of times we had no idea they were around. They had these interviews, they called them talking heads, and back in those days, nine times out of ten, I would give them a sarcastic answer. It was fun for a while, exciting even, to be filmed. After a while, they just became a fixture in our office that we never really noticed. They left a few years ago, after almost nine years of filming us. Now that it’s finally airing on television, it’s been kind of … enlightening, if that’s the right word.

There were a lot of moments back then that I had no idea that they caught. Like one night, we were on this harbor tour boat, in the middle of January mind you, and there was this moment Pam and I had out on the deck where I remember thinking we were in private. I almost told her how I felt that night. I’m sitting there watching something I already know the outcome of, willing myself to just tell her then. Just say it, young Jim, tell her how you feel, do it!

But as it turns out, you can’t change the past, even if it is on television. I remember that night too, it was the only time I ever felt so completely helpless, standing there watching Pam agree to set an official date to marry her ex, Roy. Then the toast I gave, saying she was my best friend, but never wishing her luck. There were a few more moments like that where I felt utterly lost without her, but that was the moment as I watched her dance and kiss Roy, that’s when I started putting up a wall. It was a slow build, brick by brick, wedding detail by wedding detail adding more cement and glue to the wall – a wall that ultimately went completely up the day I moved to Stamford.

Pam refuses to watch any of it, so I’ve been watching it alone. We have this schedule, two nights a week after the kids are tucked in and read to, I’ll go watch TV in the living room and Pam goes to her art studio and does her thing. The other two nights, she watches her shows and I go for a run. This way someone is always within ear shot of the kids if they need us. I think it’s a good balance, since we spend literally ever minute of the day together. Friday night’s we take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese, and the weekends we set aside a few hours for house work and yard work and then we take the kids somewhere for the afternoon. Those few hours twice a week to do our own thing is, I think, keeping us sane.

Back to the documentary. When we first heard it was going to air, Pam was all for watching it, until she saw the first few scenes. The second she saw herself onscreen, letting her ex-fiancé tell her that she wasn’t going out for drinks with the rest of us, she got mad at herself and said, “I can’t believe how dumb I was. How could I let him do that to me?” She walked out of the living room and swore she would never watch it ever again.

Why am I still watching it twice a week for the past six months you ask? Um, well, maybe I’m a masochist. Or just plain stupid. But some days, when two kids are screaming at the top of their lungs and Pam and I are about to lose our minds if they don’t stop – those days it’s a good reminder that we’ve been through worse than the tantrums. At least that’s what I keep telling myself when Cece gets angry with her sister and forgets what sharing is and I wind up having to play the bad guy.

For the longest time, and I’m reminded by what I’ve seen on the documentary so far, I sort of already was the bad guy. I’ve gotten up to the point in that year they’re showing where I lay it all out there for Pam, told her how I felt about her – that I was in love with her. I was set to watch the next part when I saw her face on the screen. Part of being her husband and her best friend is that I know when she’s been crying. And as soon as I saw her eyes staring at the desk where I used to sit, I knew she’d been crying. Not many people could probably tell, but I can. The tops of her cheeks get all red, some people would think it’s just blush, but I know it’s from rubbing her hands over her cheeks.

That was two weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to turn it back on ever since watching that look. I had never seen it before, what I did to her when I left after I told her I loved her and she didn’t say it back instantly, even though I knew she felt it. When we first started dating, we did the apologizing thing and just let it go after – instead of arguing over it we filled in the blanks and moved on with our lives.

She said she missed me, that she was sorry and that she felt the same way I did. Really, at the end of the day, that’s all that mattered. She didn’t go into detail of what it was like, and as I watched those few frames of her sad face stare off into the distance at that desk, I instantly hated myself for doing that to her. It put me right back in Stamford again, and I had to go upstairs to look at my children sleep for a few minutes to wash away the image of Pam’s heart breaking.

We don’t talk about me watching the documentary, and I think she has a point – why relive something like that when we went through it already. We have two kids and a mortgage, what more proof do we need that we made it.

But for some unknown reason tonight, I just felt like I wanted to continue watching that part of my life, that part of her life. I don’t need proof that she loves me with every ounce of herself. I know all of that, she proves it day in and day out with little glances in my direction, little taps on my shoulder as she walks by my desk, the way we share our lunch together in the break room and she rubs her shoe against mine so subtly, just enough for me to feel it. We take walks at work sometimes (yes, that’s a euphemism for something else), and we just… I know that whatever we went through was worth it to have this closeness that we have now.

Yet here I am, sitting in my living room, the kids asleep up in their rooms. Pam is in her studio painting, and the remote control is in my hand, moving to the TiVo screen and selecting the part of the documentary where I left off.

The longer I stare at the screen, Pam’s sad frown paused up there, the more I feel … almost, I don’t know. It’s some feeling between wanting to just shut this thing off and remove it from the record list, and wanting to reach into the television and tell her to pick up the phone and call me.

All we needed back then was honesty. The only thing standing between us being honest was this fear, not of rejection, but of a different truth – a possibility that maybe, just maybe the other person really did move on at that point.

I press play, and I’m no longer interested in seeing moments I missed while I was in Stamford unless they include Pam in some way. I don’t care if someone would think it’s funny when Michael outs Oscar – Pam already told me all about that. And about the bird funeral and about Dwight trying to get Michael fired and all of the other little funny stories she filled me in on during our first few dates. Ever since then, we don’t really talk about work – yeah, a little here and there, but ever since she filled in the gap of the three months I was gone, we found we have so many other topics of conversation.

That there’s still so much left to say after being with her for this long, I think it’s a good sign. It’s not just all about the kids and our families. We talk about stupid things, nothing that really matters but makes us laugh like loons. Anyone else who heard us would think we were nuts.

I’m fast forwarding slowly, keeping my eye out for all things Pam, moving on to each show as they finish, and the next thing that catches my attention is that phone call. I can’t believe they caught all that on camera. I remember that I specifically waited until after hours to call Kevin about what teams he wanted to pick for fantasy football. Watching it play out on the screen now, seeing her face fall when I tell her that, she knew right there that I didn’t want to talk to her.

And now she’s smiling because we’re joking, and I just want to go inside and … I don’t know, bake a cake or … something. Because I know what comes after this.

I lean forward, press my elbow into my leg as I see, finally – we never talked about this phone call – she wasn’t cutting me off.

I have my finger on the power button, I’ve seen enough for tonight. But instead of shutting it off, I move on to the next show on the list and fast forward through this one too. I immediately cringe and shake my head, hoping my parents aren’t watching this. I remember this day – the day I got drunk at work after hours and had Karen drive me home. And every time Pam’s on the screen, she’s checking her phone… and there goes mine in the next scene, buzzing as I’m passed out on my desk.

My rationale back then for not returning the text? She cut me off when we were talking on the phone. So I got mad at her. Again.

I am a gigantic ass. Well, not anymore. I was though, back then. I hope I’m not an ass anymore. Sometimes … I guess I can be. When I refuse to talk to her father because of his complete lack of acknowledgment of his daughter and grandkids - there’s no excuse for that and I don’t hide how I feel from Pam anymore, no matter how much she scowls and sighs at me.

I hear Pam walking upstairs. I know she knows what I’m watching, and that’s why she’s not coming inside to get me. I think I’ll go join her for now. I’ve seen enough of this and it’s making my arms need to feel her inside of them. I turn off the television and make sure the doors and windows are closed properly and walk up to our bedroom. I take my wife in my arms and kiss her as I slide the bedroom door closed.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this to yourself, sweetie,” she says, running her hand over my back.

“Me either,” I say with a shrug. I really want her to watch it with me though, so we can have a conversation about these things we never talked about. I just breathe out and kiss her neck.

“Would it help if I watched it with you,” she asks, once again reading my mind.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding, pressing another kiss to her cheek.

“Okay,” she says, wrapping her arms around my waist, pulling me into a tight hug. “We can watch the rest tomorrow. But then that’s it, no more.”

I nod and hold onto her for a few minutes before I kiss her forehead and we get into bed. I slide up right next to her and pull her close to me, like I’m afraid that whatever I just saw is going to come back and haunt me and she’s the only one that can protect me from it.

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My Best Friend


Chapter 2



I’m not a perfect person. There’s many things I wish I didn’t do. Yes, I know, those are lyrics in a song, but it applies to me. I’m not perfect. I mean, maybe my kids, on rare occasions, think I’m perfect. Like when I give in at the grocery store and buy them candy just so they don’t throw themselves on the dirty floor and start screaming. I learned my lesson this one time, I had to run to the store for milk and bread. Simple enough. Cece had to come with me – like tears down her face because I had my keys in my hand- had to come with me, and it’s so amazing how she stopped crying the instant I picked her up and said okay. We were at the checkout counter, waiting to pay and I was trying to keep her occupied. But then it happened before I even saw it coming. She wanted M&M’s, but she had just had ice cream before we left, so I said no. She dropped to the floor and started screaming, and I couldn’t pick her up. Yes, me, a thirty something year old man over six feet tall could not lift his two and a half year old daughter from the floor. I’m not even sure how she did it, she just was like… a boulder. I mean, I’d never seen anything like it.

Now when we go grocery shopping, they’re allowed to pick out one thing that they want. Anything else that they add we mysteriously put back when they’re not looking, and it completely amazes us when the girls forget they even asked for the treats that they had to put in the cart or the world would end right then and there, in aisle four of Stop and Shop.

Parenting has been a challenge. I know everyone says it’s the hardest thing a person can do, raising children. I never really understood it until our oldest started walking. We were like, oh my God it’s on the move, now what do we do. Don’t get me wrong though, I love my family, and one day I’d love to add to it when Pam and I both feel ready to try this all over again. Maybe we’ll fix what we did wrong with Cece and Alyssa with a third one, and he or she will be the perfect Halpert child. Third time’s a charm, they say.

But I’m not perfect. If I needed more proof of that, this documentary is doing a fine job of providing that for me, in case there were any doubts from what I’ve seen so far. I spent most of the day looking forward to watching with Pam from where I left off last night. True to her word, she settled herself right next to me on the sofa and curled into my side while I pressed the play button on the remote.

Immediately, literally immediately I’m brought back to the day the branches merged and I set foot back in the Scranton office once again. That day, I’m pretty sure I remember two things. Stalling for as long as possible in the parking lot that morning, waiting for someone to walk into the office with that wasn’t Andy or Karen, really just because walking in with either one of them would lead to an actual conversation that I’d have to participate in, and my mind was literally all over the place that morning.

The other thing I’ll always remember is her smile when I walked through the door. For a second we forgot everything that happened and were happy for a millisecond before it all came flying back.

The funny part is – not the laugh out loud kind of funny, more of the how pathetic I was during that time kind of funny – while I was in the parking lot stalling and making up a hundred excuses to stay in my car and never go inside, Pam had been setting up the conference room, smiling at the camera, telling them she had been looking forward to having her old friend back. I mean, I lived through it, I know I did. I just can’t understand how it went so wrong so quickly.

“Hey,” Pam whispers in my ear. “We’re here, remember?”

“Hmm?” I mumble, keeping my eyes on the television, watching her introduce herself to Karen.

“You’re squeezing my shoulder,” she tells me and I instantly loosen my grip.

“Sorry,” I say, shaking my head, my eyes unpeeled from the television.

“We don’t have to do this. It was hard enough to live through it.”

“I know,” I agree.

She nods and settles back against me, and I love that about her, that she doesn’t push and ask me a hundred times why I’m doing something. She just accepts the things I do – well, most of the time. We’ve argued plenty over what I’ve done wrong. That’s a part of married life, too. The making up though, is totally worth the arguing.

I fast forward through whatever exchange happens between my coworker Andy and my old boss Michael, knowing that this is probably the point in that day where I was standing in the middle of the parking lot waiting for someone to walk in with. At the time, I didn’t want to walk in with Karen because I didn’t want the moment I saw Pam again to have Karen attached to it. And I never want to spend any extra seconds with Andy. Well, back then I really didn’t. Anger management really did change him.

But there I am, hugging Pam hello and I’m telling the lamest joke ever, introducing myself to her like an idiot.

“You looked really pretty that day,” I whisper, leaning over to find her eyes have closed.

She nods, swallows and says, “I did that for you.”

I can’t keep watching this, I can’t watch myself pick that other desk, and still to this day I want to punch Ryan in his smug face for being such a … well. I’m not a fan of Ryan; let’s just leave it at that.

