How to Talk to a Widower

enrages me, so I make a show of charging noisily down the steps. That gets him moving, and he zips away to the side of the lawn, stopping at the hedges to flash me a pitying look. I’m all out of rocks, so I run at him, waving my arms and screaming like a banshee until he flees into the underbrush. When I turn back to the porch, Claire is giving me a strange look from the doorway.
    “I just like to keep them on their toes,” I say sheepishly, coming up the stairs.
    “Little brother,” she says, throwing her arm over my shoulders as we head into the house. “You really need to get out more.”

    “So what happened?”
    “It’s a long story.”
    “You said you have time.”
    “I can’t talk on an empty stomach.”
    I follow her into the kitchen. “Did you cheat on him?”
    “Nice. Adultery loves company, is that it?”
    “Did he?”
    “I wish.”
    “So what happened?”
    “Why are all the magnets on the floor?” she says, heading over to the fridge. “Oh! Shit. I don’t want to know.”
    “Claire, for Christ’s sake! Just tell me what happened already.”
    She opens the fridge and bends down, noisily sliding jars around, lifting up Tupperware lids to smell things. “Jesus,” she says, her voice echoing inside the mostly empty fridge. “Do you ever actually eat?”
    “I order in.”
    She slams the fridge closed. “I can’t wait. Let’s go out.”
    “First tell me what happened.”
    She looks at me, and then sort of collapses gently against the fridge. “Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens. And nothing ever will happen. And that,” she says, sinking down to the floor and cradling her head in her hands, “is what happened.”
    I sit down on the floor beside her. “Have you considered counseling?”
    She gives me a look. “I don’t need some sterile Freudian with a bow tie and a dirty mind to tell me I should never have married Stephen. You’ve been telling me that for years. I seem to recall you actually making your case somewhat emphatically at my wedding.”
    “I was drunk.”
    “You were jealous.”
    “Maybe. A little.”
    “But you were right, of course. And I knew it. Even walking down the aisle, I remember wondering what would happen to the video, to the wedding pictures, when it was all over. How sick is that? The surprise here is not that I’m leaving. It’s how long I actually stayed. I always meant to leave him, I just never got around to it.”
    “Why not?”
    She frowns and raises her hands in concession. “You get rich, you get comfortable, you develop all these equations and pie charts to prove to yourself that you’re actually happier than you think you are.” She shrugs. “I fell asleep at my post.”
    “So why now?”
    “Well, after Hailey died, I started seeing everything differently. I mean, you were a mess—you still are, by the way—and I would think of you sitting out here alone, all grief stricken and disconnected from everyone, and this is going to sound horrible, but instead of feeling sorry for you, I was actually envious of you. You were miserable and alone and I was fucking jealous. Because there’s something beautiful in grief, isn’t there? It’s like mourning is your chrysalis and when the time comes you’ll be reborn as this beautiful butterfly. And then I had to ask myself, when you start feeling envious of your fucked-up, bereaved brother, what does that say about you?”
    “That you’re deeply disturbed?”
    “That you’re even more fucked up and heartbroken than he is, you just don’t know it.”
    “And now you do?”
    “Now I do.”
    “Listen, Claire, I know that losing your wife in a plane crash and drinking yourself to sleep every night may seem somewhat glamorous, but just between you and me, it’s really not all it’s cracked up to be.”
    She gives me a shove. “You know what I mean.”
    “I’m not sure I do yet. Get to the part where you get knocked up.”
    She laughs softly and leans the back of her head against the fridge. “The irony of the whole thing is that we barely even have sex anymore. It’s nothing less than a miracle that I haven’t cheated on that man, a horny chick like me. It was just this one night, this anomaly, where he had no late meetings, and no calls to make, and there was nothing on TV, and I guess we were both bored, so we had sex. It was that or cleaning out my closet. And it was nothing special, believe me. I mean, I forgot about it as soon as it was over. But then, a few weeks