next time.

When lightning strikes, it’s the result of a culmination of positive and negative particles, the combining of the two within a cloud are what actually causes a spark. I always thought it was a whole lot of negative, and I was also taught it struck from the ground up, which is ultimately untrue. It’s a top down situation— it just looks the other way. I used to watch the lightning dance across the long stretches of the farmland set just beyond my grandmother’s yard. My little chest would fill with a combination of fear and excitement as the lightning clapped, and my grandmother and I would count, one, two, three, waiting for the thunder to roll in. I wasn’t ever afraid it would hit me, or the house, even. It seemed too far away, even when we couldn’t count more than a second before the thunder hit. I always felt safely distanced from the chaos, in the little blue farmhouse, in my Spiderman pajamas and rainboots, in my grandmother’s arms.

When I would tell classmates that my grandma lived next to a turkey farm, adjacent a graveyard, above a deposit of covetous oil, they only ever half believed me. Most thought it was impossible that she belonged to all that and could still be in New Jersey— most hadn’t left Hudson County yet, and the thought of farmland seemed other worldly, or at least, belonging to another state. My mom’s first apartment in Kearny was situated on a hill of concrete, as were the homes of many of my classmates, and so it came as no surprise that we couldn’t quite negotiate the idea of New Jersey and farmland as being mutually inclusive. Everything was pavement, union labor, immigrant enclaves, Italian bakeries, and a grand view of the skyline I longed to call home.

“You mean, people live up on the top of those buildings? Like, all the way up there?” I sat in the window seat of my mother’s sedan and outlined the New York City skyline with my finger in the wet fog of my breath.

“That’s right. And they look out and down from their view on the sixty-fourth floor, and to them, you and me and all of Kearny just looks like little ants.”

“Sometimes,” I said, my finger floating over and around the Chrysler building, “sometimes I feel like an ant.”

After I graduated from high school, I decided to spend a year at home with my mom. I was working beyond full-time at Attilio’s, my least favorite pizza place in town, but the only one that would pay me just-above minimum wage. My mom was a registered nurse at Columbus Hospital in Newark, her hours were long and strenuous and ugly, and while I knew I would eventually have to leave her side— she had fully prepared me for that— I didn’t know if I could trust her to be okay on her own. When she got home she would often skip dinner, or breakfast, or both. She never drank enough water. She always forgot to pack an umbrella, unless you put it in one of her hospital shoes before she left.

“Just like your father,” she would mutter, half asleep on the couch, still in her scrubs. “Always cleaning the spots I can’t reach.”

For a while I took this literally. My mother was a small, delicate woman, and while I had successfully inherited the slight frame of her sloped shoulders, I was my father’s height through and through. He was a large and Irish, supposedly brooding, the sort of tucked-in shirt, blue collar fellow I imagined wandering the pages of a Steinbeck novel, getting silently teary-eyed to Springsteen’s The River. I had one memory of him, and I couldn’t have been older than four. But even then, he was outstandingly large. Everyone seems big when you’re that small, but comparatively he was massive, his legs like tree trunks, his laugh like a ship’s bellowing horn. He was an Irish Paul Bunyon, sat on the floor with me, coloring in monkeys and space ships that my mother had drawn for us.

I don’t remember his death, but I know it was in the newspaper, and there was a big lawsuit that followed because he was working off the clock for a company that he wasn’t legally contracted to work for. I got older, and I was desperate to know more, but I didn’t dare ask. All I knew about his death was from the little newspaper clipping tucked away in the china hutch, beneath a set of gold-rimmed dessert plates that we never touched, not even for the holidays we seldom hosted. The picture of him in the newspaper was from him and my mother’s wedding day. She was already pregnant, but they went through the motions, as you do when you’re Italian and Irish and it’s nineteen-eighty-seven, all frilly bodices and white roses and gold envelopes. I had his eyes. They weren’t the same color as mine, but they were the same shape, and apparently expressed anger and sadness in the same way his did. They made my mother go still, like they were haunting, suddenly.