“I hate Ryan,” she mutters, and I see she’s watching the television again as Ryan is shown on the screen with a smug look, like he won something by me giving in.

I laugh, like I always do when our thoughts mirror one another and rub my thumb over her elbow. “Me too,” I say, fast forwarding Andy and Dwight’s … pissing contest, would be the best way to describe it. I keep it moving forward, catching a glance of Pam’s face on screen when Karen passes me a piece of gum. Still to this day, not that I care at all about anything related to Karen, I still don’t know why she did that. But at the time, I didn’t care.

I fast forward through some exchange between myself and Karen that I can’t really remember. There’s Andy trying to get in good with Angela … I wonder if he really knew that she would destroy his life a little a few years later.

My mind wandering is cut short as I stop fast forwarding and watch one of the moments that back then, I thought about for weeks. There’s Pam and I in the break room, and I’m listening to the way she’s asking me if I want to catch up over some coffee. I can’t even explain how difficult it was to say no to her. And I really think it’s a good idea that the cameras showed up when they did and no one will ever see what our friendship was like before it all imploded. All of the long lunches we used to go on and all of the laughter we shared and how close we were – still are. I have to remind myself. Still are. Closer now, even.

I pull her flusher against me, whisper I’m sorry in her ear, but she doesn’t move. Her eyes are fixated on the screen as I turn her invitation down and walk out of the room.

“I knew you hated me. It’s written all over your face,” she says above a whisper and I’m not sure how to get rid of the lump in my throat that magically appeared as I watch her on the screen, hugging her arms around herself in the break room.

“I didn’t hate you. I was just upset,” I tell her, kissing the top of her head.

It’s true. Hate is a strong word. I could never hate her. I love her. She’s the air I breathe and the mother of my children. And, she makes the best lasagna I’ve ever eaten.

“Yeah,” she says with a shrug, moving to stand. “I don’t think I can watch this, turns out. I’m um, I’m going to bed.”

“Wait, please, stay,” I say, taking her hand and pulling her into my lap as the documentary continues to play in the background. “I know this is crazy. I just … need you.”

“I know,” she agrees, putting her head on my shoulder as she settles into my lap.

It’s all she says, and after a few seconds of silence, she presses the fast forward button on the remote. I don’t expect her to start narrating, but she does.

“I spent most of the day in the bathroom or the stairwell in tears. Especially after this,” she points to the screen as it slows to play at normal speed, showing us and our coworkers in the parking lot.

The look on her face … I’ve never seen it. It looks like she’s choking on something or… her heart is being ripped out of her chest.

“I did that to you,” I whisper, my hand finding its way to cover my mouth.

She doesn’t say anything, just clears her throat. What is she supposed to say? That by the looks of it, I killed her that day, and that was only the beginning?

I shake my head at myself as her head presses into my shoulder and I hit the fast forward button.

As I’m wondering if the camera crew recorded our exchange in the parking lot later that night, there it is, right in front of me. The second after I press play, it’s like I’m having an out of body experience.

I don’t listen to the words we’re speaking on the screen. I remember them. I remember feeling proud of myself for telling her I started dating someone else. All I can see from where I’m sitting is that she had been crying. Again. So, if I’m keeping score, that’s at least twice so far, and there’s so much of this year left to go. Honestly, I was so oblivious and into self preservation and … I never intended to be such an asshole.

“Pam, I never meant to make you cry… I … my god I’m so sorry,” I whisper, my chest aching.

“You didn’t know what you were doing. That’s all I kept telling myself,” she says with a small laugh, almost like a sarcastic laugh. “I tried avoiding you, I really did. I stalled that night, so I wouldn’t end up seeing you in the parking lot.”

“How could I not see how upset I was making you,” I ask.

She shrugs and leans into my side a little more, pointing the remote toward the TV, moving to the next one on the list. “You didn’t want to see it then.”

I shake my head and press my fingers into her wedding band, like that will somehow take away the pain in my chest. I remember putting this on her finger, and to this day she hasn’t taken it off, not even for a minute.

I love that about her.

“I really didn’t know,” she says calmly. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to say when you said that you started dating someone. I mean, you know? I just … I wanted to ask you so many questions right there, but all I could think about was getting home before I broke down again. That night I split time between crying my eyes out and drowning my sorrows in Ben and Jerry’s. I um, I remember standing in my kitchen before I went to bed, holding your tea pot, about to throw it in the trash, but I couldn’t do it.”

I kiss her forehead and run my finger across her cheek, seeing that the TiVo has stopped and is now asking if I want to delete or save.

I select delete, like it will magically take away every single thing about that day and make it like it never happened.

“It was my fault too,” she says, fast forwarding the next installment.

“No, it wasn’t.” I shake my head, because back then, I blamed her for everything. Now? After seeing this? I completely blame myself for ignoring every signal she was sending me. I was just so proud of myself for moving on, finally after five years, that’s all I saw, that I moved on. I didn’t want to believe in something that was never going to happen.

I had no idea that I made things worse by doing that – but apparently, I did.

I look at the clock on the cable box – it’s still early, and before I can decide if I want to watch more of my life and the mistakes I made on film – or whatever they’re using these days, Pam takes the remote from my hand and selects the next one on the list.

There’s this coworker I had back in Stamford that transferred to Scranton when our branches merged – Hannah. She was certifiable. She would bring her baby to work almost every day, dressed like a girl, even though it was a boy. Thus, my daughter’s did not wear anything but pink when they were newborns and toddlers. They’re girls and the world should know that about them at least.

I smile as I watch the screen, Pam telling Hannah how adorable the baby is, calling it a she and I laugh, because I never saw that before.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I say, feeling myself smile. “I didn’t know you thought it was a girl too.”

“Yep,” she nods. “Boy or girl, still, not as cute as Cece and Alyssa.”

“Definitely not,” I say, meaning every single syllable. My daughters are beautiful. They both look exactly like their mom.

I pick up the remote to fast forward through most of this, not really remembering the day clearly until I see Andy and me talking about the things Pam hates – though I told him that she liked them.

“Who were you playing a joke on? Me or Andy?”

“You know, at first it was him, and then it was to get you to laugh, and then I got worried that you would actually agree to go out with him.”

She smiles and shakes her head, kisses my cheek and I keep fast forwarding through each portion, watching Michael act like a felon and then all of us outside in the parking lot, freezing our skin off. I remember thinking that day how cute Pam was in her winter coat, all hunched and shivering. I remember wanting to hug her. I remember remembering I started a relationship with Karen a few days before and forced my hands into my pockets.

It is so weird watching my own actions on television, recalling that I was about a million miles away in my head, yet my body was there, numb from the cold. I double the speed of the fast forward, and run into the end of that half hour and I find it absolutely fascinating that my life – our life, can be put into capsules of half hour blocks of time.

I’m not proud of it, one minute I’m sort of joking around with Pam and the next minute, it seems like it from what I’m watching now, the next one on the list – Christmas that year, I was so distant with Pam. It happened in a week’s time span. I had Karen in my ear telling me I needed to be more serious at work, that if I wanted people to take me seriously as assistant manager I needed to stop the games, and I started to believe her for a little while. I made this resolution for the New Year to stop the pranks and grow up.

But that day, Pam offered this genius prank, Dwight’s final mission for the CIA, and I turned it down at first, wanting to make Karen proud of me. Seeing it played out in front of me, Pam’s face falling when I reject her idea, it killed me all morning. It doesn’t seem like it by the way I’m seeing it on the television, but it did. I can’t fully explain what made me change my mind later that day and accept her gift. But I’m putting my money on guilt and old habits die hard.

As I watch this though, I remember the thoughts that were in the back of my mind. All I could wonder about was what would it be like to wake up Christmas morning with Pam in my arms and kids jumping on our bed. It actually happens that way now, the exact way I imagined it, and it’s … beyond anything I ever imagined it would be, ironically. It’s our very own perfect moment, like they show in movies. The rest of our days during the year are chaotic and hectic and sometimes a little nutty. But Christmas day at the Halpert’s, well, it can’t be beat.

I know I missed a lot of Pam’s expressions back then, as they’re being pointed out to me as we both sit quietly and take this in. That day though, I saw her staring at me while she was on the phone as Karen and I exchanged gifts. I saw the look on her face when I turned down her gift initially. I saw the way she looked coming out of the kitchen as Michael “canceled Christmas.” Evident tears there once again.

“How many times did I actually make you cry?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she insists, and we both start laughing at Dwight tossing his cell phone.

As she selects delete and I notice she jumps over one.

“Hey, why did you skip that one,” I ask, pointing to the screen.

“No reason, it’s getting late, we should move on,” she says, pushing her hair behind her ear. “Michael and Jan in Jamaica, remember?”

“Yeah, we had that … something, I don’t remember. Put it on.”

“It’s nothing, Jim. Just another boring day.”

“So fast forward through it, I want to see all of them if this is the only night we’re doing this.”

She shakes her head and hands me the remote.

The second Michael says “Hey, mon,” I laugh out loud. “He thought he was the funniest guy ever. This should be interesting, I don’t remember this.”

Something about the way she fidgets on the couch and rubs her eyes underneath the rims of her glasses tells me that she remembers it well. The sigh she lets out says whatever I’m about to watch is not going to be pleasant.

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My Best Friend



Chapter 3




Unpleasant would be the best word I could use to summarize my relationship with Karen. Overall, all things considered, I should have never asked her out. Aside from the fact that she didn’t accept me for me, if I hadn’t gone out with Karen and just come back to Scranton without a human shield and actually talked to Pam like a normal person would have – according to what I’ve seen from these snippets of my life so far, I’d have saved a ton of money on antacids and Cece would probably be a year older. Not that I’m ready for her to start kindergarten quite yet.

But, anyway, back then, in the time period I’m letting roll in front of me, things with Karen were good sometimes and not good other times. I’d say we were okay for most of the time, but there were days like this one that’s being shown – the day she got mad at me because she wanted to move like two blocks away from where I lived and I wasn’t really comfortable with it wasn’t such a great day. Her attitude - along with my hesitation at having her living that close to me - should have clued me in as to what a chore dealing with her would be over time.

And by chore, I mean it’s a lot easier to take my two and a half year old daughter to the doctor’s office for her shots, clean out the diaper genie, argue with Cece when she wants to wear sandals and her bathing suit to pre-school in December and getting the death glare from Pam when I leave the table without putting my dirty plate in the dishwasher than it was to deal with Karen when she was mad. There are a lot of things I forget about that time, but I definitely remember the cold shoulder from Karen, displayed in full glory on television for all to see, as she ignores me while she walks into the conference room for some meeting.

It’s probably wrong, and probably not the nicest thing to call our kids, but sometimes we refer to our daughters as our very own cold showers. They have just… impeccable timing. Whether it’s when Pam and I are kissing in the kitchen when we think they’re playing in the living room – then one of them walks in and starts squealing. Or when Pam and I wake up just a little early on a Sunday morning and… take advantage of the quiet house, one of them always seems to need mommy right when someone’s shirt is about to come off. It’s inevitable with two kids. Then, there are times like right now, when I’d actually give anything for one of them to come bouncing into this living room and distract me from what Pam and I are watching.

I didn’t remember this at first – Michael coming back from Jamaica with Jan was pretty much all I really kept with me in my memory bank. But I didn’t remember this right away, this fight with Karen over some apartment that she rented when she lived here. I really recall so few details about that relationship, that if I admitted it out loud it would make me sound like a bigger ass than I feel at the moment while we’re watching this.

Pam and I have been together for a long time – it’s easy to forget things that don’t matter. To be blunt, and perfectly honest, dating Karen, and even Katy, it was a really great distraction – something I admitted to Michael. I mean, okay, Katy and I had nothing in common, but she was … there, available, and she was into me. The same with Karen, though Karen was a lot more put together and less ditzy, we still had nothing in common, and being with her started to frustrate me right around the time that she rented this apartment a few blocks away.

