How to Talk to a Widower

meatloaf more than anything else.

    Still, I’m bummed when she’s gone. I want to touch someone, to kiss and lick and suck on them and hear them writhe and surge beneath me. I want to taste the tart sweetness of a woman’s mouth, want to be naked and sweating and tangled up in the hot wetness of Laney Potter’s heaving thighs.
    “I’m horny,” I complain to Claire over the phone. We talk every day.
    “And you feel guilty about it.”
    “I guess.”
    “Don’t.”
    “Okay. I’m glad we had this talk.”
    “I’m serious, Doug. It’s perfectly natural. Everybody fucks.”
    “It seems kind of soon.”
    “To get married, maybe. To date, possibly. But to get laid? That’s purely physiological. It’s no different than taking a dump.”
    “Somehow, I’ve never connected the two.”
    “It’s exactly the same thing. Something building up inside of you that needs release.”
    “It just doesn’t seem right.”
    “Get over yourself, little brother. If some horny hausfrau is willing to make booty calls, then pick up the damn phone and get busy. You spent the better part of your life wishing you had a number to call for something like that. Well, now you do.”
    “It can’t end well.”
    “It hasn’t even started and you’re already worried about the ending,” Claire says exasperatedly. “Look at it this way. The first few times you have sex, it’s going to suck. You’re like a born-again virgin, carrying all this emotional baggage. You’ll have trouble keeping it up, or you’ll come too soon, or not at all, and you’ll get all depressed afterwards. So you might as well get all that shit over with now, so that it’s out of your system by the time you meet someone real.”
    “Thanks for the confidence booster.”
    Claire laughs. “It’s what I do.”
    I sigh. “She’s a married woman.”
    Claire sighs right back at me, mimicking my resigned tone. “You live in New Radford, little brother. That’s pretty much the only kind you’ll find there.”

    Claire is my twin sister and the voice inside my head, whether I like it or not. She was the first person I called when Hailey died. Well, that’s not exactly true. I called my mother first, sort of. It was the middle of the night and the airline had just called to tell me about the crash, and I didn’t even remember dialing the phone.
    “Hello?” my mother said, her voice still thick and syrupy with slumber. “Hello?” I could hear the darkness in her bedroom, the heavy silence I had just shattered. “Who is this?”
    I couldn’t speak. To speak would be to grant entry to the angry mob of my reality now protesting at my embassy gates. “Hello?” she said one more time, and then she said, “Creep,” and hung up on me.
    Hailey was dead and my mother thought I was a creep. It’s the little things you know you’ll always remember.
    Somewhere, in a field or a forest, the wreckage was still smoking, with luggage and body parts and charred, twisted sections of fuselage scattered all around. And somewhere, in the midst of that carnage, lay my Hailey, the same woman I had kissed good-bye only a few hours ago, the same cascading mane of blond hair, the same long legs she used to wrap around me, the same wide, knowing eyes, button nose, and thin sensuous lips I could never get enough of, they were all there, in some random place, as inanimate as the crushed and burned debris all around her. It just didn’t seem possible. I understood it to be true, but I wasn’t getting it.
    The guy in the mirror looked like he might be getting it; his face was pale and drawn, and there was something pulsating behind his eyes, some glimmer of horror that had not yet radiated out to twist his expression. But I felt nothing. I ran a quick test on the guy in the mirror. I smiled at him. He flashed back the lopsided smile of the mentally deranged. Then I made us look horrified, and then sad, like I was practicing for some Method acting class, where a bunch of skinny dweebs sit around applauding each other’s exaggerated expressions while some never-been Gloria Swanson type offers meaningless critiques between puffs on her cigarillo. Hailey was dead, and I was fucking around in the mirror. I’d always felt unworthy of her love, and if I ever needed validation of my unworthiness there it was, staring me right in the face.
    “Hailey is dead,” I said aloud, my voice filling the room like an audible fart at a dinner party. Normal people reacted violently to