How to Talk to a Widower

do, spend the best years of his life alone?”
    “Of course not,” Mandy says.
    “I’m sure you know that it’s been well documented that happily married people are quicker to remarry.”
    “I’ve heard that,” Mandy says, nodding like a dashboard bobble-head.
    “So, Mandy,” Claire says, bringing it home. “You know any single women in these parts?”
    Mandy grins widely, happily vanquished. “I’m a realtor. I’ve shown the houses of every divorced woman in town.”
    “Mandy,” Claire says with a smile, looping her arm through Mandy’s elbow. “We are going to get along famously.”
    And that’s when Mike arrives, panting slightly as he comes through the door. “Hey, Doug,” he says, coming right up to me and shaking my hand. “Sorry I’m late. I had to file a brief first thing in the morning.”
    “Late for what?” I say, taking an extra beat to figure it out. I turn to Claire, who winks at me. “Just say yes,” she says, flashing her brightest smile.
    “Wait a minute,” Mike says. “She told me you wanted to meet me here.”
    “She lied. She does that.”
    “It’s true,” Claire says with a happy grin, leading Mandy to a vacant table. “I do.”
    Mike nods, looking uncomfortable. “Well, as long as we’re both here, can we at least have a cup of coffee?”
    “I don’t drink coffee.”
    “Jesus, Doug,” he says, shaking his head forlornly. “There are only so many times I can apologize before the words just lose their meaning.”
    I exhale slowly and nod my head. “Water’s fine.”
    Mike smiles, not triumphant, just glad, quickly looking away before the moment turns awkward, and I feel a surge of tenderness toward him.
    Marrying Hailey and moving out to New Radford had meant becoming friendly with a different sort of man than my younger, drunker, wilder single friends back in Manhattan. The men I met in Hailey’s circle were all husbands and fathers either on the cusp or already descending into the tide pool of middle age. These men were all adrift in an alien landscape of mortgages and second mortgages, marriages and second marriages, children, child support, affairs, alimony, tuition, tutors, and an endless barrage of social functions. And all of their living had to be squeezed into those few hours on the weekends that they weren’t working their asses off to pay for the whole mess. I’d always assumed that the people who lived in those fancy houses in the suburbs were financially better off than I was, and only once I’d joined them did I come to understand that it’s all just a much more sophisticated and elaborate way of being broke. There’s the jumbo mortgage, the home equity loan to renovate the kitchen and bathrooms, the two or three monthly luxury car payments; before you know it, you’ve spent a hundred grand of post-tax income before you’ve put the first piece of bread on your table. Curse of the middle class, my ass. They do it to themselves, all because they’ve got this Hollywood Christmas movie notion of what their life is supposed to look like. It’s a tenuous existence built precariously on a foundation of colossal debt, and one miscalculation, one meager bonus or bad investment or unforeseen expense, can bring the whole thing crashing to the ground. In time, I came to understand that the idyllic streets of New Radford were to a large extent an illusion, and, charged with the responsibility of maintaining this illusion, it was understandable that even the most well-preserved men would start to show some stress fractures. And so they lost their hair and gained some weight and their complexions grew pallid, their eyelids heavier, their wit sour. And while some of them were smart, worldly, and even surprisingly likable, men with whom you could spend an evening knocking back a few more than you should and setting the world to right, they still scared the shit out of me, because now that I was theoretically one of them, albeit a bastard version, it seemed that all that was left was for me to become like them. I didn’t want to get fat and bald and start indebting myself in the name of German cars and radiant heating under hardwood floors. And the greatest evidence of my love for Hailey is the fact that I didn’t pack it in and bolt for the safety and comfort of my old life and young friends back in the city.
    Instead I joined the gym and started playing racquetball with Mike Sandleman, who I met at a bar mitzvah of all places. He was only a few