Why I kept going with it? Because I had to move on and I couldn’t be single. I still don’t know why I dreaded being single so much. I really do think part of it was, I knew what I could have with Pam would have been (and is – it without a doubt is) so great, that part of me, the part that got beaten and bruised by her when I sprang all of my feelings on her and then left when she couldn’t say it back, that part of me wanted to prove that I could create that life with someone else and be perfectly happy with it. All while sitting in front of Pam all day long at work

It’s wrong, it’s terrible, and it’s really utterly pathetic. Like a dieter eating massive amounts of cookies and cake and then complaining they gained a pound. I did it to myself, the misery, because from the looks of it, had I waited just a little bit longer, Pam’s answer would have been, yes I can. I wonder if things had been different if I didn’t transfer to Stamford in the first place. Would Cece be a year older? Would Pam have even called off her wedding if I hung around? Was me leaving the reason she called it off or was it because of what I said? We never talked about that, and right now it shouldn’t matter, like the girls I used to date before Pam and I got together. I know that with any them, if we dated after the day I met Pam, they were a rebound even if Pam and I had never been on a true real date until five years after we actually met for the first time.

That I’m sitting here watching a part of my life, this day that isn’t crystal clear in my head play out on television, I can’t even understand how I could have thought to share a problem I was having with the girl I was dating (Karen – rebound girl number… 5, or 6) with the woman I am still to this day desperately, hopelessly, have to reach out and touch her now or my fingers will just fall off in love with. It’s all beyond comprehension.


I feel Pam shift next to me, her arms sliding across my stomach and her nose pressing into my arm. I lean over and kiss her, slow and warm and her hand touches my cheek, her fingers press my earlobe and she lets out a sigh. I grasp the sides of her face and pull her closer, kissing her slowly, smiles breaking on our faces as we sink into the couch. There’s something behind this kiss, and I can feel the pressure of her hand, holding my face from turning toward the television. She shifts again, this time her right leg moves over my left as she lays on top of me, still holding he hand to my cheek, and I’ll be honest, I don’t really care that she won’t let me look at the TV.

I’m making out with my wife on the couch in the middle of the week and the kids are in bed sound asleep. What idiot would I be if I even thought to complain? A pretty big stupid idiot.

Time goes by and the voices on the television are in the distance. I try to block out Karen’s voice thanking Pam for, “Talking sense into Halpert.” And my stomach turns because I … can’t … stand… that … I hated that she called me Halpert. I went with it, but deep in my gut, I just … gritted my teeth way in the back. I’m surprised I still have molars.

I feel Pam’s hand tighten on my cheek, her lips more urgent on mine as she presses her pelvis into mine – which any other night, I’d have flipped us around and done things a gentleman never speaks of aloud. But I hear sniffling and crying coming from the television and automatically I know its Pam. That’s her she doesn’t want anyone to hear her crying cry. I turn my eyes toward the TV because her hand is glued to my cheek until I pull on it gently, holding it in mine against my chest as I watch her sit there with Dwight’s handkerchief, just crying.

There’s a sting in my throat and my nose and all of a sudden I feel hot. I haven’t cried since Alyssa was born, and those were happy tears. I feel one escape as I rewind it and watch it again.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she whispers, her nose pressing into the skin on my neck.

I can’t speak. I’m immobilized, struck. I feel like someone smacked me in the chest with a metal plate and left it there with half dry adhesive, peeling the skin away slowly as it falls to the floor.

“I got caught up in something I shouldn’t have,” she says, still not looking at me. “I should have minded my own business. But you looked so upset, and then we were looking together on the computer for an apartment for her,” she sniffles, her voice squeaking. “We were close again, I thought, and I mean, you were talking to me again. You were my friend again. And then…,” she trails off, shrugging her shoulders. “I just … in the end I wound up having pushed you closer to her and further from me.”

I shake my head, let out some kind of sound I make when I’m completely disgusted with things – somewhere between a rush of air and a ‘cuh’ sound and just hold her. I feel her hair between my fingers – soft like it’s color – caramel, and I feel her holding onto me, the way she does when we’re in the pool on vacation and she follows me to the over five feet end, her fingertips digging into the muscles under my skin as we go.

I could assume she cried a hundred times that year, I could assume that she was upset a lot, inferring it from what I’ve seen so far. But to actually witness her sitting there in tears while I played oblivious asshole who was trying to pretend I wasn’t broken in half just like she was – yeah, that’s making me angry at myself.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to make this up to her, or if I am just supposed to hold her and let this moment fade out and move on to the next one on the list, or not watch anymore of this and remember that I want a third child with her soon. Third child – as in we already have two, we’ve already put this behind us and moved forward.

I say, “I’m sorry,” out of instinct. Like those seven letters are going to make it all okay. Like they’ll take away the tears she shed for me, because of me, seven - eight years ago. Like it’ll absolve me of any wrong doing, make me a better person, make the night Karen and I had after she rented that apartment never happen. Remembering that now … as I’m holding my wife in my arms trying not to unleash anymore tears and be a man, it makes me feel like I’m cheating on her.

That thought makes my throat turn and bile rise and burn the back of my throat, the acid eating away at whatever is in there. I can feel it, try to keep it at bay by squeezing my eyes shut and counting to ten as I breathe in and out of my nose.

We don’t say anything for a long time, for what feels like over twenty minutes. The TiVo has decided to stop it’s inquisition of whether I want to delete that latest installment or keep it and it’s moved on to turning itself off and returning us to whatever is on ‘live’ right now.

It isn’t until I hear my own voice once again coming from the speakers behind me that I focus again on the screen, my fingers mindlessly brushing through Pam’s hair. I’m watching myself sit on the floor in the stairwell with Dwight and I’m telling him how bad things were when I wasn’t with Pam.

How I couldn’t eat – it was true. I lost about twenty pounds over the five years. I couldn’t sleep – bags under my eyes most of the time – more when I was in Stamford than in Scranton. Food didn’t taste like anything – again, so true, I over salted everything so much my doctor almost put me on blood pressure meds.

I don’t know what her reaction will be to all of that as I watch myself walk with purpose toward the main office area and kiss her like I’ve never kissed anyone before. How’s she supposed to believe I felt all of those things or any of them when I’ve just seen about half a year’s worth of her upset, me treating her like she’s some rag doll that can be put aside at a moment’s notice for something that could be perceived as better (even though there’s no way anyone ever could be better than Pam.)

How did we get there? How did we go from this … this game we played for a year, Pam upset and me pretending I didn’t care about her anymore – to me admitting to a camera crew that I was in love with her, less than a year later? It was easier back then. I didn’t have visuals. We discussed what it was like for her to cancel her wedding, we talked about the moment she realized that she could do better. We talked about why she didn’t call me, why I didn’t call her.

We discussed at length just how apologetic we were about what could have been an easier year if we both didn’t jump the gun – me by leaving, her by saying she would marry Roy. We talked about the future on our second date, and on our third, we stayed in bed until Monday morning. I tried again, said I love you that Saturday night at her door, and that time she made all of the things I’d planned for us come into reachable sight just by saying she loved me too as she pulled me into her apartment and locked the door behind her.

I bought her engagement ring a week later. It sounds crazy – as crazy as the small instance that led me to do it, aside from the fact that I wanted to since the moment I met her. It was a Friday night, officially our one week mark, and when you finally get the girl, you celebrate a lot of milestones, even if it’s in your own head. I wanted to take her to a fancy restaurant, but when we got back to my apartment there was a message from my friend Mark asking me if I wanted to play some basketball that night. Pam just smiled and said we could do that instead. She actually wanted to come with me and watch me play. I questioned it for a minute, this coming from a woman who refuses to go to sporting events – or refused. I kind of won her over there (that’s too cocky, but true.)

I called Mark and told him to bring his girlfriend with him so at least Pam would have someone to sit on the sidelines with while we played for an hour. Pam and Cheryl hit it off from the get go, which I honestly always knew they would. Of course while they talked Mark and I played a few loose games, nothing major and I don’t think we kept score. It was more running between baskets, getting sweaty and just catching up with a friend who I hadn’t seen in a while.

There was one moment when we were catching our breaths that Mark pulled me aside and I fully expected him to call me out on not keeping in touch more since I came back from Stamford. Instead though, he said, “She’s the one. I can tell. It’s the way she looks at you.”

We men don’t get more in touch with our emotions than that, but when I looked over to Pam as I dribbled the ball to the center of the court, the smile on her face was as wide as I’d ever seen it. I swore that I saw every single tooth she has in her mouth in that moment. I knew this was it, she was in this for the long haul.

And when Mark and I were finished playing, we walked over to our respective girlfriends, and Pam was bouncing on her toes with the same smile on her face. She told me that she invited Cheryl and Mark over to her place for dinner the following night. That was it. Seems like an innocuous thing, but no woman I’d ever dated for a week had ever engrained herself into my life and included my friends so quickly. The next morning before I went to Pam’s to help with dinner I went to the jeweler’s and bought her engagement ring. As I walked out of the store with the receipt to my future in my hand, I knew that the perfect day to propose would be on our one year anniversary.

I’m deflecting and digressing and … yeah, I do this all the time. Something really gets to me and I digress. I’m self aware to know I do it, even though that doesn’t help me in any way from stopping it from happening.

I got so far along in thought that I almost forgot why Pam and I are clinging to one another. That’s the best part of my zoning out and avoidance. It leads to almost near perfect vanishing of the act that made me that upset. The problem with doing that is that … well, obviously back then it led to Pam crying on a bench outside the warehouse. So it’s not such a good tactic. I don’t use it much anymore.

There’s nothing I want to forget right now. Except maybe changing diapers. And, oh yeah, watching Pam cry five minutes ago.

She squeezes my shoulder and sits up, her lips on my cheek quickly before she shifts to sit up.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” I say, my throat hoarse. “I really … I … I didn’t know what I was doing. And I know that’s not a good enough answer, but,” I say, unsure of how I’m finishing that sentence when she leans in and presses her finger to my lips.

“Its okay, Jim.”

I want to tell her I don’t see how it could be, I don’t see it. But I just watch her in awe as she takes the remote and selects the next one on the list and settles back against me.

There’s a lot more to go. I know that. But I don’t know if I can handle it anymore. And I’m starting to wonder why she’s been so calm about it all. I rub my head and I can’t help but wonder what the hell I’ve gotten myself into by watching this … train wreck of a year.

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My Best Friend



Chapter 4



It’s amazing the things I’ve committed to memory, while I’ve let other things just … fall out of my ears, never to be reached for again. I figure, if I can’t remember why I needed to keep it, then good riddance. Okay, so sometimes I let the wrong stuff go, like the time Pam had to remind me four times that on this Sunday we have to go to her cousin’s baby’s christening. I know she cuts me some slack there, it’s football Sunday, so really, for someone like me, involved in fantasy football, I don’t really focus on anything else on that given day other than teams, scores, stats… you know. The important stuff us men use as a way to annoy our wives once a week when our toddlers are standing around in nothing other than a diaper, our four year olds are running around the house doing God only knows what, and our wives want to shove the remote control where the sun doesn’t shine because we were all supposed to go to brunch with her father but I’m still sitting there staring at the television like it’s some sort of mystic creature – her words, said in that exact way. No breaths. I actually worry sometimes if she gets enough oxygen.

I’m not a bad husband – at least I’d like to think I’m better than most. I remember our anniversaries – both of them. The one in May – how could I ever let the details of our first date fade away? I can never go one year without celebrating it in our own quiet way. We always plan on going to a Bed and Breakfast somewhere, but so far for eight years now, we’ve come home and started to pack an overnight bag and ended up with two empty bags beside the clothes we were wearing that day, never moving from our own bed for almost two days.

We always talk about that first date then, staring at the ceiling with our eyes glazed over. We both always laugh when we get to the part of the waiter’s wide eyed expression when Pam moved to my side of the booth and kissed me right there between our appetizers and entrees’.

The funnier part, I think, is that we were still going over points we both wanted to make, and in the middle of her telling me that she was really hurt about something I had done a long time ago – telling her I was over my crush on her when I really obviously wasn’t. It was very serious talk and she was in the midst of making her point and she just stopped talking, looked at me, shook her head and got out of her seat, sat next to me, and touched my cheek. When I leaned in and she didn’t pull away, well, it was a really good thing we were in a public place. The waiter though, he tried to interrupt us a good four times, and I heard each time – but come on I’m sorry. The woman of my dreams was kissing me at the moment. I’m so not ending that kiss to acknowledge him asking if we wanted more water. Just fill up the glass.

That’s exactly what Pam said to him, with a half serious half humorous expression on her face when he asked the fifth time. I was so proud of her right then, I said, “That’s my girl,” and her response was just a simple hug and a grin. It felt so good to hold her in my arms and I never, ever wanted to let her go.

