How to Talk to a Widower

are numb. Good sex, bad sex, right sex, wrong sex; I always wake up with the munchies. Claire barrels up the driveway, sending the rabbits scattering in a frenzied panic, and brakes much too hard, so that I hear the high whine of her grinding discs, but she somehow manages to avoid whiplash. She drives the way she lives, with equal parts zeal, impatience, and ineptitude.
    “What the fuck, Doug!” she says, marching up onto the porch like she owns the place. I don’t take it personally. That’s just Claire. Even when we shared a womb, she was in charge. Two minutes older than me, she’s walking proof that our DNA is much better executed in the female form, with her flowing mane of dark hair shined to a shampoo commercial gloss, flawless olive skin, eyes the color of the evening sky, and a crooked, knowing grin that, when called upon, can effortlessly transmute into a brilliant toothy smile. Our mother wanted her to be in movies, which naturally made it the last thing Claire would ever do. I’ve got the same hair, skin, and eyes, but on me they all seem randomly placed, like rubber features slapped onto Mr. Potato Head, never quite coming together to form a cohesive whole. Claire says she got the brains and the looks and I got the spare parts in case anything ever breaks down.
    “I’ve been trying to reach you all day!” she shouts at me. “Why don’t you answer your fucking phone?”
    “I threw it at a tree.”
    She gives me a look. “Anyone I know?”
    “Mom.”
    She nods. “Next time, just say you have another call and hang up. It works for me.”
    “I’ll try to remember that.”
    “I tried the house phone too.”
    “Yeah. I never pick that up.”
    “No shit, Doug.” She fixes me with a stern look. “But you can’t go silent on me. Not after what happened.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake. Will you let go of that already.”
    “You tried to kill yourself.”
    “I fell asleep in the tub.”
    “You ODed.”
    “They were sleeping pills. I just misunderstood the recommended dosage.”
    “Generally speaking, half a bottle is too much.”
    “Let it go, Claire. You’re worse than Mom. You guys have created this whole myth of my attempted suicide. It wasn’t like that. Trust me. I was there.”
    “Maybe you were there, but you didn’t have to watch the cops kick down your front door and pull you out of the tub. You were too busy going into cardiac arrest.”
    “Enough, Claire.”
    “You were fucking blue!”
    “It was an accident.”
    She looks away, shaking her head in frustration. The truth is I don’t even remember that night. The booze and sleeping pills had scrambled my brain and I woke up in the hospital, strangely euphoric and unable to remember what month it was.
    “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” Claire says, shaking it off. She can do that, change moods like taking off a hat.
    “I’ll get a new phone,” I say, which is the closest thing to a concession I’m going to make on the subject.
    “Way ahead of you, little brother.” She reaches into her bag and tosses me a colorful box. “It’s got a camera and plays movies and picks up your dry cleaning for all I know, and I’m not leaving until you activate it.”
    “Thanks.”
    “And no throwing this one. It cost like five hundred bucks.”
    “Deal.”
    Having tended to business, she bends over to kiss my cheek. “What’s new and exciting in the grief racket?”
    “Same old same old.”
    “Your last column made me cry.”
    “Sorry.”
    “No. It was great. Mom’s got it on the fridge.”
    I smile. “Wow. I finally made it back to the fridge.”
    It was our mother’s strict policy that only A-plus work was displayed on her stainless-steel Subzero refrigerator. Growing up, Claire’s and Debbie’s schoolwork was always plastered all over it, but once I’d moved beyond first-grade spelling tests, I never made it back up there again.
    “I guess you get an A in being sad and lonely.”
    “Top of my class.”
    She gives me a fond smile and grabs me by the hair to look down at me. There are faint creases at the corners of her eyes that I never noticed before. You see the people you love the way they are in your head, but every once in a while you accidentally catch a glimpse of them in real time, and in those split seconds, as your brain scrambles to adjust to the new reality, small things inside you swerve off the road and drive over cliffs, spinning and screaming all the way down.
    “We’re getting older,”