November 22, 2016 marks the 53rd anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. JFK, Daddy and Me is a short story I’ve written that is set during that week. (Originally published in Skyline Anthology 2015.) Please read below.

Late at night, in my small bedroom, by the soft yellow beam of my father’s flashlight, I used a blue ballpoint pen to scratch out a story about a band of orphans who were stranded on a gorgeous tropical island—a place very different from New Britain, Connecticut, the grimy factory town where I lived.

Meanwhile, Ma and Daddy screamed at each other in the kitchen. They’d fought before. Plenty of times. But never this bad. For several weeks, my father had been coming home late from his dispatcher job at the police station.

“Where you been, Mick? Four hours past supper.” Ma banged a pot.

“Ha! But I’m damn early for breakfast.” Daddy slurred his words.

“You’re dead drunk. What’s that smell? You stink.”

“I stink? This apartment stinks of garlic. Reeks.” I heard Daddy fall onto the chrome kitchen chair, knocking it over. “Marrying into an Italian family—I’m cursed with a lifetime of garlic.” My father seemed to be giggling.

“Beer and smoke.” Ma paused. “And her cheap perfume. You can’t fool me. I can smell that, too. A stench like disinfectant.”

My father never drank that much, sometimes one beer on Friday night. After that, he’d sing some Irish tunes—crazy songs—one about a girl so skinny she slipped down the bathtub drain. Once, he sang that Elvis hound dog song and wound up howling which made even my grumpy mother laugh a little.

A scrape and a bump, maybe Ma picked up the chair then set it against the Formica table. I couldn’t tell. I prayed that God would stop the fighting. I waited, hopeful for a quick answer. But no, if anything, my parents shouted louder, hurling violent words at each other.

Did other families fight like this? Not on Leave it to Beaver or My Three Sons. Every show, those people disagreed about something—but no screaming and yelling. And, by the end, always lots of smiles and jokey talk.

I tried to go back to writing my story. I forced myself to picture a starry night and happy orphans—children not tortured by fighting parents—those lucky kids, stirring a delicious stew over a warm campfire. Not one word came to mind. So, instead, in the margin of the paper, I sketched a picture of myself: curly black hair, green eyes behind blue-rimmed glasses. I tried to make my face look happy, but the mouth came out all wrong. Above my head, I drew the ragged leaves of a palm tree. That wasn’t quite right, either. I looked so very tiny.

More words. This time Ma saying that despite all his promises, all his big talk, they were getting nowhere, still stuck in a rat hole.

Rat hole? At least that’s what I thought I’d heard. My mother tended to exaggerate. My room had a comfortable bed, red plaid café curtains, a wooden roll top desk, a narrow three-legged bureau, a pile of books forming the fourth leg. Not much, but not a rat hole either. My mother complained —to Nonnie, my grandmother and to all our friends—how we were going nowhere fast, how she’d had bigger ideas for her life. Once I overheard my parents talking about sending my mother to accounting school. My father said something like, ”Angie, I’ll work my way up in the department, you’ll see. The minute I do, it’s off to school for you.”

I wished someone would show up at the apartment door—specifically an angel. An angel who behaved like a tooth fairy; someone who could wave a sparkly wand and undo the mess. Presto! My father would come home on time and sober, with an arm full of flowers for Ma. He’d give her a big smooch. And Ma, well, she’d smile then hug him hard.

But no angel, no tooth fairy, no nobody. I buried my head under the pillow. Didn’t matter. I could still hear them.

“You got a woman, don’t you? Go stay with her.” Ma’s voice sounded raw. I couldn’t stand it. I hit my head with the flashlight, little thunks, but hard enough to hurt. Somehow, that pain helped me get through the ache of listening to my parents shred each other.

“A woman? A woman!” Daddy’s voice battered the air. He started laughing, laughing and sobbing at the same time. “Maybe I will leave. And I’m taking the money. I earned it. Every bloody dime.”

My parents tried to put aside a little cash each month, hoping to buy a tract house in Hazardville, tiny and square, only two bedrooms but with a bit of grass out front. “Anywhere away from the tenements.” Ma would say.   Nonnie owned the building we lived in. Both Ma and Daddy wanted to get out from under her thumb. But every month, they had to dip into the savings—a flat tire on the Oldsmobile, new uniform pants for Daddy, fillings for my teeth.

More yelling. I couldn’t make out the words. Why didn’t God make them stop? Maybe I should pray to a saint. Was there a Patron Saint of Fighting Parents? I never paid attention in catechism. Then again, maybe God gave me these arguing parents to punish me for being such a bad Catholic.

A door slammed. Their bedroom door? Pounding. Ma screaming, “No….Mick…stop.”