I still don’t. She’s the best part of my life, and every single thing I do is for her. Even when I don’t take off my dirty sneakers and walk through the house tracking dirt everywhere and she gets annoyed with me and gives me that look, I know she loves me. And when she accidentally throws away a bill we have to pay and I shake my head while I look through the recycling bag grumbling along the way, I still love her.

I will never forget that night though, that first date was just the epitome of every single thing I ever wanted it to be. We finally looked at each other for longer than a second, really absorbed one another features over those few hours. Among the things I learned about Pam that night – like she hated the sound of the refrigerator in her apartment, she broke her big toe trying to dance ballet when she was eight, she loves the fall because it gives her this new energy to focus on her art. And anytime I look at her, I smile. It’s like I can’t help it.

We talked, for the first time we really talked about things that night. She told me that she really had no idea that I wanted anything other than friendship because I was always dating someone. I told her that I originally had no intention of telling her how I felt, that I was actually coming to tell her that I was going to accept a transfer to Stamford. It struck us both then that if I had gone with what I originally planned, we wouldn’t have been sitting in that Italian restaurant together right then.

Trying to keep things simple between us lasted about an hour through dinner, but as we walked through the park afterward, she started asking tough questions. Why had I denied my crush on her when it wasn’t true? I asked her how she could have not seen it, that it was written all over my face.

We spoke in detail about the day I complained to Toby about her planning her wedding. I admitted it that night that I did it out of frustration, that I really couldn’t hear the details anymore because I was losing my mind. Like literally having nightmares at night that got so bad I actually dreaded going to sleep. I don’t remember the details of the nightmares now, but I remember the sleepless nights. There were about two years worth of them over the five years we played that cat and mouse game we’re reviewing on the documentary.

The thing is though; we only really got the air clear on the events that lead up to me transferring. I’ve been sitting here for the past few minutes while Pam is upstairs checking on the kids, wondering why she never told me just how rough this year was for her. I know she did tell me that she used the year to grow and become a stronger person. She worked on her art and found herself as her own person. She told me that being with Roy for so long never really allowed her to mature and be self reliant.

The thing that amazes me is that she never complained about any of the things I had done wrong, and from what I’m seeing – I was pretty … well, I was pretty much a jerk to her. I’ve fast forwarded and rewound this one day twice so far, searching for this one part of the afternoon that apparently, according to my television, never happened.

But it most certainly did happen. I asked Pam to come for coffee with Karen and me, she declined, and then told me she won an art contest. For an instant I forgot about all of the … drama, I suppose is the best word, and just felt so honestly happy for her. And it’s the crux of what I was going through then. Fighting off these little instances of me forgetting for a second that my heart was broken to pieces and I was still trying to put it back together popped up all over the place back then. That was the one I remember the most because I was truly so happy for her and I remember I couldn’t stop thinking about how pretty Pam looked when she told me she won. I was so proud of her that she went an extra mile with her talent, finally, after years of me trying to encourage her as best I could as a friend, she finally did something.

But according to this, it’s just a plain old day where the sales team went out on sales calls together in groups of two. I ended up going on a call with Dwight – and for all of his … unique qualities that drive me to the twelfth level of pure insanity – we actually make a good sales duo. This was also the day that Karen finally found out about Pam and me from Phyllis while they were on their call. And that began the great inquisition by Karen – a period of time that I’d honestly forgotten about until about ten minutes ago.

I keep rewinding this because I know it’s in here somewhere, but it’s not. It jumps from Karen asking me to go for coffee to Dwight talking to Michael. I rewind it one more time and pause it again because I think it’ll just magically appear. Maybe I’m just being too obsessive about this. The same thing happens when I’m trying to find my keys and Cece’s standing in the corner of the kitchen with her ‘I didn’t do it,’ face of innocence. And every time, in walks my little Alyssa – the real innocent one, holding my keys in her hand as she shoves her fist in her mouth. I’m sure that kid’s going to end up in the emergency room one day with some kind of lead poisoning because her older sister keeps giving her my keys.

I let out a sigh and feel Pam walk into the room – I don’t even need to turn my head to know she’s there. I can’t explain it. It just is. I’m sure that explanation is going to make my blood pressure sky rocket when Cece starts using it. She’s four, but I can already see her turning into a little wise cracking child much like I was when I was a teenager.

Pam sits next to me then, cutting me short from drifting further into a future where she and our kids are the only certainty, and asks, “What are you doing? You look crazed.”

“Yeah, it’s … here. Look,” I say, pressing play. “See here? How I’m going to coffee with Karen one second and the next… see? There’s Michael and Dwight.”

“Mm-hmm, yeah I remember that.”

“No, not me going out with Karen,” I say, knowing exactly what her tone means. “I mean, this is … isn’t this day… you won that art contest. I don’t get why they’re not showing it.”

She shrugs and folds her legs under her as she sits next to me. “Yeah, that was a big moment,” she says partially sarcastically.

“It was,” I say automatically, turning to look at her. “I was so proud of you.”

She just nods and widens her eyes just a little bit, the way she does when she completely doubts what I’m saying but won’t say it out loud until I’m proven wrong. “Anyway,” she says, clearing her throat. “The girls are sound asleep. But that could change at any given moment.”

“Hey, I was,” I tell her. “I was really so happy for you. And it’s really bothering me that they’re not showing it here.”

She shrugs again, I raise my eyebrow to ask her what, and without a word between us she just sighs, takes the remote from me and moves on to the next show on the list. I nudge her and tilt my head and she takes a breath and puckers her lips, her cheeks beveling.

I raise my eyebrows again, trying to egg her on, trying to tell her that we don’t keep things from one another anymore.

She lowers her head and finally says, “You said you wanted to see it when you got back and then you just completely ignored me the rest of the day.”

The next words out of my mouth are going to make me sound about as mature as my four year old, but I say them anyway. “It was Karen’s fault.”

“Did she tie your hands behind your back until you promised you wouldn’t talk to me,” she says chidingly, with her lips pouted to mock me. “Look, I don’t want to argue about this. It’s nonsense. We’re past it.”

“I know,” I tell her. “It’s just, look,” I say, taking the remote and moving to the part I saw before of Karen and me at the coffee place. “That’s why,” I say as I press play just as Karen is asking me if I had a thing for Pam.

“Well, I get it now,” she says, ignoring the fact that I completely downplayed my feelings for her. She just clears her throat and says, “But back then, all I saw was you flip flopping between talking to me and not talking to me. It really drove me insane, especially that day.”

“Can I see the painting now,” I ask, pausing the screen again.

“I don’t know where it is, I’d have to look for it. Kids are sleeping,” she says, pressing fast forward on the remote. “Let’s just finish these so we can go to bed.”

She’s tired. I can tell, completely. When Pam gets tired, she gets a little … tiny bit cranky. I should probably say forget it, let’s stop watching this and go to bed. But she said this is the only night we’re doing this, and I know she meant it so I just sit back and let her zip past this one.

I can see it, and remember it all, even though the images are going by in double time. This was the day that Andy drove me so utterly insane, I had to get him back somehow. My self imposed ban on talking to Pam in front of Karen lasted all of two hours. I still blame Karen for that one – she didn’t want to play along and help me get back at Andy. Dwight had quit, and his accounts were split up, and she said she was too backed up with his work to be distracted. Ryan was too good for… everything and everyone. I did what anyone would do.

I take the remote from Pam’s hand and press play as the part where I walk up to her desk comes on the screen. I can’t stop myself from shaking my head as her eyes light up as we set our plan in motion. It was amazing, even back then when we weren’t on the best terms, we were still so in synch with one another. All I had to do was hand her Andy’s cell phone and she knew what to do.

“It’s was nice being your third choice,” she mutters, rolling her eyes.

For someone who was so calm about things before, that’s a pretty big statement for me not to acknowledge.

“You weren’t. I was like … under intense scrutiny back then. She watched every single thing I did.”

“I know. All because you admitted you used to have feelings for me,” she says, using air quotes.

I try to ignore the snarky fingers next to her head and swallow my comment and just shrug. “Back then, it made sense in my head. You weren’t a third choice. Ever.”

She rolls her eyes and motions her head back to the television. We watch me toss Andy’s phone in the ceiling. There’s a look from Karen in there – never saw that. Pam laughs next to me, and I want to ask her what that was for, but I’d be a dumbass if I actually said that right now. I can just hear her yelling at me in my head already so I shut my mouth. I may be stupid in some areas, but I know when to keep my mouth closed, especially when it’s nearing bed time. Sometimes I don’t and we bicker, but tonight I don’t want to fight.

But I can feel her getting edgier as on screen we’re giggling with one another, wearing sombreros for Oscar’s welcome back party and admiring our handy work – Andy managed to actually punch a hole in the wall between Michael’s office and the conference room. It was a fun moment, one that stayed with me so much so that it actually got me through those long talks with Karen – the knowing I still had that connection with Pam.

She speeds up the show a little – and still, I think it’s weird to call my life a show. I want to refer to it as a home video, but what we’re watching is anything but homey so far, overall.

She stops at the point where I’m sitting alone in the conference room and Karen walks in. Of course these assholes would include this and not show Pam winning an art contest.

The voices in my head scream even louder, asking me why I needed to watch this as on screen, Karen asks me if I “still have feelings for her,” and I say, “Yes.”

The screaming gets louder and I can’t even hear over my own thoughts as Pam drops her head, purses her lips, hands me the remote, stands up and walks out of the room without a look in my direction.

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My Best Friend



Chapter 5



I should follow her, take her hand, the one that gives me goose bumps every time I touch it, look into her eyes – the eyes that stole my entire life, the eyes that she shares with our children, the color and shape identical in all three. I should say something to take away the hurt that I know I put back in them, the hurt that I took away, and the pain that watching this part of our lives brought back into them, even if she never showed me it was back before she walked out of the room. This room, where we share holidays and our children’s birthdays and quiet Saturday nights watching silly child friendly DVD’s while both of our girls are sound asleep, breathing on our shoulders, safe and sound in our arms.

The burning in my nostrils won’t go away and the hand I have on my forehead presses too deep into my temples as I sit motionless, staring at the paused image of my face on screen. Admittance hurt me once, cost me sleepless nights going over points that my ex-girlfriend needed to address – five nights in a row, talking over the same points over and over again. I never in a million years thought that that instance, that moment where I came clean with Karen and told her that I still did have feelings for Pam, I never thought it would come back into my life and cause my wife to have the same exact reaction. Her facial expression all her own, but the action of leaving the room was very much exactly the same as the one that happened years ago with the wrong woman.

I know this shouldn’t be a big deal. The clanging in the kitchen tells me differently. By the sounds of it, I can hear Pam making herself a cup of tea. I know she’s reaching for the strawberry flavored decaffeinated tea we found at this little Farmer’s Market a few weeks ago. The scent of it fills the kitchen and hangs around the air for a day. She loves it so much, in fact, that I’ve gone on my own to buy more boxes, saving them for part of her Christmas gift in a few months.

For our anniversary this year, I made her a Popsicle picture frame with our baby’s names on it. It sounds cheesy, dorky even, but when she saw the photo of the four of us in there from the few days we spent in New York during Labor Day weekend, standing in front of the MoMA, she started to tear up. She was more thankful for that simple gift than she was when I bought her a diamond bracelet and her heart pendent.

This is who we are. We’re simple people living a simple, extraordinary life in a small town of Pennsylvania. I never wanted anything more than this. Children that look like my wife, a modest house, a decent paying job and a life with the only person I absolutely can not live without.

I am a funny person. I hate serious moments a lot of the times. I mean, okay sometimes you have to be serious. I’m in my mid thirties and have a family to take care of. But this is me. I make jokes a lot, sometimes maybe too much according to Pam. But she accepts it, and she’s actually even funnier than I am in her own special dorky little way. She – she’s … one day last month I saw this commercial on TV, market your own ideas or something like that. When I told her about it, she was like instantly instantly excited about it. I mean, we spent half a work day sharing lists of things we should invent.

It’s one of the reasons why I knew from the get go that she was it for me. She plays along with me, she laughs with me, she does silly things like that thing we did with Andy’s phone, and all the times I messed with Dwight. She is always my accomplice and always in my corner. Even when I sometimes make a slight fool of myself, she’s always there with an encouraging word.

Karen wasn’t. She didn’t get those little things. She saw what I could be, potential, she would always say it. I had so much potential. But Pam accepts me for who I am. That’s part of the reason why on our first date we were able to air it all out. I know I over simplify it and there were moments that night when I really thought we weren’t going to be okay and weren’t going to get back on track.

