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I have a cool laptop but own nothing else: not The Office, the characters, or even a stapler. I don't even have an office job.
The rain turned out to be somewhat of a thing.

Jim found it amusing. Pam less so, until he teased her about it. Then he could usually get at least a smile from her. He aimed for one of the big ones that seemed to stretch from curl to curl and lit her eyes to dancing, but he’d settle for a fleeting grin, or even a shrug of the shoulders.

The smallest things from Pam still fluttered his heart sometimes. That she had promised him all and given even more carved in him a new space for a bigger heart, if that was even possible.

###


It poured on their wedding day.

Pam’s mother came to him in the small room meant for the men. “She’s devastated. Can you talk to her?”

Jim frowned. “Is she—dressed? I mean,” he leaned closer, “for the wedding.”

His mother insisted it was bad luck to see Pam before the wedding, that he had to catch sight of her for the first time in all her bridal finery at the end of the aisle. His mother had waited to see that particular look on that particular son’s face for years and years, and wouldn’t be robbed of it.

Pam’s mother had no such reservations. “Yes. Does it matter?”

He ran his hands down his tie. “No.”

He found Pam standing by the window of the bridal room. He and Pam were to be married in the church courtyard that was supposed to be full of flowers and June sunshine, but instead was filled with torrents and puddles with reflections of the grey, overcast sky.

He watched her from the doorway, her hand resting on the windowsill and her head, veil and all, leaned against the frame. Other women might worry about their hair or something—he didn’t know and didn’t care. Even from behind, he’d never seen a bride look more like herself and less like a trussed-up white doll. She looked like Pam, she stood like Pam, she wore a mournful posture like a very disappointed Pam.

She turned.

He thought the grin would split his face. Here was Pam in white dress and veil, but Pam all the same.

He wondered if his legs would work. They did. He crossed the room and stood next to her, gazing out the window at the rain. He lifted her hand off the sill and held it in his, caressing the finger with the ring. The one that meant she would be his forever.

“Should we move the wedding to the gas station?” he asked.

She huffed in that particular Pam way, and tried to match his humor, though her voice was almost as watery as the outdoors. “Our guests wouldn’t fit under the overhang.”

“This wedding’s not for the guests though, is it?”

Her breath caught and she took in every feature of his face. How could she be surprised that he would know the angst behind the rain? She and Roy were to be married in the sanctuary of her parent’s church; she and Jim in the courtyard. Now it would be the sanctuary for them, too.

“I wanted it to be…different.” She looked down at their joined hands. “I’m sorry, Jim.”

“Isn’t it already? Different?”

Her eyes danced but without the smile. How was that possible?

“Yes.”

He lifted her hand and kissed the back of it, resisting the urge to mar her makeup by kissing her full on the lips. His mother would be pleased to know that at least he hadn’t kissed his bride before the altar.

He left her and hunted his dad down. “I need your big umbrella, the golf one you keep in your car.”

“The limo will pull right up to the foyer. I don’t think she’ll get that wet.”

“Do you have it in your car?”

“Yes.”

His dad was going to make him work for it, even on his wedding day. “Can I have it, Dad?”

“I’ll run and get it.”

He had Mark tuck in behind the altar. After the “I do” Jim kissed her insistently, but fast. The guests gasped when he left her, briefly, to stand without him while he jogged behind the round altar. His grin nearly split his face again. He grabbed Pam by the hand and pulled her, laughing, down the aisle, out into the foyer and through the little door into the courtyard. “Probably going to ruin your dress for pictures.”

“Jim…” But she was smiling. He took that as a yes, and gave her the first real husband-wife kiss in the rain under his dad’s umbrella, the sound of the fat plops on the nylon a staccato accompaniment to what was both the sweetest and hottest kiss of his life.

It was just the beginning.

###


It poured that September, too. Quite a bit.

Pam took to wearing pajamas after work, and she apologized every night. “You’re going to think I’m giving up now that I’m Mrs. Halpert. It’s inexcusable.”

“You’re adorable.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“I’m not.”

“You think my pajamas are adorable.”

“Yes. I hate nightgowns, though.” He shivered. “Remind me of grandmas.”

“I don’t have any nightgowns.”

“Exactly. So don’t worry.”

“It’s just with all the rain we’ve been having…I don’t know. We get home and it’s hard to take off work clothes, then find something else to put on, then—”

He held his plate of nachos on his lap but leaned over to kiss her. He hadn’t meant for it to linger but it did, so he set the plate on their coffee table and used his hands to span her waist, squeeze, and make the kiss count.