I jumped out of bed, throwing covers aside, rushing into the kitchen. I saw them, kneeling by the stove, struggling over the small metal box where they kept their money. They looked like two children fighting on the playground, his head of sweaty red curls up against her wavy black hair. But they weren’t children; they were my parents. They were supposed to be adults.

All the yelling must have wakened my grandmother who lived in the apartment above because the next thing I knew, Nonnie, who was as wide as she was tall, burst through the door with such force, the doorknob left a huge dent in the wall.

Nonnie tackled my father and dragged him out onto the porch, bumping his head hard against the jamb. I’ve wondered if my grandmother could have overpowered him had he been sober. Probably. Probably she could have.

Nonnie gave my father one final shove. “You go now. Come back when not drunk.” Daddy stumbled down the stairs taking two at a time. Then, Nonnie turned to me saying, “Jemma, go to bed.”

The next two nights I kept watch for my father, staring out the window by my bed, hoping I’d see the light on at his workshop behind our tenement. Usually, after working a day shift, my father would gobble down dinner, then head down to the shop, repairing radios, toasters, lawn mowers, whatever the neighbors brought—although they’d been bringing less and less.

But my father never showed. No call. No nothing. Ma said she didn’t care, good riddance to bad rubbish, but I heard her crying at night.

A dull ache filled my chest. Each morning, I considered skipping school, heading to the station downtown, seeing if I could talk to my father. I knew exactly which bus to take there. But Ma had never let me ride the bus on my own, saying eleven was a little too young for that.

Even if I did go, I wondered if my father would hate for me to barge in at his job. He never once had brought me inside the station. Maybe he felt ashamed that he only answered phones or maybe he wanted to protect me from all the sadness. I don’t know.

I did consider calling him. Almost dialed him several times. I knew the emergency number, but I worried about my mother catching me. The phone sat dead center on the kitchen counter.   I’d never get away with it.

Bone-tired and heartsick, I dragged myself through one last day of school before the weekend. I had gym seventh period on Fridays and could play outside. Thank God for that, but to be honest, I was furious with God. I pictured him in the left-hand corner of the universe, standing with his back to me.

We kids bundled into our winter jackets and braced ourselves against a brisk November wind. As we filed out onto the schoolyard, Mr. Sweeney, the P.E. teacher, told us to line up for alley soccer. Each child sprinted toward a chalked-off section of the asphalt court. No one dared disobey him. He’d gotten injured in the Korean War and came back a hero. My father said the man acted a little off, a little strange and maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for him to be around kids. But, I didn’t think he was so bad. Unless the students misbehaved, Mr. Sweeney hardly paid attention to any of them, spending most of every gym class with a mint green transistor radio glued to his ear.

Within a minute of Mr. Sweeney putting the ball in play, I got hold of it and started dribbling down the alley toward the goal. But a boy named Pete tripped me as I tried to make the shot. My bare knees skidded on the pavement. Worse yet, I missed the goal. Within seconds, Pete had kicked the ball clear toward the other side. Being trapped in a dress and patent leather shoes didn’t help my playing ability. I wished I could wear pants and Keds to school.

Blood dripped down both my knees. I glared at Pete as I sat next to my teacher on the sidelines. Mr. Sweeney barely looked at me or my knees. Scraped knees probably didn’t measure up to the injuries he had seen in the war.

I checked the dial on Mr. Sweeney’s watch. One-thirty. Nonnie and Ma would be looking at As the World Turns. Since I could remember, nothing got in the way of them watching that soap opera. My father once said Nonnie would probably come back from the dead every afternoon just to keep up with the story.

A few minutes later, just as a child made a goal, Mr. Sweeney yelled, “Holy Mother of God!” This made no sense. He never cared about who won the games. I saw him hold out the radio in front of him, looking at it as if it were dripping with poison. Then, covering his face, he put the radio back to his ear.

Mr. Sweeney kept shaking his head. At last, he said, “Everyone go inside. Our president has been shot.”

The principal sent all us kids straight home. I arrived to an empty apartment. When I went upstairs to my grandmother’s, I found half the people from our tenement squished into Nonnie’s parlor watching Walter Cronkite. In our block, no one but Nonnie owned a television.

Sitting on the floor, I could barely see the screen, but I noticed that the newsman didn’t have his jacket on. Strange. Mr. Cronkite always wore a suit jacket on television. He also kept taking his glasses off and repeating himself, about how there were three shots and maybe President Kennedy was dead, but maybe not.

Another reporter, one in Texas, was talking about a man who killed a cop. I didn’t understand. Wasn’t it the president who got shot?

