How to Talk to a Widower

going to let a minor detail like that stop you?”
    I think about Brooke from time to time, and by “from time to time” I mean pretty much all the time. I look for her when I drive Russ to school, I deliberately drive past her Brady Bunch house several times a day, and I sit in the movie theater by myself, wondering if this will be the day she comes. I calculate the odds, days of the week, number of movies playing in the multiplex. It’s something of a long shot. I consider leaving her a message to let her know when I’m going and which movie I’ll be at, but then I see her expression when she said good-bye to me, and I can’t bring myself to dial her number.
    “You know,” Claire says to me over coffee and water at Starbucks a few days later, “a therapist would probably tell you that it’s a marked improvement that you’re pining over a living woman now, instead of a dead one.”
    “That’s why I don’t go to therapy. Too much useless information.”
    “What’s that on your wrist?”
    “I got a tattoo.”
    “You did not!”
    I show her Hailey’s comet, streaking across the inside of my wrist. “That’s amazing,” she says, running her fingers over it. “You’re so counterculture.”
    “I’m edgy.”
    “You’re dark and dangerous.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “Now I’ll have to get one.”
    “Why?”
    “You can’t be the only one. It upsets the whole balance.”
    “I don’t know, Claire. A tattoo is a pretty big commitment.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “Nothing. How are things with Stephen?”
    “Okay, I guess,” she says. “We have a lot of sex now. And then we talk about the sex. We rate it. We designate areas for improvement. But soon I’ll be a fat horse, and then we won’t have very much sex, and we’ll have to come up with something else to talk about.”
    “Well, you will have a child,” I say. “There might be something to talk about there.”
    “Could be.”
    “So, are you going to move back home?”
    “I don’t know,” she says, looking sadly out the window. “I kind of like things the way they are now.”
    There has never been any helping Claire. For whatever reason, my beautiful, brilliant sister will always struggle against her own deeply ingrained compulsion to repeatedly slash and burn and rise from the ashes. She will always mistrust her own happiness, will feel compelled to subvert it, and realizing this makes me feel sad and old.
    “Do you love him?”
    “I think so.”
    “Well, that’s good.”
    “You think I should move back in, right?”
    “You’ll know when the time is right.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “Okay. I’ll tell you when the time is right.”
    “Thanks.”
    “The time is right.”
    “Oh, fuck off.”
    And so we go, back and forth, thrust and parry, pro and con, and none of it matters because I have no wisdom to impart and Claire is Claire and I’m me and we’ll both always be defective to some degree. Maybe it’s the price we have to pay for never having had to be whole on our own because we always had each other to fill in the gaps. Whatever it is, I don’t like knowing that she’ll never be truly happy, but all I can do is hope that maybe becoming a mother will wake something up in her, activate some long-dormant contentment gene. Or maybe it will be the thing that pushes her over the edge. I’d like to say I’m hopeful, but I’m still holding off turning the spare room into an office.

    Late one chilly night, I drive over to Stop and Shop to stock up on groceries. The lot looks haunted, with only a handful of cars and abandoned shopping carts rattling back and forth across the pavement propelled by the strong autumn wind, like the ghosts of shoppers past. I’m about to step out of my car when I see Laney a few rows over, loading her bags into the back of her minivan. It was inevitable, I guess. I do my shopping at night to avoid people, and I guess she does too now. She’s dressed in jeans, heels, and a clinging white sweater, and seeing her makes me inexplicably nervous. I slouch down in my seat, hoping she won’t see me. Mike told me that she and Dave are in counseling, but they’re sleeping in separate bedrooms and the prognosis is not good. I think of Laney’s little girl, hugging me tightly as I carried her to her bed, and I know I’ll always hate myself for this. I watch Laney wheel her cart over to the cart park, and I know I should just get out and say hello to her, I mean, we’re going to run into