How to Talk to a Widower

Wednesday, September 13, 2006
    Subject: It’s an Idiot’s Job

    Now, are we going to do this or not? We need to strike while the iron is hot.
    —K

    From:
[email protected]
    To:
[email protected]
    Date: Wednesday, September 13, 2006
    Subject: Not

    —D

    From:
[email protected]
    To:
[email protected]
    Date: Wednesday, September 13, 2006
    Subject: You’re Killing Me!

    Fine. I’ll give you a few weeks to think about it.
    —K

12

    DRIVING NORTH THROUGH NEW RADFORD, YOU CAN actually feel the real estate values rising like floodwaters around you. The quarter-acre plots become half acres and then acres, with increasingly larger houses set farther and farther back from the street, the minivans and Japanese sedans give way to upscale SUVs and German luxury cars, and the streets become wider, and lined with taller trees. And then you pass through a white-bricked gateway into the village of Forest Heights, and everything jumps another few income levels, and it’s between these bulging tax brackets that you’ll find the massive red-bricked center-hall Colonial of Stan and Eva Parker. I had been fiercely determined not to come to this dinner, but in the two days that Claire has been living with me, the old behavior patterns have already reasserted themselves and she has effortlessly assumed command.
    Claire turns into the driveway like it’s just another street, maintaining her speed until the last possible instant, braking just inches from the rear fender of my mother’s Audi. In the backseat, Russ, who has come along because anything is better than spending another evening at home with Jim and Angie, lets out a strangled breath and says “Fuck.” Russ is an accomplished linguist when it comes to swearing, and he can make the word mean anything he wants. In this case it’s a fuck of relief that Claire hasn’t killed us and the harrowing drive is over.
    “You have a problem with my driving, you can take the bus home,” Claire teases him, reaching back to muss his hair.
    “Like buses even come to this neighborhood,” Russ says, batting away her hand, his tone a complex adolescent amalgam of envy and contempt.
    “How do you think the help gets here?” Claire says.
    “Look,” Russ says, pointing out his window. “Isn’t that your dad?”
    My father is out in the front yard, backlit like an apparition by the late afternoon sun, wearing nothing except sky blue boxer shorts and white Nikes with black socks, throwing a baseball against the side of the house and catching it in an old, weathered mitt of mine. He performs the exaggerated windup of a major league pitcher, his flab shimmying around him like Jell-O as he follows through on the release, his silver hair plastered against his forehead with sweat. Rudy, his nurse, is hovering in the foreground with a bathrobe in his hands, desperately trying to get him to come inside and get dressed.
    “Please, Dr. Parker,” he whines. “This is so not funny.”
    “Hey, Dad.”
    His face lights up when he sees me, and he comes lumbering over with a big grin while Rudy, who looks poised to have a breakdown, chases after him, plaintively holding out the bathrobe in front of him. “Dr. Parker, please! Just put on the robe!” Rudy’s about my age, skinny, bald, perennially agitated, and no match for my bullish father, who outweighs him by a good seventy pounds and nudges him out of the way like an elephant swatting flies with his tail.
    My father drops the mitt in the grass and pulls me into a tight hug, exactly like he never did before the stroke. He smells of grass and sweat, and his back is rough and hairy against my hands. “Doug,” he says, squeezing the breath out of me. “What are you doing here?” This has become his standard greeting, a genuine query brilliantly disguised as a salutation, because he so often has no idea what’s going on, or even what year it is. Sometimes he appears to be on target, and other times he thinks I’m a kid again, coming home from school. Two years ago, my mother discovered him on the shower floor in a wet crumpled heap. He was in a coma for three days, from which he emerged vibrant and healthy but with his mind somehow folded in on itself and the impulse control of an eight-year-old boy. The doctors called it a CVA, which turned out to be an acronym for cerebrovascular accident, which turned out to be a fancy way of saying that there was nothing they could do about it. There are days when