“Just a minute,” she whispered. "I have to go to the bathroom.”

She took a long time, at least ten minutes he thought. He called out to her when he heard a plastic bag rustling. “Everything all right in there?”

“Fine. Be out in a minute.”

Plastic bag. He hoped it wasn’t that—

When was the last time she’d—

The tortilla chip paused on the way to his mouth and the refried beans landed in his lap. He snickered but left the beans there while he remembered back. Their camping trip, in late July. It had rained up a storm then too.

Rained. In July. Late July, and it was past Labor Day now.

He saw her easel-print pajama bottoms in his peripheral vision, a gift from his mother for the wedding shower. His gaze followed each easel on its way up. The rain poured on the roof of their upper-level condo and down the windows.

She held a white stick. It wasn’t a thermometer, apparently, because her grin reached new proportions and her dancing eyes glowed a new shade of joy. “A big positive.” She sank on the couch, showed him the stick he was somehow supposed to decipher. Two lines. Both blue. “A big, manly positive.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She wiggled her eyebrows. “No wimpy blue line here. The package says even a wimpy line is a yes. I guess a dark line means you're..."

His kiss swallowed her words while the plop of refried beans sat on his lap and the rain poured on the roof. His kiss wasn’t gentle but the hand that covered her abdomen was, gentle and warm and big. She covered it with her own.

###


It poured that day in late April too.

“We had two more weeks. Two more weeks.” The pain gripped her and she sat forward, those gorgeous locks of hair falling over her face, hiding her profile. She hadn’t pulled it back yet. It seemed she would have by now.
She breathed out, deeply, and sat back.

“Does the breathing help?”

“The breathing is a joke. The epidural, I hope, is not. So…”

“I know, love. This rain…”

Other cars had given up, pulled off the side of the road in the thunderstorm. Jim’s wipers ran at full-blast, the tires floated or skidded through the more offensive puddles and his palms gripped the wheel. “How much longer?”

She glared at him. “You tell me, Jim.”

“No, I meant…how much longer until…do you think…”

He shut his mouth. They should have shut-your-mouth classes for dads in Lamaze, instead of teaching men how to help their wives with the useless breathing techniques.

Another pain came. He drove, whispering, the thunder booming overhead and the rain teeming and the lightening cutting jagged yellow streaks through the roiling clouds.

“What is it with us and these rainstorms?” She whipped her hair up now, using the elastic she had looped around her wrist when her pains were a lot more humorous and a lot less…cantankerous.

“I did it. I proposed in the rain. It’s my fault.”

“Yeah…why did you? You couldn’t wait until it was a nice day?”

The pain talking. Just the pain. Jim drove.

It passed. She sat back, a fine sweat popping out now. His heart lurched in his chest and the remnants of his lunch seemed to churn sickly in his gut. “Should I have waited to propose?”

Her head lolled against the seat, her eyes closed, mouth in an appealing O as she valiantly gave the breathing techniques another go. She smiled—smiled—and turned to him. Her smile was new, peaceful. “No. It was perfect.”

He swallowed. “Remember that for the next few hours, Pam. K?” He used those last few lucid moments to talk to her and not the pain. “Remember I couldn’t wait ‘cause I’d already waited long enough.” He wanted to take her hand but needed both for the wheel. “Because that’s how much I loved you. And love you still.”

The rest of the drive was the pain. He didn’t talk to it, but longed to relieve her of it—prayed for it to be taken from her, even some of it.

They were too late for the epidural. She felt every bit of pain, and his heart ached for hours during that rainstorm.

###

Two days later spring arrived with warmer temperatures, bright skies and flowers blooming overnight.

His son was impossibly small in the baby seat that was impossibly small, against the little head cushion donut looking thing that was impossibly small. His son was smaller.

They drove home holding each other’s hand and craning their necks to check the progress of each of his sweet, milky breaths.

Pam smiled. “I think we broke the rain curse.”

“Aren’t you glad?”

And she gave him even another new smile, this one a mix of memories and a future. “It was us. The rain thing.”

This dad gig—he was turning into a sap. “Everything we do is us. Now everything he does is us too.”

She cried tears of joy most of the way home. She said it was hormones.

He blinked often and didn’t have an excuse of hormones. It seemed the rain--the dripping--had moved inside him and collected now in the corners of his eyes.


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