How to Talk to a Widower

cheekbone. A smattering of minor nicks and lacerations covers the left side of his face.
    “Impressive,” I say. “What did the other guy look like?”
    “Like a big guy with his knees on my chest pounding the shit out of me.”
    I nod. “You want to tell me about it?”
    “It was just a stupid fight, Doug. No need to get all Dr. Phil on me.”
    We’re sitting on two of four attached chairs that line the hall outside the guidance counselor’s office. “So, what, I’m supposed to go in and talk to your guidance counselor now?”
    He nods indifferently. “She’s waiting for you.”
    “I’m kind of relieved, actually. I thought I’d have to talk to the principal.”
    “Dead mother gets you an express ticket to the school shrink.”
    “I see.” A group of three cute girls sashays past us in short, short, hip-hugging skirts and tight, midriff-baring T-shirts, talking and laughing a mile a minute. We turn as one to watch them head down the hall. “I did not have girls like that when I went to high school,” I say.
    “Neither do I,” Russ says glumly, staring at the floor. I look at him, bruised and battered, still wordlessly grieving, but, unlike me, forced out into the world every day, to long for unattainable girls and do battle in the unforgiving halls of high school, with no one to come home to when the day is done, and I suddenly feel like a selfish, self-pitying prick.
    “We don’t talk very much, do we?” I say.
    He looks up at me. “No. We don’t.”
    “That’s probably my fault.”
    “Probably.” He shrugs, and holds his bloody hand up to the light, studying his shredded skin closely. “Jimbo and Angie are moving to Florida.”
    “What?”
    He nods miserably. “They dropped the bomb last night. It’s the Sunshine State, you know.”
    “Shit, Russ. That sucks. When?”
    “After Christmas.”
    I don’t know how to process this news. “What the hell is in Florida?”
    “I don’t know, some job or something. I kind of stopped hearing everything after the word ‘Florida.’”
    “Are you going to go?”
    “What choice do I have?” he says, glaring at me. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to live, right?”
    I sigh, and put my head in my hands. “It’s just not that simple, Russ.”
    “It is from where I’m sitting.”
    “Listen,” I say, feeling completely out of my depth. “He’s your father, and your sole legal guardian. I’m in no position to tell him what to do.”
    “Well, then. That makes two of us.”
    There’s an important conversation to be had here, questions to be asked, assurances to be made, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to do it. “Let me just go in and pay your bail or whatever, and then we’ll go get some lunch and talk this through, okay?”
    “There’s nothing else to say.”
    “Then we’ll eat in silence,” I say, getting to my feet. “Don’t worry, I’m used to it.”
    “Doug,” he says as I’m opening the office door.
    “Yeah.”
    “Could you please just talk to him?” His uninjured eye is wide, red, and earnest, and right at that moment I feel an overwhelming surge of affection for this sad, fucked-up kid, and the sudden tremor in my chest tells me that there are parts of my heart still able to be broken.
    “Okay,” I say, thinking resignedly, as I always do with regard to talking to Jim, that no good will ever come of it.

    Russ’s guidance counselor, Ms. Hayes, is younger than I expected, with straight black hair and milk-bath skin. “Mr. Parker,” she says, shaking my hand. “Thanks for coming. I’m Brooke Hayes.” Her hair bounces as she sits back down, and I can see whole constellations of earrings, hoops and studs and bands, hiding under it, definitely not standard issue for high school guidance faculty.
    “You’re the guidance counselor?” I say.
    “I get that a lot,” she says. Her voice has the laid-back, slightly raspy quality of a rock singer, like she’s just speaking between the measures and is about to break into a ballad of lost love.
    “You look kind of young, that’s all.”
    Her smile spreads like a brushfire across the open meadow of her face. “Well, thanks, I guess. But I’m fully licensed, I assure you. You look kind of young to be Russ’s stepfather too. What are you, thirty?”
    “Twenty-nine.”
    “Twenty-seven,” she says. “I guess they figured the kids would relate to me.”
    “Do they?”
    “Sometimes.” She folds one knee under her, and beckons to the