Just a Little Longer

A short story, and also...some updates!

Hello, esteemed reader! It’s been…quite a long time, hasn’t it?

I must apologize for my inactivity in putting new work on here. In addition to my full-time job, I’ve been slogging away at my first novel which I am very pleased to report is…done? As done as such things can be done? Done perhaps until it’s not so done again?

At this stage I’m submitting it to indie presses, following up with editors with whom I’ve spoken in the past at events, and preparing to run the query gauntlet once more. It’s…an odd experience, considering I’ve been working on this book for about six and a half years, have planted the flag of “I’m done!” so many times to only look at it sideways and think, no, it’s not quite done. But this time I feel a strange sense of completeness. Of course, this would not be possible without the esteemed help of friends and strangers who have fed back on the book, as well as the outstanding editing work of Elle Nash (whose services I cannot recommend highly enough). While I can’t say for sure when my novel will appear in print, if ever, you can hear selections during my appearances at Misery Tourism’s weekly reading series, Misery Loves Company.

Another factor in this Substack’s somnolescence: my work is appearing on other websites! Head on over to Maudlin House, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, and VANITY — they publish fantastic work and I am humbled and thankful to be included on their pages.

I’ve also got a piece coming out later this week over at Peach Mag that I’m incredibly proud of — keep an eye on their site as well as my Twitter for links when it goes live.

Anyway, I thought I’d conclude this update with a short story I’ve been tinkering with for a while. It’s a bit more substantial in length than the stuff I’ve published on here previously, but hopefully it makes up for my past inactivity and what will likely be continued scatter-shot updates as I continue trying to place my work and (dun dun dun) start in on a new novel.

So, without further ado…

JUST A LITTLE LONGER

My grandfather's wake came together haphazardly, a last-minute thing shared by email, so I bombed north out of Brooklyn on a Thursday afternoon and reached Norwood in three-and-a-half hours flat. The whole trip felt like an homage to him: rental car shrieking on the highway, a full bladder held at bay to beat the rush hour, speed traps and cops too lazy to leave the comfort of their squad cars be damned.

I parked my car and exited, breathing in the lukewarm Massachusetts air. The city lights oranged the clouds in the sky. My father was waiting by the doors of the funeral home. We both looked like my grandfather, though my father was starting to lose his hair and that mischievous grin we'd each inherited revealed more lines on his face than mine. Smoking again after a ten-year break, my father sucked down mentholated breaths in tiny sips, the cigarette clasped between his thumb and forefinger like a worm in a small bird's beak. He drew me in with his free hand.

"Your grandma's inside. Go see her first," he said. My father held the cigarette out to me and I waved it away.

"Gotta piss—has it started yet?" I asked.

"Not yet. Soon." Was he smiling? I couldn't tell.

I left him, wondering why someone who'd just lost his father to a grueling battle with blood cancer would seem so cheerful, and entered the building. The smell of lilac and heavy makeup in the air. Dim lamps that bronzed everything. Carpeting thick enough to hush any footfall. Still, I dashed toward the first restroom sign I saw, my relief a warm wave as hours of pent-up pressure released itself into a bleached-white toilet bowl.

Back in the entrance hall, my two aunts and a few of my younger cousins were crowding around my grandmother. My grandmother and I had the kind of relationship one would expect to form between a legendary disciplinarian and a child a bit too young to receive the kind of behavioral molding to which my father and his sisters were subjected. The grandmother we knew was chipper, a sober woman who nonetheless projected the affectation of a perpetual champagne buzz, who enjoyed an extra-long cigarette four times a day. It wasn't until she died, just over two years after my grandfather's wake, that I would learn she beat my father and his siblings with a chipped yardstick decades before.

But I didn't know that as I crossed the marigold-colored carpet to plant a kiss on her cheek while a rendition of Ave Maria scratched its way out of a long-neglected sound system and the people around us spoke quietly and crunched dry mints between their teeth.

"Hello, Nana!" I felt warm, genuinely glad to see her for the first time in a year. She seized my hands with her long, bony fingers and squeezed.

"You came all the way from Baltimore," she said.

"Brooklyn, Nana."

"Good, good. You like it there?"

"I do."

"Are you dating a nice girl?"

"Not right now, Nana," I said, choosing not to mention the boyfriend I'd asked to stay behind.

"You're too old not to be married. I was married at twenty-three."

