How to Talk to a Widower

then we were hot and pinging and we were teenagers again, except we were good at it, and we actually owned the car.
    We must have been trailing afterglow like fairy dust when we came into the house a short while later, because Russ paused his video game, gave us a funny look, and then shook his head and told us to get a room. “No need,” Hailey said, grabbing my hand and heading for the stairs. “We’ve already got one.”
    “Gross!” he said and, having rendered his judgment, went back to nonchalantly annihilating the undead on the widescreen. And Hailey and I went upstairs to break the laws of God and the state of New York, and we went at it deliriously, with a renewed passion, kissing and licking and drinking and devouring each other. Like there was no tomorrow.

    We’d been married for just under two years. I had left the city and moved in with Hailey and Russ, into the small Colonial she’d lived in with her first husband, Jim, until she found out he was cheating on her and kicked him out. And I was still getting used to the transformation, to being a husband in suburbia instead of a prowling dick in the city, to being a stepfather to a sullen teenager and the youngest member of the Temple Israel softball team, to dinner parties and backyard barbecues and school plays. I was still getting used to all of that when she got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado the pilot somehow missed the sky. And sometimes that life we were only just starting seems as tenuous to me as a fading dream, and I have to convince myself that it was actually real.
I had a wife,
I say to myself, over and over again.
Her name was Hailey. Now she’s gone
.
And so am I.
    But we’re not going to talk about that right now, because to talk about it I’ll have to think about it, and I’ve thought it to death over the last year. There are parts of my brain that are still tirelessly thinking about it, about her, an entire research and development department wholly dedicated to finding new ways to grieve and mourn and feel sorry for myself. And let me tell you, they’re good at what they do down there. So I’ll leave them to it.

2

    MOST DAYS, WE GET RABBITS ON OUR LAWN. SMALL brown ones, with gray speckled backs and white tufts like frayed cotton around their hindquarters. Or, more accurately, most mornings
I
get rabbits on
my
lawn. There is no
we,
hasn’t been
we
in over a year. Sometimes I forget, which is odd because usually it’s all I can think about. It’s my house. My lawn. My fucking rabbits.
    It’s supposed to be charming having rabbits on your lawn, a selling point, incontrovertible proof that you’ve made it out of the city and into the rarefied country air of suburban Westchester. We may be driving enough minivans and SUVs to singlehandedly melt the polar ice caps, may be retrofitting our stately eighty-year-old homes with enough fiber optic cable to garrote the planet, may be growing Home Depots, Wal-Marts, Stop & Shops, and strip malls like tumors on every available grassland, but we’ve got these rabbits, scurrying back and forth across the lawn like a goddamn Disney movie, so case closed. We are one with nature.
    New Radford is pretty much what you’d expect from an upper-middle-class suburb. You’ve read the book, seen the movie. It’s all here. The original masonry homes, Tudors and Colonials from the 1930s, housing expanding families and imploding marriages, German luxury cars positioned in driveways like magazine ads, bored-looking kids dressed in the faded palette of Abercrombie & Fitch congregating nefariously in parking lots, morning commuters loaded like cattle onto the Metro-North trains into Manhattan, minivans and midlife crises dotting the landscape like freckles. On every block, scores of immigrants in creaking pickup trucks with wooden sidewalls built up over the beds arrive every morning to landscape, keeping the lawns trim and fertile, the hedges along property lines tall and proud.
    It’s no doubt these lush lawns that are to blame for the burgeoning rabbit population. Once in a while I’ll actually see one emerge from the hedges and scamper across the grass, but usually I find them already poised on their haunches in the middle of the yard, still as statues, their little nostrils vibrating almost imperceptibly, as if they’re tapped into some minor electrical current running beneath the lawn. I find that that’s usually the best time to throw things at