“Why don’t you take a night off next week and go get pizza with your friends?” My mother came into the doorway between the dining and living room, her small frame wrapped in one of my grandmother’s crochet blankets.

“Pizza? Really, Mom?” I laughed a little, though I wasn’t sure if she was trying to be funny or if she really didn’t realize I spent fifty hours a week rolling out pizza dough.

“Oh, shit, yeah, right. I guess that doesn’t make that much sense,” she walked over and placed her hands on my shoulders, and they were cold, even through the thick thermal material of my shirt.

“Just, you know, go out, Henry. Go be a kid,” she gripped on my shoulders again and I could feel their boney tightness, a grip that had held a clenched fist for fifteen years, a grip that hadn’t let go since the last decade.

I nodded, though part of me wondered if I even knew what it meant to be a kid. I had done all the motions of teenagedom, of going to proms and seeing the Seaside Boardwalk on spring break, of kissing my first high school girlfriend in my shitty car, of dumping her in the same shitty car. My mom hung my varsity soccer jersey on the wall, as if she was trying to prove it— look, he was a kid! Not that long ago, even. But then something shifted, I opened college acceptance letters, to big state colleges and private liberal arts schools, and suddenly I felt the weightiness of my eighteen years like they were forty. It was quiet in the house. There was no congratulations, no celebration ziti, just the heavy, looming realization that there was no way we were going to be able to pay for all this, even with financial aid, even with scholarship. There was no certainty that my father had wanted college for me. My mother couldn’t have possibly known this. But she flicked through bills over and over, through checkbook entries and bank statements as if, in looking at them just one more time, maybe, maybe something would shift. She would put the numbers together in the right way, and ten thousand dollars would appear where it wasn’t before. We were both uneasy, but her especially, and I felt that she didn’t just think she was disappointing me, she thought she was disappointing us.

The house grew quieter then. Her reliance on me grew heavier, though not because she asked for it, but because she stopped caring so much for herself. Her hours grew longer, our conversations grew shorter. We were both so tired.

“I will try to be a kid, promise.” I looked up at her and she smiled tired, her eyes squinted, mouth closed shut. She ruffled my hair and walked back into the living room, where my mother often slept, her bedroom just ten feet away, but even then, it was energy she need not exert. The image of my mother sound asleep on the couch, late night news droning on, casting a bright blue light across the whole living room, would watermark into my brain, would come to signify a whole era of my life. It made my stomach feel weak.

The next morning I woke into the dimmed daylight of morning clouds. Outside my window it rained, though just barely, which felt somehow worse than if it was really raining, raining so hard I could justify staying inside and doing nothing. March rain felt inconsiderate, in those first days of young spring, those just-barely-fifty degree temperatures only came to feel like they were warm when it was sunny and windless. But this was seldom the case. Groggily, I pulled myself out of bed and into the kitchen, where my mom had left half a cup of coffee still and cold on the counter, a paper towel with toast crusts and a smudge of jam beside it. I shuffled over to the perculator, an ancient looking thing with a steel exterior and a little glass knob on top, and poured a tall cup of muddy, burnt-smelling coffee. I checked the fridge for milk, found nothing but a half-pint of wonton soup and a wilting head of lettuce, and then settled on powdered creamer. I sat with my coffee on the couch, settling into the lumpy faux suede fabric, and watched the morning news. It was just seven-thirty.

I called three friends. Only one answered with a startled yell.

“Henry, why in the world are you calling me at seven thirty in the morning?”

“I, I don’t know, I was bored, I thought maybe you wanted to hang out?”

“Henry, you’re insane. Where have you been? Besides at Attilio’s?”

“Besides Attilio’s? What exists outside of Attilio’s?”

“Right, workaholic, supporting your small family. Say no more. We miss you bud. Last week Carmine came home from school, and we had a big fire down on the Hudson. He was asking all about you.”

“How’s Carmine?”

“He got fat. Otherwise, fine.”

“When was this?”

