The Lightning Season

The funeral home was airless, smelling of lilies and carpet cleaner. I adjusted my black fedora—Dad's hat, really, from his Sinatra phase—and watched my ex-husband's new wife cry into a handkerchief. They'd been married six months. Dad had been dead three days.

"He loved baseball," David was saying, his voice cracking with rehearsed grief. I stared at the ceiling fan, remembering how Dad actually hated sports. He loved the statistics, the geometry of the diamond, the way a curveball could make physics visible. But actual games bored him. Too much waiting.

Outside, lightning split the sky—a sudden, violent fracture that made the window frames shudder. Everyone flinched. I thought of July 1998, when Dad had driven me to the hospital after my first heartbreak, both of us silent in his old Toyota while summer lightning strobed across the horizon.

"You'll survive this," he'd said, not looking at me. "Lightning strikes. You don't." I was seventeen, convinced my crushed heart would never heal. He was wrong about that, right about everything else.

Now, at his funeral, David was still talking about baseball. I caught his eye across the room. For a second, the old familiar resentment flared—how he'd never understood my father, how he'd tried to mold Dad into something more palatable, more normal. But then lightning flashed again, illuminating David's exhausted face, the new wife's mascara-streaked cheeks.

They'd taken care of Dad when I couldn't. They'd sat through his rambling stories about weather patterns and watched him decline with a patience I'd never possessed. The geometry of the situation shifted.

I stood up, my heels clicking on the linoleum. "Dad hated baseball," I said. The room went quiet. "But he loved what it taught him about probability. About how the impossible happens." I paused. "Like lightning striking twice. Like second chances."

David met my gaze, and something passed between us—not forgiveness, exactly, but acknowledgment. Of the geometry of loss, of how we'd all failed each other in different ways. Outside, thunder rattled the windows. The storm was breaking, finally.

I adjusted the hat. Dad had been right about some things. Lightning strikes. We don't—we become something else entirely.