When her mom gets sick, it seems like it’ll be alright. They tell us they can probably get most of it. Still, she doesn’t sleep for a week straight because she’s so, so worried. And even though it’s June, I can hear her teeth clattering together as she shakes at two in the morning. Most nights she just watches the phone like it’s going to ring again with horrible news or maybe something good like they were wrong and it was benign and she can smile.

Those first few nights, I stay up with her. We prop ourselves up against the headboard and stare at the opposite wall, our hands wound up together between us. She breathes slowly, in and out, like she’s thinking about it too much. We don’t say much, but every few hours she breaks the silence with, “It’ll be fine…right?”

I try to be hopeful and optimistic about things. I tell her about my aunt who went through this when I was twenty-one and how she came out of surgery alright and with a handful of chemo sessions she was in remission and has been for years. I whisper these things against her forehead as she cries and cries and watches her mom be taken into the operating room.

There are long drives back and forth, from home to the hospital. Weekends spent in a town I quickly become familiar with, knowing that someday all of these roads and landmarks will be marred with a lingering sadness. The route to the hospital becomes second nature and I know that the local news station goes out by the time we hit those endless stretches of farmland. Sometimes I leave the static on for a while, because the white noise seems to calm her down. I finally turn it off as we take the exit for the road that will eventually take us to her mother. We ride in silence for those last fifteen miles or so, nothing but the sound of passing cars and her fingernails drumming against the armrest.

I buy so many bouquets of flowers that the hospital room looks less like a garden and more like a jungle and this makes Pam laugh sadly and say, “You’ve outdone yourself, Halpert.” To which I respond with my warmest smile, “Come on, remember your last birthday? This is nothing.”

There’s a lot of waiting when someone you love is sick. I memorize tile patterns and the way to the vending machine and how to comfortably sit in one of those visitor’s chairs. I memorize the way her face looks when she’s about to start crying again. I spend hours just watching her hold her mother’s hand as she sleeps. She asks if I mind and I say, “Of course not.” I mean it and she knows that, but she still looks at me warily, like she’s just so sorry I have to sit here. I say, “Pam, she’s important to me too.” She nods and I want to be next to her, but this isn’t the time.

When she isn’t at the hospital, she’s trying to push herself through the work day despite how tired and anxious she is. After a couple of days, people stop approaching her to tell her they’re sorry or ask questions and she seems grateful for that. Even Michael leaves her alone for the most part. But she sounds detached on the phone and it takes her an hour to do things that usually only took her fifteen minutes.

On a Wednesday, she answers the phone and I can tell that it’s either her dad or the hospital calling her. She looks at me from her desk after she hangs up the phone and I get up and walk over to her.

I lean over her desk, bringing my head close to hers, “Hey, how are you doing?”

“They say she’s getting worse,” she says flatly.

And I don’t know how you’re supposed to respond to this. So I just say, “Oh.”

“They- They say-” She shakes her head like it’ll stop the tears from coming, “They say it’s spreading even though they…It’s going to be-” She looks up at me desperately, like she wants me to save her from all of this. She finally finishes her sentence, “It’s started to spread to her brain, Jim.”

It hurts more than anything and I wish I could take it back, take it away. I even wish for a second that maybe she’d never been born if it meant she never had to look like this, feel like this. If it meant that this moment right now would never happen for her. It gets hard to breathe when I realize there is absolutely nothing I can do. I can only go around to her side of the desk and take both of her hands and lead her to the bathroom.

She stands in the bathroom, leaning against the sink and she’s finally stopped crying. She looks at me and I can’t think. I don’t want to do this, is all that’s going through my mind. I can’t do this. I can’t, can’t, can’t. I’m standing far away from her, just watching her and waiting for something to happen. I don’t know what I expect to happen. Maybe she’ll say something or maybe she’ll move toward me. I don’t know. Anything. Please.

And then she breathes in loudly and unsteadily. And she says, “She’s going to die.”

And, fuck, I can’t.

