How to Talk to a Widower

aura, like the celestial forces of the universe are a team of writers on the serialized television show of your life, charged with concocting outrageously convoluted plotlines designed to achieve resolution by the end of the season. No one wants to believe that it’s all completely random, that the direction of our lives is nothing more than a complex series of accidents, little nuclear mushroom clouds, and we’re just living in the fallout.
    As near as I can figure, these were the accidents that shaped my life. If Hailey had never married Jim, then he never would have cheated on her with his ex-girlfriend Angie. And if Jim hadn’t forgotten about the nanny cam in the basement playroom, he never would have gotten caught when he did. Since it was Jim who had installed the nanny cam, most shrinks would see this as unassailable evidence that he wanted to get caught, but they just say that because there’s no prevailing psychological term for a dumbass. And if Hailey had never divorced Jim, then years later she would not have ducked into what she thought was an unused office to have herself a quick, single-mother cry. It was actually only a mostly unused office. It was mine. And if I hadn’t picked that day, of all days, to actually show up for work, I never would have found her there. If I’d met her at any other time, under any other circumstances, she never would have gone for me. Women of her caliber never did. And, knowing my own limitations, I never would have had the nerve to ask her out. But by then, the accidents had built up a momentum all their own, like a tornado whipping through the heartland, and we were sucked up into the twister like a couple of grazing cows.

    I stepped into my tiny office at
M Magazine
that morning and there was Hailey, crying at my desk. “Oh,” I said, which is what you say when you find a beautiful stranger crying at your desk.
    She looked up at me through her tears, blew her nose into a twisted, crumbling tissue, and said, “Can you please come back in a few minutes?”
    She was a VP in ad sales, and I was an articles editor and columnist, which meant our paths rarely crossed, but I knew who she was, had already nursed my little office crush on her and moved on. After all, she was beautiful, older, and an officer in the company. But now she was crying at my desk, and there’s nothing like a weeping woman to bring out your inner white knight. So I stepped out of my office and closed the door, not only to give her privacy, but also to keep any other white knights from joining the fray, because I was not up for a joust. I took a quick walk and picked up two coffees. I don’t drink coffee, but as an old girlfriend once said to me, sometimes you have to fake it for the greater good of mankind. When I returned, Hailey was reapplying her makeup. “Here,” I said, placing the cup in front of her and leaning against the wall.
    She smiled at me through the last of her tears, and she was ragged and worried and ever so slightly damaged and that’s what you need with a beautiful woman, some chink in her armor that gives you the guts to approach. Otherwise, you just circle like a scavenger, watching the other predators move in. “Thanks,” she said, taking a long, grateful sip. “Who are you?”
    “I’m Doug,” I said. “This is my office.”
    “Hailey.” We shook hands across the desk. Hers were small and soft, her fingernails bitten and unpolished. “I’m sorry about this. I’m just having a bad morning.”
    I waved my hand. “I just wish I’d known you were coming. I’d have brought donuts. And Kleenex.”
    She grinned. “I’m usually not like this.”
    “It’s not your fault. I always have this effect on women.”
    The grin escalated into a full-on smile. It was a killer smile, a warm, piercing humdinger of a smile that I felt in my thighs. Women like this generally didn’t smile at me like that. Usually they flashed polite, blinking smiles like hazard lights that said
Keep moving, nothing to see here.
But Hailey said, “I don’t want to go to my office.”
    “So stay here,” I said.
    “I should let you get back to work.”
    “If you knew me, you’d know how ridiculous you just sounded.”
    She looked at me thoughtfully. She had long, honey-colored hair, skin like burnished ivory, and dark almond eyes that opened wide when she spoke and crinkled magnificently when she smiled. “Today is my birthday,” she said.
    “Happy