Pam hated today.
Well, Pam didn’t hate today for itself, she hated it for what it was doing to her. Todd Packer’s very presence was a bad start, but she was terrified what would happen if her mother had to interact with him. She’d been downplaying how bad work was for a long time: talking up getting to hang out with Jim, talking up the chance to share a commute and a frame of reference with Roy, trying to avoid telling too many Michael and Dwight stories. So of course Todd Packer was there and sexual harassment was on the agenda the day her mom was actually going to see all of it.
She wasn’t even angry, except maybe at the universe. She knew what this place was like. She knew that only Jim kept her sane at it. So she should have known this was coming. She just felt like someone watching a train wreck in slow motion: out of control and incapable of stopping it.
Maybe that was why she giggled so loudly and blushed when her mom asked in that carrying whisper “so, which one is Jim?” She could see his ears do that thing they did when he was pretending not to listen, and she giggled like a schoolgirl because that was not at all what she had expected her mother to say.
“Mooooooom.”
She pulled her mother further away from Jim and behind her desk, out of Jim’s range of hearing.
“He’s right there, he can hear you.”
“Honey, I just want to make sure he’s real.”
“Of course he’s real, why wouldn’t he be real?”
“Pam, dear, you’ve been going on about an imaginary online friend for ten years. I wanted to make sure Jim was actually tangibly present, unlike that Scranton guy.”
“Scranton is real! And anyway, Jim isn’t like Scranton, I see him every day.”
“OK, dear, but you talk about them just the same, you know. Jim did the funniest thing. Scranton shared this great link. Jim and I pulled a trick on Dwight. Scranton and I won the Arizona Trivia…”
“Zone Trivia, mom. And I don’t…anyway, Jim is right there. I can even introduce you if you promise to not be weird.”
“Now why would I be weird?”
“This is weird, mom. What you’re doing right now. I feel like I’m 16 again and you’re embarrassing me in front of Tess and Izzy.”
“Are you sure you don’t mean like when I embarrassed you in front of Roy?”
“Yes, that too. Why are we splitting hairs on who you embarrassed me in front of how? The point is, don’t embarrass me.”
“I won’t, honey. I just wanted to check what kind of embarrassment we meant. Is this ‘don’t tell Jim I just learned what a tampon is’ or ‘don’t tell Jim about playing naked in the mud at age three?’”
“Why would you tell him either of those stories.”
“OK, OK. Just checking, honey. Now, introduce me before I raise my voice and he starts hearing what you don’t want him to hear…”
Fortunately for Pam, Michael had chosen that moment to rope Jim into a discussion of what, exactly, differentiated sexual harassment, sexual assault, and boys being boys. Pam would usually have reveled in hearing Jim try to squirm out of that conversation, but at the moment she said a small prayer to whatever deity had been listening to her and slipped her mother out while Jim was otherwise engaged, giving him a small smile and wave as they hurried out the door.
She spent the ride to dinner trying desperately to find something to talk to her mother about besides Jim or Scranton. They ended up talking about Roy. This made dinner itself fairly awkward, as Roy was so clearly making a very different level of effort to impress Helene than he usually did for Pam—and thus than Pam had been talking to her mother about. Her mother kept shooting her knowing glances over her wine glass (the alcohol being another failed attempt to get a different conversation started) and Pam felt the joy of a day with her mother slipping away.
Her mother seemed to have a sixth sense about this, though, and after dinner dragged Pam away from Roy for a girls’ night out at a small bar Pam had never been to (but which apparently had been a real happening place when Pam’s parents were younger). Pam would have sworn she saw Roy breathe a sigh of relief and let his gut out as he went to the truck, but that felt ungenerous so she shook it from her mind.
It was harder to shake the feeling that her mother had something very definite in mind as the conversation at the bar turned inexorably to her “imaginary and real friends.” Her mother, apparently, was concerned that Pam didn’t seem to have any girlfriends anymore, and wanted to pump Pam about the friends she did have. Pam was careful not to mention quite how often she was online, or how much time Jim spent at her desk. She wasn’t sure why she felt guilty; her mother wasn’t Roy, after all, and it’s not like she even had anything to feel guilty about even if she had been. But by the end of the night she knew two things for sure: she needed to talk to her mother more when they weren’t drinking and Roy wasn’t around, and she needed to spend either more or less time with Roy. It bothered her a little that she wasn’t sure which.