“Pam, you don’t-”

“No, she is. They said five months. And I thought it was six? Isn’t it always six months? Like on TV and everything, it’s always that the person has six months to live. But she gets five and how do they know? Five months. She won’t even get to see- She won’t be here for our first wedding anniversary. She said she was going to throw us a party, but she won’t- God, Jim, she won’t ever know her grandchildren or what if we get a dog? She loves dogs and we talked about getting one, remember? And now if we do, she won’t get to play with it or anything. She’s not even old. She, she, she-” And then it’s just tears and maybe there are words, but I can’t understand any of them.

I pull her into my arms and hold her tightly against me because it’s really honestly the only thing I know how to do for her anymore. I say softly and gently against the echoing of her sadness, “Hey, alright? It’s okay. Everything will be-” I stop there though, because things aren’t okay and they probably won’t be okay. Not yet anyway.

With her mom getting worse and the hospital being a two and half hour drive from Scranton so we stay at her parents’ house for days at a time. We sleep in her old bedroom that’s still decorated like it was when she was in high school, the walls a light green and . There’s something about kissing her in this room that makes me fall all over again. Like I did years ago when she walked into the office for the first time. That endless sort of falling where it feels like I could never stop, never reach the bottom. There’s something about the warm, moist feeling of her mouth when the lights are off and I can hear the sounds of cars driving by and dogs barking in neighboring yards that makes me so overwhelmingly in love with her that it almost feels inappropriate because her father is down the hall, sleeping alone.

I whisper through the dark to her closed eyes, “I’m sorry.”

“What?” I see her eyes open.

“I’m just…sorry.”

“Jim…”

The way she says my name in that moment- And I’m crying for the first time in so long, for the first time since all of this. I’m crying against her shoulder and I feel so pathetic for it. I keep saying that I’m sorry and then the curves of her body lock into mine underneath her teenage bed sheets and I feel something within me start to unravel. And it’s, “I love you so, so, so much.” And, “I can’t even begin to-” And, “You’re, God- everything.”

It hits me then. I’m afraid. Terrified. So, so scared of losing her. Scared of some disease coming and eating away at her. Scared of spending nights in hospitals, watching her get thinner and thinner. Scared of waking up one day without her while the world is still turning.

I say it out loud, “I’m scared,” hating the way my voice is wobbling all over the place.

I can see her green eyes even in the pitch black. “Of what?”

“You being gone.”

She makes this sound that I can’t describe, but it’s like sympathy and love and something else too, and she’s kissing me softly. “I’m here. Always.”

Always, always, always. I repeat it in my head as if it would help me understand that concept of eternity and things that last even after you stop breathing. “Yeah, until you’re-”

“Stop. Jim-”

“I’m sorry.”

She lets me make love to her. We haven’t in almost two weeks and I hate having to ask, but I want to feel close to her. I find myself needing that solid proof that she’s here right now with me. She makes soft, moaning sounds almost just like breathing and when she comes, she says my name so quietly against my shoulder.

I wake up before her and watch the way the sun rises, inching slowly up her skin until it glows orange on her face. I watch her eyes move beneath her eyelids like they can tell me things, like they can tell me what’s going on in her mind. They flutter open then and she smiles softly, stretching her legs out as she looks at me. I feel guilty, like we shouldn’t be enjoying this brief moment of domestic happiness. I kiss her anyway, because she’s so beautiful all the time. I kiss her anyway, because I can’t be sure when I’ll see her smile again.

Her mother dies a week later on an afternoon when it rains while the sun is shining still. She’s the only there when it happens and I’m watching from the far end of the room in one of those uncomfortable chairs.

I’m watching her hold her mother’s hand under the bright florescent light above the hospital bed. I’m watching the way it makes her hair look a strange color and her part is all crooked because she stopped caring, I think, three weeks ago. And it’s like she knows this is it, because she grips her mother’s hand even tighter and presses her lips together in that way that tells me she’s about to cry. I’m watching as my fingers rake along my knees methodically back and forth, pulling at the fabric of my pants, gripping hard as I wait for it to just happen. She’s saying that she loves her and that she’ll be sure to tell our kids all about her and she’ll take care of dad and the house and her sisters. That she’ll plant those roses in the side yard for her. That she’ll-

And then there’s a breath and then nothing and I’m standing behind her with a hand on her back.