The one that stands out right now is when she asked me why it took a week for me to get what she was saying. After the long pause and a shake of my head, I just said I didn’t know what she really meant. I wanted to keep things simple. We never touched on it again, she accepted what I had told her at face value and we moved on.

That was the glaring difference between Pam and Karen - Karen would have pushed me and pushed me to talk for hours on end until I blurted out things I didn’t necessarily mean, I just said them to get her to leave me alone. It’s like she had this crazy mantra towards the end – when you’re mad at him, just keep talking. Karen would point out my flaws and try to get me to work on them. It was all about my potential with her.

Pam accepts me for who I am. Not what I’ll be. From that first date of ours onward, she takes me for all of my flaws and quirks and she loves me anyway, in spite of them.

I know that my wife is in the kitchen right now, wondering what kind of person tells the woman they’re dating that they have feelings for someone else, and still continues to date that other completely wrong for them person. How am I supposed to explain that to her when I don’t even know the right answer, other than the fact that Karen was a safety net that I just hung on to for all of the wrong reasons?

I’m probably choosing wrong right now by staying here in the living room, choosing to play the next portion instead of walking into the kitchen to talk to Pam. But I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell her other than I love her and I was stupid and that she’s right, none of this matters and we should just delete it all and never watch any of it every again.

That I’m pressing play right now and digging my elbows into my thighs as I lean forward on the sofa may not be the right path to go with right now may not be the best decision I ever made. I know when I walk into the kitchen - because obviously I’m going to do that eventually, I’ll get a smirk from her and a comment of some kind that will be tongue in cheek.

I fast forward through this – what can only be described as completely bizarre – portion right in the beginning. Michael talking to his video camera, Dwight in a bra… I can’t stop myself from rolling my eyes and letting out a sigh. I keep going forward, passing by things I absolutely recall. It was some time near Phyllis’ wedding, and for some reason Michael had to have a shower for her and a shower for the guys. Thanks to his buddy – whom I still can’t stand – Todd Packer, we had strippers in the office. Well, only one – the real stripper.

Michael left me in charge of getting the male stripper. Instead, I did a search on Google for speakers in Pennsylvania and I hired a Ben Franklin impersonator – mainly because I thought it would be something Pam would laugh about with me. And a little bit because I wasn’t going to get myself in trouble.

I was so, so wrong about that. For all the times she went along with one of my jokes, this one was an … epic fail I guess is the best phrase to use.

This was also right around the time when I had just about had it with Karen and her nightly talks, most of the details are just not in my head anymore. I just remember feeling so incredibly tired.

I’m passing through most of this men shower and women shower business - the utter ridiculousness of that entire day was just beyond… anything sane people do. Or normal managers in productive offices do. I’m still surprised that we’re actually still in business right now given the way things ran when Michael was still around. I mean, it is pretty funny in a bizarre, do I really work with these people kind of way, to watch Michael and Dwight smack their butts on television.

I see Pam and I come on screen and hit play instantly. This was by far the most awkward conversation we’ve ever had. And that includes the time I had to tell her my most horrifying experience with a girl – she forced it out of me – I’ve since stricken it from memory. There was the conversation we had after I failed to propose to her on our one year anniversary – thank you Andy for stealing my thunder. And the tension filled ten minutes during our first date when I asked her why she waited so long to call off her wedding when she said that stuff at the beach about not caring about any of the reasons she shouldn’t have been with Roy until she met me. She said it was because I was always dating someone and she didn’t know with me. She knew that despite Roy’s flaws, he was safe.

My eyes focus on her face, the way it looks so pained as she talks to me about sleep and getting enough of it. I remember I specifically made a point to say Karen and I had late nights because we were up talking. Even during that time when we were on this weird seesaw ride, I didn’t want to give her an image she didn’t need. She had one thing right though. Sleep is important.

I wish I got more of it back then, because our toddler manages to wake up in the middle of the night at least three nights a week for reasons we still haven’t figured out. By the time we get back to sleep it’s time to wake up and go to work.

I have to laugh at the television as she goes on to say how different she is when she gets six hours of sleep compared to eight hours. Boy do I know the difference there. I know it well. I can’t help but smile at that for some reason. It was awkward back then, and now, knowing how serious she was about her sleeping pattern… it’s pretty amazing actually. It’s really funny to wake her up before she’s ready. Some mornings I would let my lips wake her up, and other mornings I would scare her awake.

Until she became pregnant with Cece, then the fun ended. She had two valid points. One – scaring her awake could hurt the baby (I doubted it, but try arguing with a pregnant woman). And the most valid reason – we were on track to be woken up every four hours once the baby arrived. It’s ironic how right she was about it, and even more ironic that she actually said at that time, “Don’t fall asleep at your desk.”

We did that once, we actually fell asleep at work not too long ago when Cece was a baby. It was the beginnings of Cece’s ‘reverse cycling,’ which really only means she’s up and in hysterics while mommy and daddy are trying to sleep at night.

Yep, Pam was definitely not joking when she said we would never sleep a full night’s sleep for a very long time. Even still, I wouldn’t pass up being woken up by Cece now, her running into our room on weekend mornings, taking it upon herself to jump into bed with Pam and me. Soon our little one will follow along once she’s grown out of her crib.

I can’t wait for that. I always wondered what it would be like to have that with Pam – a lazy Sunday morning snuggling in bed with our kids. That doesn’t sound very manly but I don’t care.

I hit the fast forward button again, trying to get through this quickly but also within enough time for Pam to calm down so we can actually talk. Maybe I’m supposed to be preparing some responses to her inevitable questions.

I hear the faint sound of fingernails on a mug coming from the kitchen and let out a sigh, pausing the TiVo – and in that exact second I see Pam and Karen come on the screen. I shake my head and can feel the lines on my face define themselves as I press play again.

The quick exchange about Ben Franklin almost fools me, but my eyes stay glued to the screen as I hear Karen say, loud and clear, that I had told her about Pam and I kissing. She’s making it all nonchalant but that was nothing like that conversation between Karen and I went.

”Did you kiss her?”

“It’s really … look it’s not a big deal, please just drop it? Yes, I liked her, yes, I kissed her. Just let it go. You and I are together now. The past shouldn’t matter.”

“Fine. I’m sure if it was me and my ex-boyfriend was hanging around, you’d feel differently.”

“Pam is not my ex. Look, it’s really late. I have an early sales call. It’s no big deal, okay?”

“Okay. We’ll talk about it more tomorrow.”

I have so many questions. But my train of thought gets cut short again as I hear Karen ask Pam if she still has feelings for me.

She said yes. Well, it’s more like, “Oh, yeah.” But it’s there. Before my brain can really process that, Pam is already deflecting, saying she misunderstood Karen’s phrasing.

It’s amazing how something so simple can get so far beyond messed up in just a few misunderstandings. Misinterpretations. For years, all we did was misinterpret each other.

I scratch my fingers through my hair and stop the TiVo, taking a deep breath as I stand and walk into our kitchen. I love how Pam decorated it. Yellow walls, white cabinets, a mess of our children’s art covers the refrigerator doors, a bunch of her framed art work lining the walls and a few figurines here and there. It feels like home to her this way.

I step behind the chair she’s sitting in, press my hands into her shoulders and kiss the top of her head. She leans back into my chest and when my arms envelop her she puts her hand over my forearm and lets out a sigh. She smells like strawberry tea and baby lotion and I have to close my eyes to stop the dizzying feeling. Something about watching what happened in the past is messing with my mind, bringing the pain of that time back in with a force I wasn’t prepared for.

“I don’t know how I got through it,” she starts to speak.

“Me either,” I breathe out, pressing my nose into her cheek.

“I used to dream about this. I’d have really vivid dreams about us, being together. And every day we grew further apart,” she says, her cheek pressing into my arm. “Every day we grew apart, the dreams became more real feeling – like I could really touch you, I could really feel your lips kissing me. And now, to know that you admitted you still had feelings for me back then and still stayed with her. I’m not annoyed, because I made the same mistakes too, but… still,” she trails off with a shrug.

“I don’t know why I stayed with her, other than the fact that I was weak and scared and lonely. It’s the same reason why I dated all of the other women I dated. They weren’t you, but I needed to feel close to someone,” I admit, tugging her hand for her to stand, wrapping my arms around her and kissing her cheek as she lets me hold her. She looks up at me, craning her neck and I take the invitation and kiss my wife’s lips.

When she fidgets on her feet and we both walk toward the living room, folding her into my lap, she runs her thumb over my wrist in some pattern. She stays quiet for a while, and as the silence lingers I start to try and fill in more blanks.

I can’t come up with anything to say other than this. So I go with it. “I think part of me thought that she would help us get together. I had no idea she was a clingy, manipulative person.”

“Manipulative?”

“Yeah, well judging by the conversation she had with you in the kitchen and our conversations that she and I had where she wouldn’t say exactly how she knew, but kept telling me you weren’t interested. I was just … too weak. I heard what I wanted to hear.”

I must look like I’m desperate for her to understand or something, because her eyebrows crease in the middle and she covers my mouth with her hand. I pucker my lips and close my eyes, kissing her palm.

“It’s okay. We did things we shouldn’t have and didn’t do things we should have,” she says calmly. “Maybe we need a break from watching this.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” I say, ready to go rest my head next to hers.

“How many are left,” she says, running her eyes over the list. “Ugh,” she sighs out. “That damn wedding.”

“Delete it.”

“Can we?”

“Yes,” I say. “Delete it.”

“Done. I don’t want to remember anything from that day,” she says.

“Yeah, the only thing I really do remember is that I owe you a dance,” I say, hoping it didn’t sound as cheesy as I think it did.

She grins and kisses me. Turning off the television, she walks toward our stereo and places the CD our wedding band made us of the songs they played at our wedding.

‘Amazed’ by Lonestar – the first song we danced to as husband and wife - plays low through the speakers as I take her in my arms, press my cheek against her temple and hold her hand close to my heart.

I look into her eyes as the lyrics sound through my ears, and I sing along, whispering so she’s the only one that can hear.

“I wanna spend the rest of my life, with you by my side,” I say into her ear. Her response is placing her hand more strongly around me and grinning wider as she looks at me, silently saying the same thing.

I’m pretty sure the rest of the things we’ll watch when we get to it will probably bring up more questions. But right now as I move slowly in a circle with my wife in my arms, I feel like I’m falling in love with her all over again.

.

.

My Best Friend



Chapter 6



There are more than a thousand things that are one hundred percent amazing, fantastic, superb, just … so great about marrying my best friend. We do everything together, we go everywhere together, we think alike, we like the same things, we have the same sense of humor and we almost always never argue. A few times here and there we’ve had small spats over trivial things that don’t matter at the end of the day. There are a few that have bled into our work day – the cameras following our every move during one of our more extensive silent treatments. I hate those days, where all I want to do is vent to my best friend – but she’s not talking to me because I may have done or said the wrong thing.

We always manage to work through it, sometimes we don’t even have to say what we’re thinking, and I’ll just look at her and just keep staring until I get her to smile. She does the same thing to me. I can see everything she’s thinking before she even says it. All she has to do is look at me, move her head just the … this certain way that just says everything and nothing, and I know what she means.

The one … I wouldn’t say bad thing necessarily, but the one not so good thing about spending every waking and sleeping second with each other means that sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, our arguments spill over into our work day. It’s only really happened twice since we’ve been together, and one time the camera’s caught on to it and followed us around all day long. That was probably our worst fight. We had the silent treatment going on, any time I tried to sneak a look at her she would wave her hand in the air or ignore me.

It was so stupid too. Cece had woken up in the middle of the night – she was eleven months old at the time. I heard the baby, Pam was still sleeping, and instead of taking care of the kid myself, I woke Pam up and told her the baby was up. I just figured, if she’s hungry, Pam’s going to have to get up anyway.

My brilliance at three in the morning isn’t really my finest quality – all Cece needed was her binky and a diaper change, apparently she fell back to sleep on the changing table. Sometimes when Pam doesn’t get enough sleep, she can be a little passive aggressive, so we never really got a chance to get our fight started and done before we got in the car. She chose to unload on me the minute after we left Cece at daycare.

