How to Talk to a Widower

creative ad-libbing if it will enhance her performance. She opens her eyes and fixes Debbie with a steely glare. “He may be impaired, but he’s still the same man who looked at that ugly child and saw his beautiful daughter, and he will be the one to give you away.”
    Debbie looks at her, flushed with exasperation. “You’re all delusional,” she says.
    “We’re your family, sweetheart. Deal with it.”
    “This isn’t a family, it’s a freak show!”
    “Come on, Pooh,” I say softly. “It’s Dad. What’s the worst that can happen?”
    And that’s when the baseball comes crashing through the kitchen window. Portia shrieks and throws herself to the ground; Claire drops her wineglass, which shatters on the imported tiles of the kitchen floor as the window erupts into a spray of glass over the food on the counter. Outside, Rudy can be heard shrieking, hysterically, and moments later, my father’s sweating face appears at the broken window. “Everyone okay in there?” he says, panting lightly.
    “Fine, Dad,” Claire says, shaken.
    Portia gets back to her feet, quietly invoking the Virgin Mary in Spanish as she brushes herself off.
    Russ appears in the window next to my father, looking nervous and guilty. “Fuck,” he says.
    My father’s eyes come to rest on the baseball, nesting perfectly in the center of the wild rice salad, and then he looks up at me. “Little help, Doug?”
    I retrieve the ball from the salad, flick off a few clinging bits of rice, and toss it through the window frame. He catches it in the mitt and smiles at me. “The boy can hit,” he says delightedly, and then disappears back into the yard.
    It seems to me that in a normal family, this would be the part where the bride bursts into tears over the ruined celebration, and the mother of the bride swoops in to comfort her and reassure her that everything will be okay. But I could be wrong. I don’t know very much about normal families. I just extrapolate from what I’ve seen on television.
    “God almighty,” my mother says, exhaling loudly and taking a swig of wine right from the bottle. “That man won’t rest until he kills me.” Then she reaches into the oversized designer purse perched on the stool beside her and ransacks it until her fist finally emerges clutching her trusty bottle of Vil Pills. “Forget it,” she says to Portia, who is examining the spread to see what can be salvaged. “Throw it all out.” She pops a yellow pill and washes it down with another swig from the bottle. “We are not serving food with glass shards in it. This isn’t prison.”
    Debbie, meanwhile, is suddenly all business. She whips out her cell phone like a six-shooter and turns her back on us. “Mike, hey, it’s me … no, just a typical day at the asylum. Listen, change of plans. My dad kind of trashed the dinner … Yeah. No, he was playing baseball, don’t ask … Yeah. You may want to prepare them for that … Mike, now would be the absolute perfect time for you to
not
bring that up, okay? We’re going to improvise. Just get us reservations at the Surf Club. Yeah. Seven-thirty. Call me once you have it confirmed … Okay … Me too. I’ll be waiting for your call.”
    She snaps her cell phone shut with authority and turns back to face us. “Problem solved,” she says with a strained, self-satisfied smile.
    “And that’s why they pay you the big bucks,” Claire says.
    “I got food poisoning the last time I ate at the Surf Club,” my mother says.
    “Mom,” Debbie says, her voice low and menacing, like a distant thunderhead.
    My mother shrugs. “I’m just saying. I didn’t leave the bathroom all night. It was coming out of me like Niagara Falls from both ends.”
    “Jesus Christ, Mom!” I say.
    “Sometimes at the same time,” she says, lost in her reverie.
    “We should have just eloped,” Debbie says miserably, collapsing into a chair. “We should have just gone to Vegas and been married by an Elvis.”
    “Don’t worry, Pooh,” I say. “At this rate, everyone will have all the weird out of their system by your wedding day.”
    Debbie gives me a dark look. “Everyone,” she says, “is just warming up.”
    Right then, I almost feel bad for her. But then I revert back to thinking that it serves her right for scoping men at my shiva, and I can feel the festering resentment grab hold of me once more. “I’ll go help Dad get ready,” I say, suddenly needing to be away from my little sister.
    “I’ll