How to Talk to a Widower

birthday.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Birthdays can be rough.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “How old are you?”
    “Thirty-six. And divorced. And mother of an angry twelve-year-old.”
    “You’re only as old as you feel.”
    “Well, then I’m fifty.”
    “You look outstanding for fifty.”
    She smiled. “It’s just not what I thought it would be, you know?”
    “Thirty-six?”
    “Life.”
    “Ah, life,” I said, just like somebody wiser than me might say it. “Don’t get me started.”
    She flashed me a wry grin. “How old are you?”
    “I’m twenty-five. But I feel twelve.”
    She snorted when she laughed, but I liked it anyway, and so I made her do it a few more times, and then she opened up and started to tell me about her divorce and her troubled son, and her bad luck with men. She was thirty-six, divorced, and a single mother. I was twenty-five and still waiting for something to happen to me. We were from two different universes, suddenly thrown together in the twilight zone of my office. It wasn’t just that she was too old for me; it was that she was too pretty, too sad, too wise, and altogether too worldly for someone like me. But something had happened, some hiccup in the cosmos, and we could see behind each other’s curtains, and we were talking and laughing, and she was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.
    “Listen,” I said, after a little bit. “We can go on like this all day, but today is your birthday, and in my family, a birthday means one thing, and one thing only.”
    “And what’s that?” she said.
    “Great Adventure.”
    “What, the theme park?”
    “So you’re familiar with it.”
    “We’re at work.”
    “I don’t know about you, but I won’t be missed.”
    “We can’t just leave work and go to an amusement park.”
    “Normally I would agree. Or I’d pretend to agree so that I seemed responsible. But it’s your birthday today. My hands are tied.”
    “I have a budget meeting at ten-thirty.”
    “Blow it off. I’ve never seen someone who needs to ride Nitro as badly as you do right now.”
    Hailey looked at me for almost a full minute, I mean, really looked at me, like she was studying a map. “I’m eleven years older than you.”
    “So if I were thirteen, then this would be weird.”
    She shook off her smile. “Just tell me why?”
    “Because the more you talk, the more I like you. And because you’re so beautiful that it actually hurts if I look at you for too long. And I’m sure you get asked out a lot, by older, smoother men than me, but they’re asking you out because you’re good-looking, and there’s nothing wrong with that, I mean, you have to start somewhere, but you see, normally that would be exactly why I didn’t ask you out, so the fact that I am now means that we’ve already passed all of that.” I took a deep breath. “And because I think you would really like me, if you gave me a chance.”
    Her face turned red, and she didn’t smile like I’d hoped she would, but she didn’t look away. She did not look away. “Are you always this honest?”
    I nodded. “Almost never.”
    “But that’s honest too.”
    “I know. It’s tricky.”
    “It’s nothing personal, Doug. I’ve just had some bad luck with men.”
    “That’s because you don’t know the secret.”
    “What’s the secret?”
    “You have to train us when we’re young.”
    And this time her smile was like a ray of sunlight, the kind that pierces the clouds on an angle and makes you think about heaven. And so we drove her car out to Great Adventure, and we rode Nitro and The Great American Scream Machine and The Batman Coaster and Kingda Ka, and I bought her a funnel cake and a sparkler and sang “Happy Birthday” to her on the Ferris wheel and she kissed me at the top. And sometimes that’s all it takes, no epiphanies, no revelations, just funnel cake on a Ferris wheel and one crazy, miraculous day that should never have happened, but somehow did. It was fate, I thought. Destiny. But I only thought those things because I was in love and didn’t know any better.
    I didn’t know about the accidents yet.

9

    CLAIRE SHOWS UP IN HER PIMPED-OUT ESCALADE and her Gucci sunglasses and her three-hundred-dollar jeans. It’s been a few hours since Laney left, and I’ve just woken up from a short postcoital nap to sit on the porch and eat Cap’n Crunch out of the box until my teeth