Here’s the thing about us though. We silently fought all day long, not even an IM went between us. And all it took for us to be good again was me swatting her rear to get her attention and telling her how much I love and adore her and how sorry I was and could she please forgive me, all said through my facial expression. It only took about ten seconds for her to smile, and the instant she bit her lip I knew we were good and I couldn’t wait to get home to make things up to her.

I think we both know that we’ve been through way worse, and that these spats and quarrels we have are just minor instances of insanity brought on by trying to raise children properly, maintain a house and keep our marriage alive and well. I have to give Pam all the credit in the world for making the latter a goal of hers. She does little things, like sometimes when no one’s looking at the office, she’ll kiss my cheek. She makes me a video once every few months just to tell me she loves me. This one video was just a few minutes of our kids playing together in the living room, and at the end they all say, “We love you, daddy.”

But we have been through worse. Back in the days when we weren’t together and with different people and things were messy, I never thought I would see the day where Pam and I would walk through the park with two other little one’s between us. If you had told me the night of our coworker Phyllis’ wedding that this is where I’d be – dancing in my living room with Pam in my arms, I would have told you to seek help. That’s what I told the cameras, in not so many words, when they asked me that night, “What would you do if you thought Pam was interested, hypothetically?”

See, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about things like that before I went to Stamford. I cut myself off from letting those thoughts back in. And at that wedding when Pam left with Roy, I shut them out as fast as I could and went back to my next best thing – AKA Karen, who couldn’t be pried away from her BlackBerry for longer than a song or two. It was do or die, survival of the fittest.

Okay maybe I’m exaggerating, but yeah, back then, when all I really wanted to do was be with Pam the way we are now, nothing hurt more than trying to convince myself endlessly that it wasn’t going to happen. It’s funny how neither one of us wants to relive that night, and it should feel good to know that I can delete it from our TiVo. But I can’t delete it from my mind.

Because that was the point where I shut Pam out for the first time in my life so completely that I literally ate once a day to stay alive and forced myself to stay with Karen because she was nice and she was pretty and she was into me. It never became easier to do – pretend Pam was just a coworker and nothing more, concentrate on sales as Karen had suggested so I could become something more with the company than just a plain old salesman. I never wanted it but at that point, I was trying to change my life.

That meant a new job and a new person to try to love, to try to get rid of all of the ideas I had for things Pam and I could do together if we dated – got married – had kids – shared our lives with one another. I thought I had lost the love of my life. What other choice did I have other than jumping into work?

I really didn’t care what I did for a living – still sort of don’t as long as I make a paycheck every two weeks and my kids have clothes on their backs and food in their stomachs. All I want is this woman – my wife, Pam - in my arms. I want us to be happy, forever. If I can accomplish that for every day of every year that we’re still breathing, then I’ve done my job.

If every once in a while we can do things like this, things like dancing in our living room, things like taking an extra five minutes to get to work so we can have an adult conversation before we have to abide by PDA rules in the office and stay a respectable distance away from one another. If we can keep doing things like staring at one another with matching smiles that reach the corners of our eyes like they are right now as we slowly move with one another in a small circle on, the fibers of the carpet scratching at our feet, I’ll never have a single regret for as long as I live.

She pulls me closer to her, rests her head on my chest and let’s out a sigh, the sound filling the room over the lull in between songs. I can’t help but stop our movements and pull her into a tight hug, closing my eyes as I rest my head next to hers.

I expect her to tell me any second now that it’s late and we should go to bed and we should forget about finishing what’s left of the documentary. I’m so sure she’s going to say it that I have my response of protest ready to go, so I almost miss what she whispers to me.

“We should finish, before it gets too late,” she says, her voice muffled in my t-shirt.

I pause for a moment, shoving away the no I was going to say and instead bring her closer to me and let out a breath as I kiss her cheek. I don’t know if we really need to continue this, so I ask her, “Are you sure?”

She nods, lifts her head and grins, running her fingers through my hair, her palm resting on the crown of my head. I love when she does that. I don’t know why. I just do.

“Okay,” I agree quietly, tilting her face toward me as I lean down to kiss her lips. I never want this… I don’t know – this magnet inside of me that makes me need to kiss her all the time to stop being so powerful. Maybe it’s all the time we spend at work unable to act like we’re married.

Or maybe it’s to make up for all the times I wanted to do nothing more than hold her in my arms and kiss her senseless but was forced instead to watch her be treated like she really didn’t matter to her fiancé.

I shrug to myself and smile at her, amazed that she still wants to continue watching these moments of our life apart instead of going to get some much needed sleep.

I turn off our stereo and in less than a minute we’re back on the sofa, my arm slung over her shoulder and her head on mine as I pick up where we left off. The description reads so vague I don’t even understand it.

“Boss goes to business school,” I mutter as I select play. “When did that happen?”

“Michael gave a lecture at one of Ryan’s business classes,” she says.

I let out a scoffing laugh and fast forward through the beginning. As the screen quickly moves coworkers and our old boss Michael, I can’t really pin point this day right away. I keep going through Pam and Roy talking at reception, no protests from the person seated to my right, so I continue with the fast forward until I come on the screen.

“Press play, I want to see what you said,” she says, pointing at the television.

“Someone’s getting into this now,” I say playfully, moving my fingernails over her forearm.

My voice fills the room and by the look on my face on screen, I’m about as mad as I’ve ever been in my life. And that includes all the times my brothers tortured me when we were kids. I’d say by the looks on my face, I’m actually madder than I’d ever been right then as I state that Pam was with Roy and I was with Karen, something about Brangelina and Frangelina – not even sure where that came from.

“Who’s Frangelina,” Pam asks with a shake of her head.

“You know, I’m not even sure. I say weird stuff when I’m mad.”

“I know you do,” she agrees with a laugh. She snuggles closer to me as I fast forward most of that day.

“I still can’t believe there was a bat in the office. I was scared out of my mind.”

“Yeah. You seemed like you were,” she says sarcastically as the images on the screen of me messing with Dwight say otherwise.

“I really was. I mean, it’s a bat. I just did that … shtick to take my mind off of you being back with Roy. I…,” I say, stopping suddenly, unsure if I should continue.

“You what?”

“I was trying to prove to myself that I could have as much fun with Karen as I did with you.”

Pam nods and slings her arm across my waist and kisses my cheek. Not the response I thought I’d get, but I’ll take it. I want to ask her why she’s so unaffected by any of this, but I’ll assume it’s because she lived through it and I was oblivious to anything related to her. I don’t want to ask her because I don’t want to dredge up old hurtful feelings inside of her tonight – or ever.

I press play as soon as I see Pam on the screen chatting with someone about the pictures she created. If she didn’t look so sad in her purple turtleneck wither hair pulled to the side, I’d say she looked completely adorable.

And so sad and vulnerable. I can see why she clung on to Roy at that time. She explained it a while ago, but I can really see it here.

I don’t know much about art, but I’m not really sure why she’d call herself and her work impressionistic.

“Impressions,” I ask, tilting my head to the side, my cheek grazing her hair.

“Yeah,” she says, pressing the pause button when all of her pictures are displayed. It was … stuff that sort of reminded me of you. Our office building – where we met. The cup of coffee – all the times we went for coffee. The water color I did that won that art contest. The stapler – obviously. And the um … the flowers you got me for my birthday one year.”

“Wow,” is all I can say as I scratch my chin. These are good. But the things she makes now? They’re like a million times better. I do think saying that out loud would insult her, so I’ll keep that to myself. I love anything she does. Her art is like … a fine wine. It’s gotten better with age.

She does these little cartoon things sometimes now when she’s bored at work, and my coworkers and I make up captions for them. She calls them doodles. I call them art. I’ve said it a million times and I’ll keep saying it until I can’t speak anymore. She’s the most creative person I’ve ever met. Now, her art has more expression, more life, more feeling.

“Yeah. I think I’ve come a long way,” she says, almost reading my mind.

I don’t budge though as Roy enters the frame with his (dumb – I’m sorry, that’s mean of me… but true) brother.

“I can’t believe he’s bragging about being there,” I say aloud.

“Yep, that was him. Wait, it gets better,” she tells me, nodding toward the television.

I brace myself for whatever is about to come, wanting to go back in time just so I can punch the smug look off of his face. And also – grow a pair of balls and show up to her art show and support her as the friend I claimed to be. She did ask me to come.

We both gasp in horror at the sight of Dwight shoving a plastic bag over Meredith’s head, the bat flapping its wings wildly inside.

She turns to me with an amused expression and says, “Foaming, barking killer.”

“I miss those days sometimes,” I say with a laugh. “We did so much less work when Michael was our boss.”

My amusement is cut short as I feel my face turning into a scowl as Roy tells Pam he’s leaving without waiting. I let out an aggravated sigh and she takes a hold of my index finger with hers, wrapping it around tightly.

“He left? Why … what the hell,” I blurt out without thinking.

“He left,” she says with a nod. When Roy asks Pam to come back to his place, she’s immediately wagging a finger to the television. “I didn’t go back to his place that night.”

I really don’t know why she felt compelled to tell me that. Maybe it’s the same reason I cringe anytime I see Karen and I together on the screen. We don’t want the image of us being with our exes in one another’s heads – ever.

She suddenly presses stop on the remote the second Oscar and his boyfriend come on the screen at her art show and deletes the entire thing from the TiVo, and before I can register what she’s doing she’s selected the next one on the list.

“What’d you do that for?”

“Nah,” she says, shaking her head. “I … um. Oscar and Gil didn’t like my pictures, let’s leave it at that.”

I stare at her for a moment, wanting to tell her that the point of doing this was so I could see everything. Instead I narrow my eyes at her and she just shakes her head.

“It was nothing, don’t worry. I don’t need you saying something to Oscar. Plus, I’m tired of looking at my pathetic face, it wasn’t a good night at all. But,” she continues, “Michael showed up a few minutes before the show ended and that’s when he took the picture of the office building. I could have done better. I do better things now.”

“Whatever you do is great, Pam. Those reminded you of something, they meant something to you. You put your heart into it. Maybe not as much as you do now, but those reminded you of things that were personal to you. That makes them special.”

She looks at me warmly and wraps her arms around my shoulders, pulling me into a hug. Her lips are next to my ear when she says, “You don’t know how much it means to me that you said that.”

She pulls back a moment later and kisses me, and it says she knows why I couldn’t be there then. It says she loves me. It should make me feel better. I try to let it do that, but I’m trying to swat away the guilt like a mosquito that just won’t stop buzzing around me until it bites me, leaving a welt on my arm that itches like nothing else.

I don’t know if what I said makes up for missing her first art show. Nothing may ever make up for that. All I have is my genuine support to offer her and all she does. It’s always been that way. It’s never been forced or faked, even if I was stuck in this swirling vortex of self doubt, self preservation and selfishness.

I try to convince myself that it did make up for it. Pam is back to snuggling herself in my side with her head on my shoulder. I don’t know if I need more evidence than that.

I was selfish back then. I blamed it on being hurt, but now that I look at things, I never took her situation or her feelings into consideration. We talked about this a long time ago on our first date. I apologized for it – for not giving her a chance to get on the same page, for not realizing I was sending her mixed messages too. Selfish for expecting her to instantly abandon a relationship she had been in for nearly nine years, with whatever limited security that went along with it. Especially since all she saw was me dating other women and telling her I used to have a crush on her, that I miraculously got over.

I never could though. There’s no way to. I couldn’t even pretend to be over her.

I like myself, I think I’m a good person. I’d even go so far as to say I’m a great husband and father. My kids love me. I hate nights when I have a late sales call and can’t go directly home with Pam. But I love them too, because the millisecond I walk through the front door, both of my girls are running down the hallway toward me with their arms extended, smiles on their faces and their giggles filling the house. There’s only one thing that’s better than that. Waking up and falling asleep with Pam every day and night.

As much as I do think I’m a good person, I absolutely can’t stand the sight of me on the television screen, Karen and me at this really pointless cocktail party that David Wallace had. I tried to joke with Karen that it was a way for him to show off his house to people. She didn’t think it was funny.

As images come across the screen of the front of the house as Michael shouts that loves Jan, Pam lets out a laugh.

“What,” I say, peering down to her.

“What do you think the point of this was, other than to show off his fancy house?”

My laugh is instant and I shake my head and kiss the top of my head and mutter, “Thank you. I totally thought the same thing.”

She looks at me and smiles, raising an eyebrow. “Same brain.”

I let out another laugh as I say, “Yeah, more than you know.”