“On Tuesday, when I came into Attilio’s and asked if you wanted to go out. We didn’t forget you, Henry, we just never get to see you.”

“I know.”

“I have classes today and then hockey practice later at the rink. Maybe we can grab a slice—” he paused, giggled, there was a pause, and then I giggled too.

“Next time, bud.”

“Next time.”

I hung up the phone smiling. On the news there was footage of a fire that had happened overnight at the empty warehouses along the turnpike. I thought about spending the day looking at the same grey landscape, at walking outside and smelling the cool smoke that weighed heavy on the town. I thought about eating another obligatory day-off cannoli at Fortucci’s. I longed to see the stars. I couldn’t do the rigorous routine of doing nothing in the same place. Not again, not today.

With my hair pulled back into a green “Bob’s Autobody” baseball cap, the same one I wore the day I took graduation photos, the one that left my hair flat and awkward on top of my head, I slid into my car and pulled out of the driveway, passing by the loaded memories of my childhood, which had faded indefinitely, uncertainly. I passed Nicole McNally’s house, the youngest daughter of my mom’s childhood friend, and my first real girlfriend. She was a pretty girl, smart beyond her years, hair always loosely hung in a ponytail. She played tennis, and her dad absolutely worked for the mafia. We never talked about it. We didn’t talk much in general, mostly we just kissed in her makeshift garage hangout, where she kept a stack of Mexican blankets and a goodwill couch and where, on the wall, hung a five-string bass, one that I asked her to teach me how to play once.

“I don’t actually know how to play it,” she said, her fingers, wrapped tightly around mine.

“Why do you have it hung up, then?”

“I used to want to play when I was little, but then I realized it’s not really a me thing. It was my uncle’s and he’s like a music guy. But that’s not me. I don’t even care about music, I just listen to whatever’s playing on the radio.”

I pulled it off the wall and held its neck in my hand, pulling the thick leather strap over my head, feeling its weight pull down on the crease of my shoulders.

“It looks good on you,” she smiled, kissing my shoulder and then adjusting the strap.

“You should learn to play it,” I said, ignoring her explanation for not having learned to play it in the first place.

“Why don’t you?”

“I don’t have a bass.”

“You can use this one.”

“I don’t have the time.”

“Of course you don’t.”

The conversation grew quiet, and I plucked at the thick strings, releasing a low, bouncy sound that echoed off the unfinished walls of the garage.

When I broke up with her, from the driver’s seat of the same shitty Ford Taurus, her eyes wet with tears, crying onto the cigarette smelling interior (I never once smoked a cigarette, but the residual scent left behind from the previous owners was enough to deter me from wanting to try), I told her I wasn’t good enough for her. I wasn’t sure if that was true. I wasn’t awesome, I wasn’t patient and I got fussy when she got upset that I didn’t see her as much as I could (should) have, but whether that was a matter of being better or worse than a person didn’t seem applicable. I just didn’t think we were going to the same place. Even if we were both eighteen going on nineteen, living in a suburb, driving shitty cars and hoping to someday go off to college, I felt like she was going to grow up, and I had already gotten there. It certainly didn’t look that way on paper, she was headed to FIT in New York, full of hope and dreams within reach, and I was headed towards fifty, sixty hours of wage slavery. But it felt that way. It hurt her more than it hurt me. For me it was mostly an ache. I was breaking up with her in her own best interest. It felt like bullshit, but I’d continue to tell myself it was the right thing to do even when I didn’t feel that way, when I saw her at the occasional house party or when her family came in to pick up a pizza. It wasn’t regret, it was just unsettling.

The parkway was vacant for a weekday, especially so early in the morning. I expected a decent amount of commuter traffic, even if I was going away from the city. The roads were familiar, though redundant, New Jersey held a lot of different atmospheres, but the parkway was a constant, only marginally grayer as you went more North, marginally greener at the South end. I put on a mixed CD of songs that I had made Nicole when we were dating, one that she had returned to me wrapped in my favorite grey soccer sweatshirt and shoved into the mailbox of my apartment building. My mom thought it was a ransom video when she came home and found it, and she called me crying. In instructed her to put it into the DVD player and, much to her relief, Gerry Raferty’s “Right Down The Line” started through the speakers. It was apparently my father’s favorite song and had come to be one of mine. It was a household anthem and soon became a frequent player in my car ride soundtrack.

