The day Jim and Karen broke up, Pam found Karen in the stairwell, rubbing at her eyes. Karen wasn't crying – that was hard to imagine – but she looked as if she'd like to. Her eyes were tired and red, and when she looked up and saw Pam, frozen on the landing, she sighed and didn't even try to smile.
"You're supposed to break up with people on Friday, like firing them," Karen said.
"It is Friday," Pam said.
"Oh."
Karen's face didn’t change, just stayed sad and tired. Pam remembered once, when she was a little girl, biting into a blueberry with a broken tooth they couldn't afford to fix, back when her dad was between jobs and they didn't have good health insurance. The difference between anticipating the sweet burst of juice and the pain of having the tart, firm fruit split open on her bad tooth had made her feel a lot like she did now, watching Karen lean against the cinderblock wall, her hand looking small against the bricks.
"He's emotionally retarded," Pam said, and went to sit next to Karen on the stairs. She didn't mention that it seemed to be contagious.
Karen kept repeating the phrase all that night at the bar, only by midnight she'd turned it into "emotional fuckwit," which Pam was very sure came from a Bridget Jones book. She wasn't in a position to argue, though, leaning sleepily on one hand, elbow propped on the bar, as Karen kept talking and nudged another shot towards her. Pam liked shots, it turned out, when they were seven dollars a pop, aged Padron tequila from the bottle on the back of the bar. There was something wrong about letting Karen spend fifty dollars on tequila on the night she got dumped for reasons, Pam was pretty sure, that had more to do with her than with Karen, but shot number four was burning down her throat and she was chewing on a piece of lime before she could really think about it.
"It's like, I'm not an idiot, you know?" Karen asked, raising her voice over the noise of the stereo system. She gestured sharply with her hands, her fingernails shiny and tipped with white.
"I know," Pam said.
"Fuckwit," Karen said, and looked around for the bartender to order a beer.
Pam waited with Karen for her cab, shifting from foot to foot in her high-heeled sandals. It was a warm night for April, and she had her coat over her arm. Karen was still wearing her pin-striped suit from work, but she'd unbuttoned the jacket and untucked her blouse.
The cab still hadn't shown up after half an hour, and Pam finally put her arm through Karen's and started walking in the direction of her apartment, wondering how far this uneasy guilt feeling would take her.
Karen paused for a moment to slip her heels off, and Pam did the same, and they walked home with their shoes over their shoulders, hooked on the tips of their fingers, like girls leaving the prom. Their nylons were shot to hell by the time they tiptoed up the stairs to her apartment.
When Pam got up around noon, mouth like an old sock and head like a diving bell, Karen was still asleep on the couch, her mouth hanging open a little. Her hair had gone frizzy in the night, the smooth waves starting to curl at the ends, and something in Pam relaxed. Karen wasn't a threat – hadn't ever been, really – and she was fierce and funny enough to get through this without being broken, and it was springtime. Things were going to come out right.
She poured orange juice into a glass, drank half of it, then got down another glass and poured one for Karen too. Stepping around the shoes on the floor, she sat down in the armchair in the living room and set both glasses on the coffee table with a clink.
The noise woke Karen up, flinching, and she flung an arm over her face.
"Time is it?" she mumbled from beneath her sleeve.
Pam glanced at the clock, hanging crooked like always on the wall over the stove. "Almost twelve-thirty."
Karen groaned.
"Do you have an appointment or something?"
"I might, with the porcelain god in a minute here," Karen mumbled, and Pam smiled, surprising herself.
"It's down the hall to the left," she said, standing up. "And there's OJ here on the table."
"Thanks," Karen said, yawning. She took her arm away from her face, braving the sunshine, and groaned again.
They ended up going out for brunch, because she was out of milk, and then to a movie, because there was no reason not to, and afterwards they went into the big Barnes and Nobles and got syrupy sweet mochas and looked through the fashion magazines, laughing at the runway previews.
"That's not real," Pam said, poking at an Alexander McQueen dress made out of paper maché and feathers. "Who would wear that?"
"It's couture. It's art."
"That is not art," Pam said, but Karen was elbowing her with a giggle, and the teenage kid patrolling the aisles with a badge on a lanyard around his neck was giving them a dirty look, so she put the magazine away.
"I don't really know anything about fashion," she said as they crossed the parking lot to her car.
Karen shrugged. "You dress fine."
"Yeah, but I'd like to dress… I don't know. Different."
"Why? Thinking of leaving for a better job?"
"I don't know," Pam said. She paused. "Uh. Are you?"
Karen screwed up her mouth, running her hand through her hair. "I don’t know yet."
They were quiet on the ride to Karen's apartment, listening to the classical station her car radio had been stuck on for months. It wasn't annoying enough to bother getting it fixed.
"Listen, thanks," Karen said when the car rolled to a stop. "It was really cool of you to hang with me."
"It was fun," Pam said, finding she meant it. "I don't – um, I don't really have a lot of girl friends in town. I didn't grow up here."
Karen nodded. "Well, if you feel like taking pity on me again – "
"Oh, it's not – "
"I guess I'll have a lot of free time in the future," Karen said to the gear shift. "So, you know. Give me a call."
"I will, totally," Pam said.
On her way home she thought about going through her clothes and picking out an outfit for Monday morning, or playing with her hair and the flatiron, or looking online for makeup tips, but she didn't really feel like doing any of that. That nidgy feeling of guilt was still with her, and besides, she could wait a while longer.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
sophia_helix is the author of 19 other stories.
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