I laughed and nodded as she proceeded through some of those grandmother-ly conversation points. As she spoke, I thought about her accent, the r's blooming out to ah's, gerunds lost like loose change through a pocket hole. Like the rest of my family, she'd spent her life in Eastern Massachusetts, married my grandfather in the mid-50s and sired a clan that now stretched from Plaistow to Plymouth. My grandmother defined how we sat around the table, how we chewed our food, what time we gathered for Christmas. It was her manner of speech—even her high-pitched, hyena cackle—that set the tenor for how we communicated.

After another twenty or so minutes of milling between the half-dozen poster boards plastered with photos of my grandfather—the only one of me was taken when I was two years old, nude in a kitchen sink while my grandfather scrubbed my head with soap and flashed his yellow-gray teeth—we took our seats in front of the casket.

The whole scene felt so goddamned alien, this most human of affairs. I think what bugged me the most was how performative it all felt —the dramatization of our grief. Like we can't put our lost ones into the earth until we gather, share photos like the score for an oratorio, and gird for the moment when we start to forget their faces and they pass from memory to family myth.

I thought about my visit from a month before to see my grandfather in the hospital. Body hollowed, shrunk like a child in the bed. Said he was ready to go but kept grasping to each breath so he could see as many of us as he could. We didn't say much, but we shook hands several times and said our goodbyes in that unspoken Irish way that carves an inevitable path toward guilt. He kept winking, too. See you next visit, he said. I didn't lose control of myself until the bus ride back to New York, me sobbing in the back row. I was somewhere in Connecticut, one of those highway stretches that's always jammed with traffic. An inescapable clog. By the time we moved again, I was done, so much so that as I approached him in the funeral home, knelt on the creaking wood altar and squeezed the arm of his green suit, my peace was already made.

***

The pastor, someone who'd grown closer to my grandfather in his last years, spoke to the assembled about the community built by Christ when the double-sided doors swung open. A tall man, with close-cropped black hair, decked out in a formal military suit, mission medals and sergeant arrowheads, entered the room. The name MURPHY—my name, our name—emblazoned on a black-and-gold tag above his right breast. It was, at first glance, my grandfather, looking as he did during his days in the U.S. Army. Military police. Several photos out in the entrance hall irrefutably attested to the likeness.

Audible gasps rippled through the room as the man gingerly approached my grandmother.

"Excuse me, Debbie?" the man wearing my grandfather's military uniform asked. Attendees gaped and whispered. I quickly looked around and saw no sign of my father. I thought of his smile outside.

The man took a knee in front of my grandmother and, gently, reached out and took both her hands. "I just wanted to say that I love you very much. You are the love and light of my life, and I am so proud of the life and family we built together." His rendition of my grandfather's manner of speech was flawless. The right timber, the shade of gravel for which he was known. Sure, he'd sounded like a dumpster dragged across asphalt during his dying days, but his sound from when he was healthier—it was all there.

"I also wanted you to know that my favorite memory together is swimming in those crystal waters in the Florida Keys."

Aunt Mary cut him off. "Who the fuck do you think you are?"

"I—"

"Are you sick or something? This is a wake!"

"We're grieving here!" Aunt Julia shouted as she stood, a barrier of flesh and blood between my grandmother and the man.

"Let him finish," came my father's voice from the back of the room. My aunts turned their heads in unison, and I saw the fury etched in stone across their faces. But the moment passed and Julia and Mary sat, entangled their fingers in my grandmother's hands. My father sat in one of the metal folding chairs near the door and it squeaked as he resettled.

The man who looked like my grandfather cleared his throat and straightened his tie. The moment of frenzy briefly broke the spell, but then his face relaxed and assumed the uncanny resemblance—the way persistent upward pressure on the checks suggesting a smile, the ever-so-slightly squinted eyes—to my grandfather.

"I want to sing you a song, Debbie," he said to my grandmother. He then began singing Can't Help Falling in Love in an undulating baritone, not aping Elvis but not straying too far from the velvety quiver of his signature vibrato. For three minutes, the man sang my grandparents' wedding song. Darling, so it goes...Some things are meant to be, he told us. We were as stone as the last notes left his lips.

***

Out in the entrance hall, my grandmother was handed a cigarette, despite the plainly visible No Smoking sign on the wall. The operators of the funeral home appeared to be giving her a pass. Bits of ash flecked the carpeting at her feet.

"What the hell was that?" Julia asked. "Where is he now?"

"Outside, maybe," Mary scoffed. Since we'd left the room my aunts had draped themselves in familiar scorn. I knew they'd loved the song—the visible tears couldn't be hidden as we'd filed out of the room—but I said nothing as I paced at the edge of the group.

"He just," my grandmother started to say. "He sounded just like Ray."

