How to Talk to a Widower

forced him to sing along to the jukebox.
    “You’re going to hurt yourself,” I say.
    “I’m going to hurt you if you take one step onto this porch.”
    “It’s my house, Stephen.”
    He turns to face me, his handsome jaw trembling with rage, eyes wide and crazed. “Do I look like I give a shit?”
    He does not, and I know he doesn’t need a particularly compelling excuse to kick my ass. Stephen has hated me for pretty much as long as he’s known me, and not just because I trashed him in his wedding toast. At Claire’s prodding, he gave me a job at his company, which I could have told him would end badly. I screwed it up in a matter of months, by sleeping with one of the administrative assistants. As it turned out, he’d been planning to fire her, but now that I’d slept with her, he was scared of the legal ramifications, although he had no such concerns when it came to firing me. I used to fuck stuff up like that all the time. I didn’t see the big deal. I do now, but you don’t go and apologize to someone five years after the events in question. And even if I did, the fact would still be etched into my permanent record as far as he’s concerned. He reached out to me and I crapped on his hand. A short while after that I got drunk at Thanksgiving dinner and punched him in the nose. They broke it up before he could hit me back, and nothing festers in a man more than an unanswered sucker punch. So I owe him an apology and he owes me a punch in the face and it’s just not a good recipe for a friendly conversation. So I stay where I am at the foot of the porch stairs and say, “Knock yourself out,” and Stephen goes back to hurling himself at my door and calling out to Claire.
    “Get the fuck out of here, Stephen. I mean it!” Claire shouts.
    “I just want to talk to you!” he shouts.
    “Then you should have called me!”
    “You won’t take my calls!”
    “Then you wait until I’m ready to take them. I don’t work for you, Stephen. You can’t schedule me like a meeting.”
    “Just get down here and open this fucking door!”
    He hits the door again and this time I can hear the wood groan, the faintest sound of preliminary splintering, but then his legs crumple under him and he drops to his knees, letting out an agonized sob as he clutches his shoulder. “Is he okay?” Claire calls down to me.
    “He’s looked better,” I say. “Why don’t you come down and talk to him?”
    “Butt out, Doug.”
    “Right. Sorry.”
    Stephen struggles to his feet, still clutching his battered shoulder, and staggers out from under the porch roof and down the steps, lurching past me to look up at Claire from the lawn, his eyeballs throbbing with desperation. “Please, Claire,” he says, his voice ragged and hoarse. “Don’t do this.”
    “I have to,” she says softly.
    “I love you.”
    “No. You love having me. I could be anyone, really. Now go home!”
    “Is there someone else? Is that what this is about?”
    “Okay. I’m going to start throwing things now,” Claire says, tossing up her hands exasperatedly before disappearing from the window.
    Stephen looks at me. “That’s it, isn’t it? She’s having an affair.”
    “That’s not it,” I say, shaking my head.
    I register a dark blur in the upper corner of my eye and then we both jump as a pair of Rollerblades lands with a hard thud on the grass between us. “Jesus Christ, Claire!”
    “No, Stephen,” she shouts down at him. “There’s no one else. There has to be someone to begin with for there to then be someone else. And for me, there is no one at all, and that’s why I’m leaving you.”
    “You’re not making any sense!” he cries, approaching the window. Claire drives him back by throwing down the Louisville Slugger baseball bat that Russ has dutifully handed to her. The bat lands on its handle, carving out a fist-sized divot in the lawn.
    “Fuck!” Stephen shouts, throwing himself against the wall of the house. “Will you just calm down for a minute!”
    “Go home, Stephen. I swear to God I’ll call the cops.”
    By now I suspect that at least one of the many neighbors standing on their porches watching the spectacle with growing consternation has beaten her to it. Things like this don’t generally happen on our block.
    Meanwhile, Stephen mutters something unintelligible, pushes himself off the wall, and steps under the window again. “I love you, Claire,” he calls up to her. “I may not be the most exciting