How to Talk to a Widower

guy in the world, but I’ve always been good to you, and I’ve always tried to make you happy. I can’t make you stay if you’re going to leave me, but I think, after six years, that I deserve the courtesy of an explanation. You can throw anything down on me that you want.” He drops to his knees like a dazed fighter in the later rounds, and looks up at her, panting as the tears run unchecked down his dirty, sweat-soaked face. “I’m not going to move from this spot until you come down to talk to me, face-to-face. I’m through ducking.”
    There’s a moment of dead silence as Claire looks down at him, and then she hurls the desk chair out the window. Luckily for Stephen, it turns out he has one more duck left in him after all. I dive left and he lets out a yelp and rolls to his right as the chair lands with a heavy metallic crunch exactly where he’d been, the wheels and casters flying off in all directions like shrapnel. Rabbits run for their lives, and I wonder why I never thought of an aerial assault before. Stephen lands on his back and lets out an anguished scream that seems to go on until next week, while upstairs, Claire bursts into tears and disappears into the house.
    I pull myself to my feet and walk over to Stephen, who is still lying on his back and staring up at the sky in a catatonic haze, the way you do when you’re stoned and the clouds start looking like cartoon characters and old girlfriends. I bend down to pick up a chair wheel assembly and then sit down on the grass next to him, idly spinning it in my hands.
    “I’m sorry about your door,” he says after a while.
    “Don’t worry about it, man. You had your reasons. I’m sorry about my sister. That was uncalled-for. Really.”
    “She’s really leaving me, isn’t she?”
    “It seems that way, yeah.”
    He turns his head and looks at me, his lips quivering with emotion. “Why?”
    I rub the cool metal of the chair wheel against my palm and let out a deep sigh. “Because she’s Claire,” I say. “And that’s what Claire does.”
    He considers that for a minute, and then looks back up at the sky, nodding to himself. “I really do love her, you know?”
    “I know.”
    He gets up slowly, groaning with the effort. His right arm hangs limp, like something vital has been disconnected inside, and he starts limping toward his black Porsche, parked at the curb.
    “You sure you’re okay to drive a manual?” I say.
    He stops and turns around. “No.”
    “You want me to take you home?”
    “If you wouldn’t mind.”
    I don’t know how to drive a stick, so I take him in my Saab. He’ll send someone for the Porsche. When you’re as rich as Stephen, there’s always someone to send in these types of situations. He sits with his eyes closed in the passenger seat, his head pressed against the window, a low, steady hum coming from inside his closed mouth, like he’s singing a duet with the engine. The streets give way to boulevards and then to the highway, and soon we’re wordlessly speeding north toward the gilded forests of Greenwich in the loneliest part of the afternoon, just before the light starts to fade. Stephen doesn’t wear a seat belt, and I don’t remind him to. He looks like he’d prefer to fly through the windshield if we crash, and I know that feeling, I’m one of the founding fathers of that particular feeling. And seeing him like this, so limp and beaten, I feel an unexpected stab of empathy for him. He married the woman he loved, was as good to her as he knew how to be, and still he lost her. It’s incomprehensibly unfair, and I know that feeling too. Stephen’s only mistake was in thinking that Claire would keep on loving him. It was an understandable mistake, since she’d made it too.
    “I feel like I’m dying,” he says hoarsely as I pull through the gates and into the driveway of his Mediterranean-style mansion. Stephen is rich, handsome, and athletic, and it occurs to me that this may very well be the first time he’s ever lost the girl. There are tears in his eyes, and as much as I feel for him, I’m the last person he should be talking to about this. Later, he’ll regret having let me see him in this vulnerable state, and because he can’t take it back, he’ll just hate me more for it.
    “Look,” I say, throwing the car into park. “I know right now it seems overwhelmingly bad, but you’re in shock. I mean, between Claire leaving you and then the baby, it’s just a lot to absorb. You