How to Talk to a Widower

as easily conveyed on film, some unheralded director invented the stare-out-at-the-horizon technique to signify deep thinking. My mother, who long ago lost sight of the line between real behavior and the depiction of it, is also high on Vil Pills and alcohol, which means her relationship to reality is probably even more compromised than usual.
    “We used to come to this beach all the time when you were little,” she says without taking her eyes off the blackness of the Sound. “Do you remember?”
    “Sure.”
    She sighs. “I used to love coming here. The three of you loved to be in the water. It was practically the only thing you could agree on. And I would just sit on my blanket watching your little bobbing heads, and know that, at least for the time being, I was doing my job, and you were all happy. But then you started bringing your Walkman, and you would just lie on the blanket plugged into your headphones, lost in your own troubles, and Claire grew boobs and discovered bikinis and would run off with all those horrible boys, and that would leave Deborah with no one, so she’d bug you until you made her cry or you walked away, and then I’d end up yelling at her, and it was at that point that I stopped loving the beach.”
    I just stand quietly, an actor in the wings, waiting for my cue.
    “You’re being kind of hard on your sister, don’t you think?” she says.
    “Not really, no,” I say, stepping up onto the breakwater to join her.
    She nods, the floodlights from the restaurant casting her features in a blue glow. “Mike is a good man. Oh, sure, he’s a little dim-witted for a lawyer, and we’re going to have to have his hand surgically removed from your sister’s ass, but he loves her and, more important, she loves him. I can see it in her eyes.”
    “She owns him.”
    “Oh, get off your high horse, would you? It’s no less real. She loves with dominance, you grieve with hostility. Different strokes for different folks.”
    “Point taken.”
    “But that’s not my point. This is.” She turns to fix me with a stern look. “Cut her some slack. This is her time. With any luck, she’s only going to get married once. So don’t rain on her parade. It’s not her you’re really mad at anyway.”
    “No? Who is it I’m mad at?”
    “At Hailey, of course,” she says, looking back out to the ocean. “So am I, by the way, pissed as all get-out at her, for leaving you like this. But that’s old news, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
    “Neither do I.” The water slaps angrily at the rocks below us, splashing the air, and I can feel the tiny droplets of cold mist settling on my face like wet pinpricks.
    “Whatever Debbie’s heinous crime against you was, it was committed in the name of love, and you, of all people, should appreciate that.”
    “Self-love,” I say.
    “Oh, come on, Douglas. Is there any other kind?”
    “Listen, Mom.”
    “No, you listen. Listen to your mother. I may be a flake, and I may be three sheets to the wind, but I’ve been around a bit longer than you, and I know a thing or two that you don’t. I know Deborah can be a tight-assed bitch, but that’s genetic and there’s nothing she can do about it. But what you should understand is that it was no picnic for her, growing up with you and Claire. On your good days, the two of you were simply exclusive, and on your bad days you were downright cruel.”
    “Oh, come on. We weren’t that bad.”
    She raises a thin, plucked-within-an-inch-of-its-life eyebrow at me. “You were terrible. You still are. She is one of three, but she’s always been on the outside, looking in at the two of you, with your private jokes and your secret looks. She’d have given her right arm to be a part of it. She still would. Maybe it’s my fault, for not making you include her more. All she’s ever wanted was for you and Claire to love her.”
    It’s rare for someone to say something to you, just a few words, really, and actually make you see yourself from a completely different vantage point. But my mother is still capable of occasionally turning in a revelatory performance. “I never really thought about it like that,” I say, feeling like an asshole.
    “Of course you didn’t. You and Claire are always too wrapped up in your own dramas to notice anyone else. And that’s genetic too,” she says, flashing me a sad little grin. “Unbridled narcissism is practically your birthright.”
    In the distance, I can