I pick up the remote to fast forward. I was bored at the cocktail party years ago. It’s just as boring now.

Suddenly Pam starts to fidget and tries to take the remote from my hand. “Let’s move on to the next one.”

“Nope,” I say, extending my arm to the side, completely out of her reach.

“Unfair advantage, bully,” she says, swatting my stomach. “I just think…”

She stops talking suddenly as the image of her and Roy come on the screen.

“We don’t have to watch this,” she says, sitting up straighter as I hit the play button.

“No,” I tell her as I watch a calm conversation between her and Roy suddenly out of no where grows in intensity. His eyes become wider as she explains that she kissed me.

Wait. “Y… I kissed you though,” I say.

It’s all happening too fast, he’s standing now and yelling at her when she asks him to listen and it makes me jump back in my seat.

“What the,” I shout louder than I probably should as I stand up and point to the television – images of Roy throwing glass after glass at the bar. “Pam what … why didn’t you … “

I can’t find the words, the only thing I can do is look between the television and my wife in horror. “Did he hurt you?”

“No,” she says instantly, her hands on my forearms. “No, he didn’t, Jim.”

I turn around to the television again as the image of Pam driving away in tears. It’s an image that will be burned in my brain for a while. I look back to Pam and her expression is full of concern, and I match that expression with my own, feeling the nerves and muscles in my forehead creasing.

“If I – I ever thought he…” I stutter, watching her shake her head.

“Jim, I swear. He never hurt me. Not physically.”

“If he ever hit you, I swear I’ll find him and I’ll …”

She takes my face in her hands, pressing her palms into my cheekbone and her eyes bore into mine as she says, “I’m not going to make excuses for my ex, but trust me when I tell you he never hit me. There were a few times when he got angry, but never like that. I’d never seen him throw anything, ever.”

I don’t know what to say, and I know anything more will insult her in some way. All I can do is pull her into a hug, bury my face in her neck and hold her tight and try to take back every ounce of pain I caused.

“I’m glad it happened,” she says.

“What?” I ask, pulling back.

“If that never happened, we wouldn’t be here.”

I almost ask her how she figures that, but I let it go, assume she’s right and hold her in my arms as tight as I can as I stare at our wedding photo that sits on an end table.

“We won’t watch anymore,” she says, rubbing her hand over my back.

“No. I want to finish,” I say without thinking. Am I really crazy? Maybe. Masochistic? Most definitely.

“Let’s go to bed now. We’ll finish tomorrow,” she says firmly, pulling me into a kiss before I can protest.

I love this woman. I love her more than anything on this green earth and if anyone ever hurts her again - my actions? They'll be justifiable.

She turns to me as we walk up the stairs, her hands on my shoulders and she whispers, "I love you."

I love that she couldn't wait until we got all the way up the stairs before she said it.

.

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A/N – Thank you so much, Callisto. This chapter wouldn’t be here if not for you. Thank you a million times. Thanks also to Klutzy Girl for the idea and all of my cheerleaders.


My Best Friend


Chapter 7



Usually I can find the bright spot in every situation. I’m an optimist, what can I say. It’s probably why I kept hope alive years ago that I could get the girl. Watching the past unfold the past few nights, seeing all the hurt I never wanted to see, it’s starting to get to me. Or, more truthfully, it’s gotten me good. I woke up this morning with my thoughts jumbled as I tried to analyze things. Eight hours of nose to the grindstone selling definitely did nothing to help, since I’m standing in the elevator with my wife, on our way home, and instead of kissing her like I usually do when the doors close and we’re alone for the ten second drop to the lobby, I can’t move my eyes from this smudge on the door. It has no apparent symbolism and I’m not that far gone in my thoughts to delve into if it means something or not.

I hear the shuffling of her feet and look down to her, forcing a weak smile.

“Busy day,” Pam says, nudging me with her elbow.

“Oh, yeah,” I agree, trying to snap myself out of my self induced whatever this is. Stupor? Maybe.

She reaches for my hand and instead of taking her hand in mine I take my keys out of my pocket and fiddle with the remote door opener thing.

“Okay, out with it,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest, stepping in front of me when the doors open. “You’re mad at me for something.”

I scoff, shake my head and walk toward the lobby door, holding it for her. “What makes you think I’m mad?”

She looks at me sideways, lips pursed, head tilted and eyes serious as they stare up at me. Turns out, I’m not good at hiding anything from Pam. I used to be. Or not. That is up for debate.

“Really,” she says dryly. “Because I’m pretty sure you just sold a year’s worth of paper today, you barely spoke to me at all and you didn’t want to go out for lunch with me. So you’re either mad or someone’s taken over your body.”

I know she tried to throw a joke in there at the end, but the will to laugh refuses to show up. Only the will to shrug, open her car door for her and say, “I’m fine,” as normally as I can.

“Would you just tell me what the deal is,” she says with sincerity that almost annoys me. I’m not sure why it does, but it does.

I want to be able to get over whatever I’m thinking on my own. But the more she stares at me expectantly, the faster I lose the fight against whatever I am about to say.

I let out a breath, and I don’t mean it to sound as frustrated as I end up sounding. It’s not her fault I let my imagination run wild like caged zoo animals set loose.

“It can’t be that big a deal. What, did you lose a sale or something?”

“Why’d you tell him you wanted your relationship with him to work out,” I blurt out.

“What?” A hundred emotions from hurt to confusion crossed her face as she backed away ever so slightly from me. “Who? I barely spoke to anybody today.” She stares at me as if she’s trying to divide seventy by thirty.

“Did you think he magically changed over night?”

“Who and what are you talking about?”

“Roy. Did you think he changed?”

I know I caught her off guard by the way she gapes at me. I wait for her to say something, but the only sound I hear is her car door closing with a little extra force than normal.

“You know what, never mind,” I mumble, walking toward the driver’s side. I tug on the seatbelt and buckle in, waiting for her to say something as I drive to pick up the kids from daycare.

But she’s silent, and with each passing second I’m kicking myself for bringing it up at all. I try to rationalize with myself that she was persistent, that she made me say it. How very mature. Blame someone else – my wife, no less, for my own inability to get a grip. When she ignores me while we gather the kids’ things and get them in the car, I know I should have put up a stronger fight to hold it all in.

I wait for her to say something during dinner. Instead, I listen to her ask the kids how their day was at school, what they learned, what they did. Then, she’s outlining a plan for the weekend, not once glancing at me. Apparently we’re going pumpkin picking on Saturday afternoon and then visiting my parents at night. I’m sure that’s something Pam would have told me about on the ride home.

I try to apologize while she rinses the dinner plates, but she waves her hand, shooing me away, and I end up in the living room with the kids, watching them play for the few minutes before they go to bed. They’re really well behaved most of the time, tonight included, which I’m thankful for. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to referee tonight.

“Come on, bed time,” Pam says as she stands in the entryway, dishtowel in hand. “Say goodnight to daddy.”

I look at her and she shakes her head. Apparently my fatherly duties end with a quick hug to the kids before she brings them upstairs. Usually we both read to them and get them settled. Instead of fighting her, I hug the kids, tell them I love them and try to make eye contact with Pam. She’s looking everywhere but at me – her feet, the wall, the kids, anywhere but at me. The silence of their footsteps walking away from me and up the steps is deafening. I flip on the television to drown it out and stare blankly at some ESPN breakdown of the Eagles defense. I’m sure it’s well thought out. It always is.

I try to pay attention to the commentators, attempt to shove aside the questions - what if this and what if that, why did she do it that way. I know it doesn’t matter now. Before I can delve too far into what life would be like if things had gone another way, Pam walks into the living room, hands on her hips and her eyes wide, looking at me expectedly and I’m wondering if where a half hour just went.

“Hey,” she whispers as she inches into the living room.

“Hey,” I say somewhat defensively as I turn the TiVo on. I’m sure here’s where I should start apologizing, but instead I’m pressing buttons on the remote control.

“No,” she says instantly. “We’re not watching anymore of that documentary if this is how you’re going to act now.”

“I’m just trying to figure things out,” I say simply as I start the next one on the list.

“What are you trying to figure out? If I loved you enough back then? Because believe me, I did,” she says calmly, sitting next to me.

My focus is split between Pam, on our sofa next to me with her hand pressing on my shoulder, and the television, showing Karen trying to convince me to go out with her. She always won those battles. If I could recoup all the money that I spent on dinners we didn’t need to go out to, I’d add it to the commission I made today and buy a new house with a terrace for my wife. Maybe one day I will. Right now though, I know what’s about to be shown on the documentary, and instead of acknowledging what Pam just asked, I can’t tear my eyes away from the screen.

“You could’ve told me he had a bad reaction to the news, or something,” I say as Roy bursts through the office door and shouts my name.

“I didn’t know he’d do that. I really didn’t. And also, I didn’t think you really wanted to be involved in anything I did anyway.”

“Right, well,” I reply, rubbing my chin. I press fast forward, choosing to skip watching myself almost have my ass handed to me. The room fills with our breathing and the ticking clock on the mantle as the images whiz by. I press play the instant I see Pam and me in the break room.

Her apology resonates through the speaker and I can’t help but let out a small laugh. “You made a joke out of saying you were sorry,” I say as I watch my onscreen self walk out of the break room like I’d been hit in the face with a shoe. “Your goon of an ex tried to rearrange my face and you thought it was funny.” Yes, I’m justifying my anger from before. No, I’m not dumb enough to tell her that right now.

“I didn’t make a joke. I didn’t think it was funny. I was seriously sorry.”

I shake my head and let out a breath. "There was the whole weekend between the throw down and your apology."

"Don't start being petty."

"What did you do that weekend?"

She looks at me like I’m either crazy or I’ve just made her as mad as anyone has ever made her. "You really want to know?”

I nod. “I don’t know why, but yes.”

“I spent most of it crying on Isabel's couch. Not about Roy. I thought I lost you for good. It wasn't pretty. At one point she wanted to call you just so I could talk to you but then I cried even more because I deleted your cell number from my phone that night you told me you were dating Karen."

"Oh.” I’m taken aback. “I had no idea you did that."

“I thought you forgave me for this already,” she frowns, her eyebrows creased. “I thought we were done with all of this back and forth you did I did stuff and moved past it a long time ago.”

“I did.” My posture softens instantly at her sad tone. “I just don’t understand why you told him we kissed right then. Or at all.”

“Part of me still felt guilty about kissing you and wanting you. I just thought he needed to know. You told Karen,” she says pointedly. “Remember? It was no big deal?”

“Yeah, I didn’t mean that.”

“Well,” she says with a smirk. “Whether you meant it or not at that time, it still hurt me. It just kept getting worse. Haven’t you been watching? I mean, before you went to that cocktail party you acted like you were my boss, telling me not to leave too early. It was like you were talking down to me.”

“I really didn’t mean for it to sound like that,” I say, wondering how I wound up on the defensive when I’m the one who asked the question.

“Whatever. It happened, and that’s how I heard it, that I was just your coworker. And the more time I spent thinking about it and the way you were treating me, the more I started doubting you ever really cared about me,” she says, calmer than I think she should be.

“I …” I sigh. “I was being a jerk.”

She widens her eyes and nods. “You were being a jerk and Roy had been doing anything and everything to win me back. You were pushing me away. He was starting to treat me better than he had in nine years. I thought he changed. And honestly, I was tired of sitting at home almost every night wondering what life could be like with you. Yeah, maybe it wasn’t the best decision of my life, but I don’t know how to make it not happen. I can’t undo something like that.”

“What would you have done if he didn’t react the way he did and said instead, okay I forgive you, no big deal?”

“Does it matter now?”

“No, not in the grand scheme of things,” I say honestly. “I just want to know.”

“I know you never saw what I did in him. He was a good person, a decent hard working guy who had his faults. One of them happened to be taking me for granted a lot of the times. And yeah, I mean, I don’t know, if things were different and he didn’t freak out, I would have been with him and married him and probably divorced him already. Because for all of the good in him, there was still that lackadaisical guy who only half paid attention to me and held me back all the time. You’d be in New York or somewhere with Karen or someone else. I would never have gone to art school. I would never have had my dream wedding. I would have never become a sales person or office administrator. Your parents would have sold their house to strangers and our kids wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be your wife. I wouldn’t be me, married to my best friend. But I would have settled for all of that because you didn’t want to know anything about me back then. And honestly, at the time, I was a little happy that he almost punched you. Because there were times when I really wanted to just slug you."