"He's an actor, Ma. That's what—"

"He had the voice and everything," my grandmother continued. She drew in a puff and a few more flakes of ash fell and settled on her black leggings. Our eyes met, briefly. "And when he held my hand. It was just...that's how Ray did it."

"I think it was gross. Mike must've paid for it," Mary said, referring to my father.

"I thought it was nice," my grandmother said. "It made me feel closer to him again. For just a little longer." My grandmother placed her cigarette in a cup on the table beside the couch and stood. "Okay, I'd like to go see Ray again." I watched as my aunts, their faces etched with confusion and lingering anger, led her into the main room.

I stepped out into the brisk night air and looked around.  The man sat in the front seat of a sedan in the far corner of the parking lot. When I got closer, I saw that he was speaking with my father, who was in the seat beside him. My father noticed me, waved from behind the windshield, and jerked his head toward the back seat of the car. I didn't know what to do otherwise, so I opened the door and eased inside.

"Mark, this is Noam," my father said as I closed the door. "Noam, meet my son, Mark. He's from New York." Noam turned and we shook hands. Up close, subtle differences between him and my grandfather were more apparent. His lips were thinner and his hair was dyed darker. But the resemblance was still strong like he'd been plucked from a book of photos snapped from a distance.

"Nice to meet you," I said.

"Say, Mark, you got any of that good weed from last time? I think Noam could use a toke."

"Oh, it's okay," Noam said. His voice was naturally higher-pitched than the tone he'd used when pretending to be my grandfather.

"No, no. You're a guest and you've been treated poorly. Come on, Mark, I know you got some."

I'd been saving a joint for later when inevitable insomnia reared its ugly head, but I acquiesced and removed the joint from my jacket pocket. I lit it, inhaled deeply, then passed it forward toward Noam. My father took it and sucked in a few puffs before handing it to Noam.

"That's—some good—shit," he said before releasing a long trail of smoke. "Anyway, like I was saying. Noam, you can't beat yourself up over it."

Noam exhaled and coughed, then handed me the joint. "It seemed like people really hated it," he said.

"That's...well, you know, some people deal with grief differently than others. Some can't take a joke," my father offered.

"But I don't think Ray meant for it to be a joke. When he walked me through it...all the stuff he showed me…" Noam trailed off and reached down around my father's feet and picked up a thick black folder. He opened it, revealing a sheaf of photographs, detailed notes, and a tape recorder.

"Every time I went to meet with Ray we spoke for hours. He'd have me come in real early before your grandma or the rest of the family would show up to visit.  Check it out, I—I recorded our conversations. With his blessing, of course." Noam pressed play and my grandfather's voice began to float through the smoked-congested car.

"—and when you see Debbie you gotta get my smile just right, see, like I've got it here...that's it, very good. Very good. And when you're right in front of her, you should take her hands. Both of 'em. Not too hard now, I know you got a nice handshake but ease up on it, ya? Soft. Like you've got a rabbit. Now, I worked railroads for twenty-five years after the military so you know I got a hard grip too but with Debbie my hands were feather-light. That's gonna be the thing more than whatever you say or do, okay Noam? Here, take my hands. Try it. No, no, that's too hard. Softer. Even softer. There you go. Just like that." A pause as the recorder picks up some wheezing and coughing. "Now in case my piece of shit son—"

Noam clicked off the tape recorder. "He went into a whole thing about you ruining the bit," he added with a laugh.

As my grandfather spoke, I let the joint burn and blinked away tears, stopped by the love and affection in his voice, the earnestness of it, him wanting my grandmother to feel that tenderness again after he was gone. I cleared my throat and held the joint out to my father.

"That's...damn, Noam," my father said, his voice hoarse. He coughed and cleared his throat. "Damn."

"Well, I fucked it all up, so…"

"You didn't," I said.

"What?"

"My grandmother. Nana. She...she appreciated it. Fuck what my aunts said or did. It was...it worked."

Noam flexed his fingers on the steering wheel and his sigh sounded like freedom. He smiled toothily and bowed his head. "Okay, okay, here's a good one," he said. He told us about how my grandfather kept bragging to the nurses about his wife's beauty, how they'd never eclipse her—but of course, they were beautiful, too, he stressed, beautiful with life. Then Noam told us how scared my grandfather looked when they wheeled him out for tests, as if that act signified the approaching end he'd sought to postpone. Eyes glassy, car cloudy, Noam drifted into easy silences between each memory. But we held comfort in those silences, Ray immortal in our minds. "What a good guy," Noam murmured, then again, until silence pooled in the space between us once more.