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“I used to worry about you growing up in a world like this… then you turned into the kind of woman who could handle anything it throws at her.”
—ROBERT MONROE
Constance Monroe
The rain startsto fall as soon as the funeral home begins lowering my father into the ground.
It’s not a soft drizzle like the tears of the gathered mourners. It’s a downpour that washes out the opening of the grave and leaves muddy rivulets pouring down onto the coffin as it’s lowered into the earth. The storm is loud and angry, fitting for the day and my mood.
Standing beneath a borrowed black umbrella, I try to listen while a priest I’ve never met speaks platitudes about a manhe didn’t know. I can’t hear his mumbled words over the thunder and rain. I don’t have to hear him to know he’s probably talking about my father being in a better place, finding peace, eternal rest, that it’s all part of God’s plan, blah, blah, blah.
If this is God’s plan, then I don’t want anything to do with him.
There’s no peace to be found when a loved one is murdered so cruelly and painfully.
Since the night of the fire, every time I close my eyes, my mind fills with my father’s screams of anguish. I want to believe that he didn’t suffer, that he died from smoke inhalation before burning alive. Even if that were true, it provides little comfort.
My father never believed in heaven or hell or put any faith in gods. What he believed in was taking care of his family and the people who worked for him, earning enough money to pay his bills on time, and minding his own business. He believed in quiet dignity and respected every soul he met.
He also believed that the Luciani family, the mobsters he gave ten percent of his profits to, would protect him from evil bastards like the ones who set him and his restaurant on fire.
They didn’t.
The umbrella does little to keep me dry when the rain begins to blow sideways. It soaks through my clothes and sends a chill through me that I feel in my bones. I don’t care. I’m already drowning emotionally. I may as well stand here and drown literally now that both of my parents are gone. There’s no one left to love me the way only a mother or father can love.
“Constance.” My best friend Melissa gently calls my name. She holds out a single red rose to me, which I absently take without looking at her. I don’t want to see the pity in her eyes. I don’t want to see her tears washing away in the rain, or the sadness on her face.
I am so over the cold, wet grief.
I want a blazing fucking fire. Not like the one that burned down my father’s restaurant and took his life. I want one of my own making. I want to rage. I want to howl like this storm, to scream until my throat grows raw. As if that will do any good.
For the first time in my life, I want to hit someone, to hurt them the way I’m hurting.
But Melissa doesn’t deserve my wrath. She’s done nothing wrong. “Give me a moment,” I say to her, my voice husky from crying for days on end as I twirl the long, thornless stem between my fingers.
My friend hesitates but finally backs away, leaving me alone beside my father’s grave while everyone else runs toward their cars.
I can’t help but notice a black SUV idling across the cemetery road with dark windows. No one gets out. No one comes to mourn. It just sits there while someone inside watches me.
Since I have a feeling about who it is, I flip him the middle finger before turning back to the final resting place for my father.
There wasn’t enough of him left for a casket, but I know he would want to be buried next to my mother.
The funeral home asked me what I wanted to put on his headstone. I had no fucking clue. I’d never thought to ask my father what he wanted etched into the stone that marks his final resting place.
I finally decided to mimic what he put on my mother’s when she died eleven years ago from a hit and run.
Robert Monroe. Beloved Father and Husband. 1967–2026.
It doesn’t do him justice. He was so much more, but how do you fit a lifetime of memories onto a granite memorial?
My father was a good man. A good man who made some bad business decisions to make ends meet. Decisions that were meant to give me a better life. Decisions that cost him his life.
He was too kind, too honest for this city. And so loyal that he died doing the dirty work for a mobster.
I crouch beside the grave, ignoring the way the mud clings to my heels, to toss my rose onto his coffin before it’s covered up.