The laugh I let out is real and I finally turn toward her, finding her eyes shining a little. "I didn't mean to upset you."

"It is what it is. I wasn't innocent there, I know that. I did some stupid things, I didn't do things I should have, but it doesn’t change the fact that I loved you then. And I love you now.”

"I love you," I say, looking directly into her eyes as some stranger who looks like me on the television is complaining to his ex girlfriend about a co worker not accepting a gift.

Her chin dimples and she swats at a tear. "Please don't ever ask me what if things were different questions anymore? No more what ifs. Unless it's what if we have another baby or what if we upgrade the Subaru."

I pull her toward me and hold her, the palm of my hand pressed lightly on the back of her head. She sniffles slightly and I whisper, "I promise."

A few moments pass of just holding one another and my brain being my brain needs to lighten the mood, so I pull back and kiss her and brush her hair from her eyes. "What's wrong with the Subaru?"

She laughs instantly, tongue between her teeth and her eyes squeezed closed. She shakes her head and wraps her arms around me again.

"I'm sorry I ever made you think I wanted nothing to do with you," I say.

She nods and presses a kiss to my neck. "Can we be done watching this now?"

"No. I still need a replay of that stuff you said at the beach. And I need to see Dwight being manager."

"Because him being acting manager wasn't scary enough for you?"

"Nope," I say with a smile. “I promise no more over analyzing.”

"I'll go get the popcorn," she says, lifting her eyebrows and grinning as she walks toward the kitchen.

I sit back a little bit, stretch my neck and take a deep breath as I focus on the television. For me, there’s nothing of interest crossing the screen. I leave it on fast forward until I see Roy and Pam at the café she told me they went to. She told me about how he went his way, she went hers and everything was fine and settled between them.

But hearing their conversation, how sullen she sounds, it makes me immediately regret anything I said and everything I thought earlier today.

How she looks when Roy says she called off their wedding for ‘that guy,’ the way she corrects him and says there were a lot of reasons, and the way she says, “He has a girlfriend,” all of it makes me shake my head and wish for a time machine so we could go back and do it again the right way this time. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her standing next to the entry way, leaning her arm on the wall, a bowl full of popcorn in her hand.

“That simple,” I say, and she nods as she steps closer to me.

“Pretty much. Like I said, I didn’t do some of the right things either. But yeah, if Karen wasn’t there, who knows,” she shrugs, sets the bowl on the end table and folds herself into my lap.

“Is that the good kind,” I ask, pointing to the yellow bowl.

“Yep, white cheddar.”

I smile and kiss her cheek. “My favorite.”

“I know,” she says with an exaggerated tone. “Okay, this is it. Let’s finish this and be done.”

I nod in agreement and press play for the next one. It’s funny how I can remember different things about a day than others do. As I fast forward through this, I know it’s the day that Michael decided to pretend he was depressed – for attention. It’s why he did most things, for the glory of the spotlight. What I remember though is the betting the rest of us did on the side. It was a fun distraction from thinking about the woman who currently has her head on my shoulder.

“You really confused me that day,” she says almost too low for me to hear her. “One minute you were so distant and the next we were almost us again.”

“I confused myself a lot, too.”

“Yeah,” she replies, pressing a light kiss to my cheek. “Must have been Michael making us come together for a day something.”

“Let me know if you want me to press play. Otherwise I’ll keep going forward,” I say against her hair, planting a kiss on top of her head.

She nods and settles further into me. My legs are going a little numb from her sitting on them, but I don’t really care.

Without a request to slow the images in front of us, the end comes pretty quickly. I shrug as I press delete and start up the next one, fast forwarding as soon as it starts showing me dressed as Dwight.

“That’s an image I’ll never get out of my head,” she laughs between bites of popcorn. “You look good as Dwight.”

“Yeah, that was pretty fun,” I say, remembering that I didn’t share that prank with her. “Long overdue.”

“We need to do something soon again,” she says with a laugh.

She’s such a good cohort. I run my hand over her arm and hug her close to me as the images move by, showing the day they recalled a ton of paper because of an obscene watermark.

“I don’t remember talking to you at all that day,” I admit. “I do remember wishing I didn’t know Andy, but that’s a different story for a different day.”

She laughs as I press stop and delete. It’s getting late, and besides Pam looking really pretty that day, there isn’t much else to see.

“Oh, this sounds promising.” I read the description aloud, “Michael takes the women shopping.”

She shakes her head and waves her hand. “Skip it. I can summarize it for you. My boss takes me and my female coworkers to the mall and offers to buy us one thing at Victoria’s Secret. I bought a robe. Karen bought herself a little something special for you,” she says with a lot of sarcasm. “I’ve only recently been able to un-see it. Don’t make me watch it again.”

I wouldn’t dare. I won’t even reply, though I want to tell her that I wish her jealous streak would’ve shown up years ago. But I’ll keep that to myself. I delete it without watching and move on to the next.

“Employee games at the beach,” I read aloud again. “Okay,” I say, pressing play. But the instant I press fast forward, Pam stops me.

“Don’t. I want you to watch all of this,” she says.

“Sounds like someone’s seen this before?”

“Only the one time I lived through it,” she replies. “There’s something I want you to see.”

“What,” I ask, genuinely. I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“Fine, here,” she holds her hand out. “I’ll show you.”

Her actions don’t mirror her tone. Her actions are telling me that she’s about to reveal something super important and I better be paying attention or she’ll kill me somehow in my sleep. But her tone is light, gentle and a little tired.

We’re quiet for a few minutes. I can only hear the sound of us munching on our popcorn and the thoughts in my head.

“Mm,” she mumbles. “Here,” she points to the television as the images slow down, revealing Karen throwing an egg at me by the water’s edge as Pam looked on. “Were you doing this in my face on purpose?”

“No,” I say instantly.

The way she tilts her head and looks at me with her eyes narrowed says she doesn’t believe me.

“I didn’t do it intentionally on purpose,” I give. “It just sort of happened that way.”

“Yeah, because you didn’t even see me sitting there on the sand as you told her specifically where to walk,” she says dryly, shaking her head.

My lungs deflate and I lick my lips, wishing I could find somewhere to crawl and disappear. “I did it on purpose.”

She nods and the guilt I feel is automatic.

“It shouldn’t matter now,” I say, and the way my voice sounds so small shocks me.

“Yeah, that’s what I said before. It doesn’t matter. But can you just see how, to me back then, it was really impossible to actually believe you really meant that you were in love with me?”

I nod and press my nose into her hair. “When I say I love you, I always mean it,” I whisper. “I am so sorry I ever made you think that I wasn’t serious.”

She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to tell me that this happened a long time ago, that she’s just trying to prove a point from the argument I started earlier today. And as she fast forwards some more, I’m left feeling like I need to do something to make this all up to her. We’ve been married and parents for years. But I need to do something. I know the reason why I did it. I think we’re strong enough to handle the truth.

“I did it on purpose because I was trying to push you,” I say. “I wanted to see your reaction. I wanted to make you mad enough to do something.”

“Then why did you still go through with the job interview. I mean,” she says, appropriately stopping the documentary at the moment where she runs through fire. “It just doesn’t make any sense. I told you I missed you and you still wanted to leave me.”

“You never said what I wanted to hear,” I say, pointing out that fact as her words from years ago fill the room. “I miss our friendship is a lot different than I’m in love with you.”

“You’re right. It is. Still. You always knew what I was talking about.”

“You know I’m dense,” I say, nudging her arm, making her look at me. “For what it’s worth, I was still really proud of you for saying something.”

“I know. And I get that you were with Karen. I can’t fault you for taking time to think. That’s what I did when you told me you loved me, I needed time to think. Change is scary,” she says evenly.

“I get it now,” I say, linking our fingers together. “We’re so alike it’s a little scary.”

She lets out a laugh and smiles at me. “That’s why we get along so well.”

As we go through the last one, that last day we were apart, a full day before the first night we became us, we don’t say anything. I laugh at Dwight crying when Michael makes him manager. My smile is cut short though and I almost say something when Karen says Pam is “kind of a bitch,” but my wife holds her finger over my lips. I try not to make eye contact with Pam as we watch me ask Michael if Karen and I can go to the city early and he implies that we’re going to have sex. We did, but a gunman would have to threaten the life of my children for me to admit it out loud.

Then Kevin approaches me and asks me who’s hotter, Pam or Karen, I open my mouth and whisper, “You,” in my wife’s ear. “You’re the hottest woman in the world.”

She smiles ruefully at me before turning back toward the television.

When she yawns I decide to move things along, skipping a chunk of activity from Jan coming back with a boob job to Dwight telling me he’s my new boss. It was all funny back then, but once was enough.

Things move along, and I stop when I get to Pam’s interview. By now I know her well enough to know that she meant nothing of what she said.

She lets out a laugh and says, “Yeah, like I was going to sit there and tell them, I’m not happy for him. I don’t want him to take the job; I hope he doesn’t get it. I want him to be happy with me; I want him to come back to me. That’s what I meant to say.”

“I know, sweetie,” I say. “I know.”

I move forward again, going through the weirdest, most awkward conversation with Karen. I know she was trying to joke about her getting the job. But something about the way she spoke sort of… was odd. I don’t know. It was like she was forcing herself to say it.

“Wait, stop,” Pam says, pointing to the television. “I want to see you in New York.”

“I’d ask why, but I started this, didn’t I,” I say wryly.

“Yeah, you did,” she says, studying the documentary.

She watches quietly as we see snippets of Karen and me in the city at night, brief snippets that they are, I kind of wish they would have not caught the conversation that’s now resonating through my televisions speakers. Karen asks what’s going to happen when she gets the job.

I watch Pam’s face fall as Karen says she’d move to the city with me, that there’s no room for us in Scranton.

“In my defense,” I say quickly. “I never actually agreed to it.”

“And there I was, thinking if Karen got the job, you two would end things,” she says evenly, letting out a slow breath. “It makes sense that you would though. I get why. I hate it, but I get it. You moved on, you grew up. You thought you were doing what you had to do.”

I appreciate that she understands what I was going through, but I shake my head. “I think we both did the same thing. A little different, but mostly the same.”

She nods. We move forward quietly as the clock ticks away at the time quickly.

I stop when Dwight’s meeting comes along, and I can’t stop a barking laugh as I point to the screen. “Oh my god, Phyllis is sleeping. That’s amazing.”

She laughs and moves her hand for me to keep going as she gives another yawn. I don’t really need to hear what’s passing by on screen to know that Dwight as manager the first time was just as successful as him as manager the second time. Minus the gun firing thing. That was a bonus.

I press play when Michael enters the office again, and he’s announcing that he’s never going anywhere, ordering Ryan to get him coffee. And there’s Pam asking if Karen got the job in the saddest way I’ve ever heard her speak. It makes me kiss her cheek as our eyes remain glued to the screen like we don’t know what’s about to happen.

I’m getting a kick out of her playing along with Dwight, saluting him as he thanks her for being his secret assistant to the regional manager.

“You’re good,” I whisper, giving her another kiss.

“Thank you,” she says airily as another interview with her alone comes up. This time talking about the future.

“I know what your future holds,” I say as I reply to her onscreen ramblings. “You get married while you’re pregnant, twice in one day, the first time on a boat. This is ironic since you didn’t want to marry Roy on that booze cruise, but you were okay with marrying me on a boat, though I’m not complaining. You have two kids, me as your husband, an art studio in the garage.”

“Pretty fricken great if you ask me,” she says with a grin.

I kiss her lips, and it turns into one of those kisses that last a while, pulling each other closer to one another. We let the television play on, sinking into one another. She moves herself from my lap, readjusting herself so her legs are on either side of mine and we continue to make out.

The next time I open my eyes, a younger version of me is on the screen with shorter hair asking Pam if she’s free for dinner.

The beauty of her smile, the tears in her eyes let me know that whatever we went through made us stronger. That I’ll never have to worry or wonder what if she doesn’t love me the way I love her. Not that I’ve ever questioned it. I know she does.

There are a few things I want to see, like that rabies walk we did and the time we had dinner at Michael’s place, and the night I almost proposed but Andy killed my moment. But that can wait. I know tomorrow night is dinner out with the kids. And obviously, there’s the pumpkin picking on Saturday. And I think maybe I’ll see if my parents want to keep the kids overnight on Saturday so I can go on a date with my best friend.

.