I took the parkway until I merged onto I-95, becoming suddenly aware of my shifting surroundings. Houses with wide, vast properties, trees on both sides of me, parks that stretched through hills that wound familiar landscapes. I opened the windows. It was still grey outside, but the moisture lingered in the air in a way that made it smell soft and inviting, the damp earth giving the whole world a green-feeling smell. The rest of the drive was a series of deep inhales and soft exhales. My breath loosened, I felt my shoulders unhinge themselves and melt down my back. When I finally reached the long, winding driveway to my grandma’s house, I rolled up the windows and pulled in slowly, my wheels crunching beneath the rocky gravel. I hadn’t told her I was coming, and couldn’t even be sure she was home. But there was her car, parked beside the house, and there was her den, all lit up with a soft yellow glow. I knocked on the front door and she peeled the door open slowly.

“Is that… Oh! Henry!” She swung the door open and wrapped her robe more tightly around herself, before pulling me into a long, tight hug.

“Hey Grandma,” I returned the hug, my chin resting just above her head.

“What in the world are you doing here? Not that it matters, I just would have expected you to call.”

“I—”

“It’s no matter. I’m happy you’re here, come in and go make yourself at home.”

I walked into the mudroom and kicked off my shoes before sliding cozily into the breakfast nook. My grandmother scurried in behind me, pulling a mug out from one of the shelves and putting it down beside me. She asked if I wanted tea or coffee, and I opted coffee.

“I never thought I’d see the day that my boy,” she paused, “my young man would sit down and have a cup of coffee with me. I’m too lucky. How do you take it?”

“I, uh, usually with milk and sugar.”

She pulled a porcelain pitcher of half-and-half from the refrigerator and a small bowl from the china hutch, and then watched me as I slowly and carefully spooned heaping teaspoons of sugar into my mug, examined closely as I poured in cream. She smiled wide.

“That is quite the cup of ‘coffee’ you’re having there,” she chuckled, not with judgement, just observation.

“Yeah I guess it’s not quite grown up yet. It’ll get there. I’ll be on black coffee before my twentieth.”

My grandfather had passed four years ago, and since then my grandmother had made an art of keeping the things in her house in pristine condition, as if she was waiting for his return. There was always a tray of cheese and crackers in the fridge, wrapped tight in cellophane, discarded and replaced immediately if not eaten in three days or so. She was always brewing coffee, always baking. My aunt went and saw her every Sunday, and while the same could not be said about my mom, for reasons of distance and time at her disposal, we always let her host holidays, and she always did so with dedication and eagerness.

“I’m guessing you have today off?” she asked, cupping her small, delicate fingers around her mug, full of hot black tea.

“I do! My first actual day off in a little while.”

“And you wanted to spend it with your grandma, huh?”

“I did. I needed a little break from the beautiful, scenic downtown Kearny.”

“Ah yes. You know, your father never liked it there.”

“That’s what my mom says. She always said he would have moved to the country. This being the country, I guess,” I pulled back one of the lacey curtains and looked out past the old cherry tree that stood gnarled and proud in the center of the backyard. Beyond that was green, for as far as was in eye’s reach.

“I offered for the two of them to move in here for the summer, so you could have the backyard and your mother and father could get some fresh air, but they both worked way too much. Your mother still does. The hour between Millstone and the hospital would’ve been hard. Same for your father, too.”

I nodded, imagining how differently I might have painted my childhood now, had the summers been spent rolling around in green grass, taking swimming lessons at the nearby lake, sharing summer barbecue with neighbors, drinking lemonade on the porch. It was a whole different color palette. I didn’t invest too much time into the thought, but still, it’s slim chance for could-have-been left me queasy.

