How to Talk to a Widower

emphatically, pointing to his head, and even though I know he’s just busting my balls, it hurts anyway. What can I say? I’ve got sensitive balls.
    He passes the joint in my direction, but I shake my head. “Pass.”
    “Bullshit,” he says. “I stole this from your stash.”
    “Russ,” I say softly, turning to stare right at him. “If you hate me so much, why do you come here so often? And why did you ask that cop to bring you here the other night?”
    He looks up to meet my gaze, but by then I’ve looked away. I have not been able to sustain eye contact with anyone, strangers and loved ones alike, ever since Hailey died. I’m not sure what that’s about, but there it is. Russ shakes his head at me, his face contorting angrily as he fights back the tears. “This was my home, man,” he says. “You just got here, and … ” His voice cracks and he says, “Shit,” and turns away.
    “Russ,” I say.
    “Forget it,” he says. “I just came by to apologize for the other night. It won’t happen again.”
    “I don’t want to forget it.” I reach out to him, but he hurls himself out of the porch swing, flicking the joint away in disgust. “What’s going on with you, Russ?”
    “Nothing. Life’s a fucking dream. I gotta go.”
    “I wish you wouldn’t.”
    “Yeah,” he says, stepping off the porch. “Well, when was the last time one of us got what we wished for anyway?” He heads down the driveway, pulling on his headphones to drown out the world with the angry soundtrack of his life, and all I can do is what I always seem to do, watch him go.
    I don’t believe in heaven or God or an afterlife. I don’t believe that Hailey’s gone to a better place, that she’s an angel watching over me from above. I believe her soul was obliterated in the same instant her body was, when her plane hit the mountain at three hundred miles per hour and crumpled like an empty soda can. But as I sit sprawled worthlessly on the porch, eyes closed, sucking the last few puffs out of Russ’s discarded joint, I can feel Hailey so strongly that it momentarily stops the breath in my smoke-filled throat and makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
Hey, babe,
I say to her in my mind.
Is that you I feel, or just the hole where you used to be?
    But then the moment is gone, and it’s just me again, sitting on my porch rocker, lazily getting stoned in the middle of this stupidly beautiful day. I watch my sad, angry stepson growing smaller and smaller as he heads down the street and think of Hailey’s comet, flaming against his skin, and wonder how badly it hurt to get it. I watch him until he disappears, and then I stare up unblinking into the ridiculously blue sky and I do too.

6

    LANEY POTTER SHOWS UP AROUND NOON TO DROP off a meatloaf for my dinner. Hailey’s friends set up a rotation in the weeks after the crash, and while I’ve long since convinced most of them that it’s no longer necessary, Laney, who had Tuesdays, has yet to relinquish them. As soon as she arrives, she puts her meatloaf in the fridge and hugs me, kissing my cheek on her way in. She holds me tightly against the full length of her body, not at all the way a married woman should hug a single man, and she touches me a lot when she talks, asks me if I’m doing okay, and she would love it if I would just fall apart in front of her, so that she could hold me and comfort me. Laney is a rowdy redhead, big boned and curvy, with the bee-stung lips of a porn star, and a husband named Dave, a lawyer about fifteen years older than me. At thirty-four, she was the only other spouse in our circle from my generation, and she’d always been somewhat flirty with me, in a harmless, joking way, like we were in this together, but lately she’s turned things up a few notches. Nothing that couldn’t be explained away if it backfired, but there’s a pointed invitation in these comprehensive hugs of hers.
    “You don’t look too good,” she says, pulling back from her embrace, but not yet releasing me, her lower body still incidentally pressed up against mine.
    “I’ve been looking at pictures and crying.” It’s not what I mean to say, but it’s what comes out anyway. It’s such a strange condition I have; I can’t look anyone in the eye for more than a second or two, but ask me a simple question and I’ll pour my heart out uncensored. When Laney rang the doorbell, I’d been lying on the living room floor going through a shoebox of pictures