Mrs. Domkowski, Mrs. Kaufmann and Mrs. Perez all squeezed on the same sofa together which was something. Most days these women squabbled about parking spaces, garbage cans, noisy kids, you name it. None of them spoke English well, which also didn’t help. Daddy said that those people stepped off the boat and right into Nonnie’s apartment building. Of course, after that they headed to the factories to work. Nonnie’s tenement was not far from Stanley Tool and Fafnir Bearing. Everybody was welcome at the factories: long hours, low pay and no English-speaking skills necessary.

Mrs. Perez ran her rosary beads through her fingers, one by one. Click, mumble, click, mumble. A cigarette dangled from Mr. Assaryan’s mouth, the ashes fluttering down to the carpet. I wondered who was running his store on the corner and why Nonnie wasn’t getting him an ashtray.

Then, just after 2:30, Mr. Cronkite announced that John F. Kennedy had died. Was he wiping tears from his eyes? I had never seen a newsman cry on TV.

The set stayed on all day and into the evening. Some people came and went, but most just stayed. Folks left food on the kitchen table—provolone cheese, salami, bread, olives, empanadas, chicken cutlets, stuffed cabbage, angel wings dusted with sugar. The neighbors picked at the food, but didn’t eat as much as you’d have thought. All day Saturday went the same way, everyone staring at the sad scenes on the screen. When the Rutgers college boys sang a requiem with the Philadelphia orchestra playing behind them, even Mrs. Kaufmann cried. And that was something. She was a hard one. Never a smile or nice word. Ma said the woman survived a war camp and still had a number tattooed on her arm.

Every time the back door opened, I jumped up, hoping it’d be my father. But no Daddy and no word from or about him. I felt bad about John Kennedy—he was young, handsome and Catholic. A Catholic man in the presidency. Our whole church celebrated back on election night. Yes, I was sad about JFK, but I remember feeling guilty that I was way sadder about my father being gone.

On Sunday morning, no neighbors showed up. Each family went to their own church, not Mrs. Kaufmann, of course. The priest at my church read a statement from Pope Paul. The pope said he was profoundly saddened. I felt profoundly saddened, too, by every damn thing. I could have thrown a chair through a stained glass window I felt so sad. I wondered if God felt sad too, or if he cared at all.

People wept and blew their noses and wept again. This reminded me of my Grandpa Padric’s funeral, years ago. Oh how I wished I could be sitting on that wooden pew, snuggled under my father’s arm. But my father was nowhere to be seen. I knew it was a sin for him to miss Mass. That much I remembered from catechism. I wondered if God planned to send my father to hell.

Back home after church, my family ate our usual Sunday lunch—a light chicken soup with orzo, roasted chicken and potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs, always followed by a cake covered in whipped cream and soaked in rum. This day, though, we didn’t gather at Nonnie’s dark wooden table and we didn’t quite make it to dessert.

We sat in the parlor, balancing plates in our laps, staring at the television. At first the screen showed President Kennedy’s coffin traveling down Pennsylvania Avenue. But then, the picture changed to Oswald being taken out of the Dallas jail. I didn’t know where he was going. But as Oswald came out into the parking area, in the lower right corner of the screen, I saw a man’s back, then heard a shot. Lee Oswald gasped and fell to the side. Then the screen filled with scuffling bodies, pushing down the shooter.

I jumped to my feet, sending the plate of pasta and meatballs to the floor. No one seemed to care about the mess. A stretcher carried Oswald away. Not much later, a newsman announced that Oswald was dead. The neighbors must have heard the news on their radios. Within minutes, Nonnie’s parlor filled to overflowing.

The shooting at the police station terrified me. My father worked at a police station. Was he safe? I went downstairs to our apartment, to my room and crawled under the covers. I pushed away my fears about my father and the police station. Instead, I tried to picture the day last summer when my father taught me how to ride a two-wheeler. He ran by my side for hours, red-faced and breathless, making jokes the whole time: If Ireland sank into the sea, which county would never go down? Cork, of course.  

At the end of the afternoon, my father and I lay with our backs against the small grassy hillside behind the school, discovering fantastic stories in the clouds overhead. I kept those images in mind as I fell into a deep sleep.

No school that Monday. All morning we watched famous people arrive for the funeral—Prince Philip, General de Gaulle, Haile Selassie. As the television showed the Mass given at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, I noticed my mother crossing herself with the parishioners on screen.

At the end of the Mass, as little Caroline left the church, the Cardinal leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. Big tears rolled down Nonnie’s cheeks. I realized I’d never seen my grandmother cry.