“How are things back home? I talked to your mother last week, but she didn’t have much to say. She says you’re working a lot.”

I nodded again, “Yeah, I guess it’s a good amount. It’s alright. I’m saving up for classes, I should be able to enroll for next fall. I’ll probably just live at home for the year and go to community college, but, hey, it’s a start.”

“Do you know what you want to study?”

“I don’t know, maybe film?”

“Do you like film?”

“I love movies.”

“But is that what you want to do? Or do you just like watching movies?”

“Grandma, sincerely, I have no clue. But I need to just—”

“Move forward?”

“Yes.”

She tilted her head and looked at me with furrowed brows, the same face my mother made when she worried. Her small hand found its way to my shoulder, and for a second I thought I might cry. And then I did. I cried hard, long sobs, the kind that catch and swallow your breath whole. I cried the way I did on the night I broke up with Nicole. I cried the way I did on some nights when I got home from work at midnight and found my mother passed out on the couch, her arm draped over the side, the TV still running. I cried the way I did when I ran to the top of town and into North Arlington and through the cemetery and couldn’t find my father’s headstone. I would run by a thousand dead people and not one of them was ever him. I wasn’t even sure he was there, but I liked to think one day I would get to the end and pass seventeen beloved daughters and blessed mothers and there would be Gregory James O’Sullivan. My Dad. I cried like I was a child about to leave my grandma’s house and go back to life in the square footage of our little beige apartment in a little beige building. I cried and cried and spit and spat and heaved and didn’t think it would ever stop. And then I did.

“It’s been hard, Henry, I know.”

“There’s so much I could be doing and I’m just sitting here, like, working? With my tail between my legs? Like I don’t know how to be a kid and I don’t know how to be an adult and it’s all just, it’s all fucked up.”

I swallowed hard, my head nodding almost involuntarily. It’d been so, so hard. I looked out the window again and saw all the green, and I thought, that’s it. That’s as far as I can see.

“It’s scary, I bet.”

“Yeah, I guess scary would be the word.”

“And I bet you don’t really feel like anybody gets it, do you?”

“Not really, at least, not as far as I can tell.”

My grandmother’s expression was grave and she came to sit across from me. She gripped tight onto both my hands with her own.

“You might feel that way, and I get it. Your mother doesn’t have it in her to be candid with you, but I know she hurts and I know you feel it. And I know you loved that girl and I know you broke up with her because you felt like you needed to do all this, to work and put money away and promise not to be a burden to me or your mother. I know how much your mother gave up for you, but I also see how much you give up for your mother, and that matters just as much, if not more. We see you, Henry. I see you, and your mother sees you and all your friends see you, and heaven rest his soul, I know your father sees you too. And I know if he’s half as proud of you as we all are, he’s twice as proud as you can even imagine.”

“Grandma, I work at a pizza place.”

“You work hard.”

“I’m not even, like, a labor guy. I’m not even cut out for like, whatever union foreman fantasy I’m sure he had for me.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“I have feminine shoulders.”

“You have kind shoulders, and a softness just like your mother and your grandfather. And it's a beautiful thing.”

“It certainly doesn’t feel that way.”

“It never does. Not at first anyways. But you’ll grow into it.”

Her hands released mine. I stood up and she hugged me again, my chin rested on the stop of her head.

She pulled out a tray of grapes and strawberries and bowls of pretzels and crackers and we sat for a while, quiet in the warming March day. The rain continued, softly, and we talked about my grandfather, about my grandmother’s time at college, she pulled out baby pictures of me and my mother and my uncle, photos from my mother’s wedding that weren’t the one in the cupboard beneath the china. Photos of my mother with cake on her face, photos of her doing the hand jive and kissing my grandfather on the cheek. They were photos of me, too, I just didn’t know it yet. Outside the clouds persisted and, unusual for the time of year, lightning clapped and somewhere, one, two, three, four seconds away, thunder rolled. It was loud, all at once, and it would be okay.