She doesn’t cry. She just sighs almost like she’s relieved and puts her mother’s hand down and turns into me a little so that my arms go around her waist. Her breathing is even and steady, nothing like I would expect the breathing of someone who just lost her mother, her best friend. I kiss her hair and say, “Um, should we get a nurse?”

She looks up at me with clear green eyes and shakes her head, “No, uh, can I just be alone with her for a minute?”

“Yeah, definitely. Of course.”

I leave the room and stand outside of the door, resting the back of my head against it and closing my eyes. The world feels still, unmoving and it seems out of place when two nurses walk down the hall and laugh at something. They turn a corner and there’s a silence then that rings in my ears and I press my ear just slightly to the door, but there’s nothing on the other side of it either.

I lean against the wall for ten minutes before she comes out with her eyes red. I put my arm around her waist and say gently, “You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I will be.” She wraps her arms around me and holds on. “I have to make calls.”

I sit on the bed and watch her in the full length mirror as she zips up the side of her black skirt. She sighs loudly and her arms fall to her side as she frowns at her reflection. She grabs the hem of the shirt she’s wearing and pulls it off almost violently.

“I have nothing to wear to a funeral.”

“You looked nice,” I say helplessly, because this isn’t really about what she’s going to wear today.

“No, I didn’t. I looked stupid, inappropriate. God, what are you supposed to wear to your mother’s funeral?”

My heart speeds up a little, because her voice is getting shaky.

“Why don’t you wear the dress?”

“I can’t wear the dress, Jim,” she turns to me and gives me this pleading look. “It’s too bright and happy and colorful. Black, right? I’m supposed to be wearing black. Only this-” She gestures to the skirt she’s wearing and the shirt she just tossed onto the chair. “-is too black. Like- I don’t know.”

I grab her by the hand and pull her so she’s standing between my knees. I look up at her and say softly, “Didn’t your mom really like that dress? Didn’t she buy it for you?”

She sits down on my left knee and nods slowly. “Yeah.”

“Okay, then.” I reach up to kiss her on the cheek.

She smiles at me and slides off the skirt and grabs the dress from the bed. I watch her shimmy her way into it and try not to think what I would normally think while watching her put on a dress like that. She looks over her shoulder at me, “Zip me up?”

I oblige, my hands shaking a little as I work the zipper. “There. Beautiful,” I say when I’m done.

The drive to the funeral home takes us through winding back roads lined with full, green summer trees. It’s raining one of those borderline torrential mid July rains and the sky is that almost green color that means thunder and lightning aren’t far off. We’re silent, just listening to the rain pounding down on the car. She watches drops rolls across the window pane. I get distracted by the tree branches as they swing in the wind.

From far off, there’s a flash of lightning and she leans her head back against the headrest and mutters, “Funeral weather,” and I think about a sea of black umbrellas.

But the rain’s stopped by the time we get there and we step out of the car into thick, humid air and she grabs onto my hand and doesn’t let go for the duration.

There are condolences and a priest who doesn’t know anything about Pam’s mom except for a collection of trivial facts that someone jotted down for him ten minutes beforehand. There’s a funeral procession that takes us to the cemetery and Pam keeps smoothing out the front of her skirt on the way there and then she looks over at me when we pull up behind her dad and her sister and she’s blinking rapidly and smiling like she’s embarrassed to be crying in front of me. As if she’s been trying to hide it the whole drive, like it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it. I lean across the car and press my lips to her forehead firmly and say, “I love you,” before we climb out of the car.

On the drive back home, the sun pushes its way through the clouds and all those summer trees are glowing green and gold. I drive faster than I had on the way there and she smiles a little when I take those curves a little quicker than I should. We listen to the sound the tires make against the wet pavement. She rolls the window down just enough to let in that damp smell of summer and it seems like things will be alright.