As the pallbearers lifted the casket, John-John fidgeted at his mother’s side. I pitied the child, losing his father so young. Jacqueline Kennedy whispered to him and took a paper from the boy’s hand. Then, John-John saluted his father. The picture shook, maybe the cameraman was crying, too?

I could not hold back my own tears. I ran down the wooden porch steps and sat down on the cement stoop at the bottom. I knew I had to talk with my father, to see if he was all right, to try to make him come home. Would the buses be running today? I didn’t know. If I wanted to take the bus, I’d have to go inside and steal the fare. Too big a risk. I decided to walk to the station. Ma and Nonnie wouldn’t miss me. Not today as they watched the funeral.

So, I headed downtown, trudging into the bitter wind, getting lost once, asking directions twice, but finally arriving. I paused in front of the heavy wooden door, frightened to go in. Through the large side window, I could see my father sitting by a counter, talking on the phone. Would he be angry?

My father jumped up from his chair and scooped me into his arms, holding me close for a long time. I burrowed into his hug, never wanting to leave.

“Where have you been? You’re mother just called. She’s worried sick. Go ahead. Sit down now. I’ve got to let her know you’re okay.” He pointed to a wooden bench then dialed my mother.

My father turned his back to me, cradling the receiver, talking quietly into the phone. I couldn’t hear the words, only the tone of the words, quiet reassuring murmurs. He spoke much longer than it would take to convey a simple message. I dared to hope.

After my father hung up, another cop came by. “Mick, go on. Your shift is almost over anyway. I’ll cover for you.”

My father grabbed his hat, scarf and jacket from a locker and we left out the back door.

Once outside, my father asked, “Jemma, how in the world did you get here?”

“Walked.” I lowered my head, bracing for a lecture.

Instead, my father grabbed my shoulders. “Good lord, girl. Five miles?”

“I had to see if you were all right.”

My father pulled me into another hug. He shook a bit as he spoke. “All right. Yes, I’m all right. But sad and very ashamed.”

The wind picked up. Daddy wrapped his scarf around my neck. “Buses aren’t running. Let’s get going. Your mother will be waiting.”

I shook my head. “They’re watching television. The funeral.”

“Even still. I know she’s anxious to see you. Let’s try to get home before dark.” We started down Main Street, going past one closed shop after another.

I looked up at my father. I hated to ask, but needed to know. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No, darling, of course not. Your mother is the only woman for me.”

Did I believe him? Not quite. I knew that adults lied, parents even. “Where have you been staying?”

“I’ve been sleeping in an empty cell at the station. Not too comfortably.”

I couldn’t let it go. He still wasn’t making sense. “But why have you been so late all those nights?”

“They cut back my time at the station. The chief’s nephew—they gave the boy half my hours.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Ah sweetheart, if life were fair, JFK wouldn’t be dead now, would he?” My father kissed the top of my head. “So, I took a part-time job as a janitor at the high school. Cleaning toilets.”

“The perfume. I heard Ma yelling about perfume.”

My father gave a sad smile. “Yes, ‘perfume like disinfectant’ was actually Clorox.”

I suppose I should have felt relief, but instead I was furious. Why did my parents have to be so dumb? “Why didn’t you just tell her?”

“She didn’t intend to marry a janitor. We’ve been hoping I’d get on the force, maybe make detective some day. Instead, I was pushing a mop. I couldn’t face her or your grandmother, either.”

“But why were you so drunk?” If my father had been my child, I’m sure I would have punished him for pure stupidity.

“Felt depressed. Guess I can’t hold my liquor.”

“I’ll say.” I didn’t want to be disrespectful, but it was all I could do to hold my tongue.

We paused by a shop full of televisions. Even though the store was closed, several of the sets were on, replaying scenes of the funeral. We watched for a minute. Without sound, I especially noticed the faces, all sad, all in shock, all holding questions with no answers.

Finally, my father tugged at my sleeve. We continued in silence for a while. Then he said, “It may not look like it, but your mother and I, we’re trying.” He paused. “I’m not perfect, Jemma.”

Not perfect? Not by a long shot. My scream first, ask later mother wasn’t perfect, either. And Nonnie, God help anybody who crossed her. “I know. Nobody’s perfect.”

Come to think of it, for the first time, it hit me that maybe I wasn’t perfect. I was no big expert on running the universe.

I squeezed my father’s hand and said, “Well, I guess you’re perfect enough.”

The sun started to set. As we made our way, the cold November sky bled red and then purple into the horizon.

If I’d had the power to write my life like the stories I wrote by flashlight late at night, I would have gone ahead and given myself a happy ending, right there and then. But I didn’t have that power and knew I never would. Instead, on that saddest of sad days when the whole world seemed to be weeping, I held my father’s hand and walked slowly toward home.