How to Talk to a Widower

couldn’t have been more than a few pieces of her, splinters of bone and charred flesh and hair, all fused together in some grisly collage, some horror movie prop resembling nothing remotely human. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this whole experience, it’s that cremation is the way to go. It’s clean, efficient, and, most important, leaves nothing to the imagination. We could turn all the cemeteries into forests and playgrounds.
    Russ and I stand solemnly in the rain, surrounded by white and gray tombstones that rise out of the earth like jagged teeth as far as the eye can see. We peer doggedly at the etchings on Hailey’s as if looking for edits or amendments that might have been made since we last were here.
    “I can’t believe it’s been over a year already,” Russ says.
    “I know.”
    “Sometimes it feels like a week, and other times it seems like so long ago, like I can’t even remember what life was like when she was here.”
    “Do you come out here a lot?” I say.
    “When I can get a lift.”
    “You’ve never asked me.”
    Russ nods, his hair slick and matted with rain. “I didn’t want to bring you down.”
    “That would be a neat trick, considering where I am these days.”
    “Do you ever talk to her?”
    “I hear her in my head all day.”
    He turns to me. “But do you talk to her?”
    I brush the rain-soaked hair out of my eyes. “Not really,” I say. “No.”
    “Well, I hope you won’t mind if I do.”
    “Of course not.”
    Russ steps forward, brushes some leafy debris off the small, square-trimmed hedges at the foot of the grave, and then kneels, leaning his head against the stone, eyes closed. He does this without a trace of his usual self-consciousness, and I know that hearing him speak to her will be more than I can bear, so I step back a few paces and turn around. A funeral procession has just arrived on the other side of the cemetery, and I watch the small parade of red and black umbrellas bouncing almost jauntily among the graves, following the pallbearers as they make their way across the geometric landscape of glistening tombstones.
    I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she’s gone. And so am I.
    I watch the funeral for a little while longer, until I hear a rasping sound behind me, and turn to find Russ weeping violently against Hailey’s tombstone, his face twisted into a mask of anguish, rocking back and forth like he’s in the grip of unseen gale-force winds. “Russ,” I say, stepping over to him. “It’s okay.” But of course it isn’t, and he knows it, and he presses his fingertips desperately against the stone, desperate to feel something more than just the cold, wet granite. I bend down, unsure of how to approach him, but as soon as I touch his shoulder he collapses into me, pulling me down to my knees in the soaked grass, burrowing his face into the crook of my elbow, clutching my arm as he lets out a long, shuddering cry. And as my body shakes along with his, I look down to where his wet hair is falling away from his neck, and I can see the tattoo of Hailey’s comet glistening on his drenched skin, staring right up at me like an accusation, and I decide that, afterlife or not, it’s high time I had a talk with Jim.

19

    THE PUBES IN THE WASTEBASKET HAD BEEN THE first clue.
    Hailey stood naked in her bathroom that morning, poised to step into the shower, when a ball of fur in the wastebasket caught her eye. She let out a small, startled cry, thinking it was a mouse, but even as she did, she saw that the mound of hair, resting in the basket on some discarded soap packaging, was not moving. She peered down into the wastebasket, still half asleep, trying to comprehend what she was seeing. At first she thought it was a Furby, one of those toy creatures that had been all the rage a few Christmases ago. Maybe Russ’s had broken and he’d thrown it out. She crouched down to get a better look, and only then did she see that the strange pile was actually a mound of pubic hair. More specifically, it was Jim’s pubic hair. It made for a perplexing picture, Jim standing naked over the wastebasket, shaving his pubic region. She stared at the dark, kinky mass, which, she now observed, had reddish highlights. She’d been married to Jim for almost ten years, and had never noticed that his pubic hair had red highlights. Was this a spousal failing on her part? Did other wives notice things like that? She stood back up, frowning slightly. Why was