How to Talk to a Widower

them.
    Bugs, Thumper, Roger, Peter, Velveteen. I name them after their storied counterparts and then I try my best to brain them. Because they remind me of where I am, marooned out here in this life I never planned. And then I get pissed at Hailey, and then I get sad about being pissed at her, and then I get pissed about being sad, and then, never one to be left out, my self-pity kicks in like a turbine engine, and it’s like this endless, pathetic spin cycle where all the dirty laundry goes around and around and nothing ever gets clean. So I throw things at the rabbits. Small rocks mostly—I keep a stash stacked like a cowboy’s desert grave on the front porch—although, in a pinch, I’ve been known to throw whatever is on hand: the odd unopened beer can or a gardening implement. I once threw an empty Bushmills bottle that landed neck down in the grass with enough force to stay planted for a few days, like a whiskey sapling.
    Oh, calm down. It’s not like I’ve managed to hit one of the little buggers yet. And they know it too, barely moving when my missiles hit the lawn three feet behind them or a yard to the left. Sometimes they’ll cock an ear, other times they’ll just look at me, daring me, mocking me, trash-talking with their beady rabbit eyes.
Is that all you got? Shit, my grandmother throws harder than that.
    Energizer Bunny, Playboy Bunny, Easter Bunny, Harvey, Silly-Rabbit-Trix-Are-For-Kids Rabbit, White-Rabbit-With-The-Pocket-Watch from
Alice in Wonderland
. I’m sitting on my front porch, stone in hand, taking aim at the one that’s wandered onto the driveway, when my cell phone rings. It’s my mother, calling to make sure I’m coming to a family dinner celebrating my little sister Debbie’s upcoming wedding.
    “You’re coming for dinner,” she says.
    There’s no way in hell I’m coming for dinner.
    “I don’t know,” I say. The rabbit takes a tentative hop in my direction. Harvey. I draw a bead on him and throw my stone. It goes high and wide and Harvey doesn’t even dignify it with a sideways glance.
    “What’s not to know? You’re so busy all of a sudden?”
    “I don’t really feel like celebrating.”
    Debbie is marrying Mike Sandleman, a former friend of mine, whom she had the great fortune to meet in my house while I was sitting shiva, which was something I hadn’t really intended to do. I’ve never been much of an affiliated Jew—Ben Smilchensky, who sat at the desk next to me at Beth Torah Hebrew School, used to bring Batman comics that we would slide between the pages of our Aleph-Bet letter books, and that was pretty much the beginning of the end for me. It seemed absurd to start being religious now, at the very moment that God had finally tipped his hand and revealed that he didn’t actually exist. I knew because I was there, standing beside Russ at the cemetery, watching from miles above as Hailey’s coffin was lowered on two handheld cloth belts. Even floating way up there, I could hear the creak and scrape of the coffin as it bumped against the hard rock sides of her freshly hewn grave, and then the sharp thuds of the flint-laden earth hitting the dry, hollow wood as they shoveled in the first few mounds of dirt. She was underground. My Hailey was underground, in a gaping wound of a grave in the Emunah Cemetery just past the reservoir, a half-mile from the Sprain Brook Parkway, where we used to drive in the autumn to see the leaves change colors. Hailey jokingly called it “foilage,” and that became our own little word for it. And now she was underground and I knew I would always think of it as foilage and autumn would always hurt, and I’d probably have to move out west, someplace where they had fewer seasons.
    So don’t talk to me about God.
    But my twin sister Claire insisted that the shiva ritual would be good for Russ, and I may not believe in God, but I believe in guilt and no one wants to dick around with eternity, even if it isn’t there. So we sat shiva, and it was as bad as I’d anticipated, sitting there all day with Russ, asses sweating against the vinyl seats of the low mourner’s chairs provided by the Hebrew Burial Society, nodding and pursing my lips at the endless parade of rubberneckers through our living room: friends, neighbors, and relatives offering lame conversational gambits from flimsy plastic catering chairs, before heading into the dining room to grab something from the buffet. Yes, there was a buffet: bagels, lox, salads,