How to Talk to a Widower

need to take your time with this.”
    He turns slowly in his seat until he’s facing me, and fixes me with a hard stare. “What baby?”
    I nod slowly, lowering my head until it’s resting on the steering wheel, and all I can think, over and over again, is
Oh fuck.

24

    LATER, AS THE DAY DIES, RUSS AND I STAND OUT IN the front yard, tossing a baseball back and forth in the lingering daylight while Claire screams into the phone at Stephen, who’s been calling pretty much every hour on the hour to demand an audience. The block is filled with the muted sounds of suburban evening: crickets chirping, the musical jangle of dog leashes, the muted thrum of central air compressors, and the resounding slap of leather on leather as the baseball hits the woven pockets of our worn mitts. This is usually my witching hour, the time of day when the utter futility of it all threatens to overwhelm me, and by now I’m usually sitting on the porch, three or four swallows into the Jack Daniel’s.
    I just need a little time to figure this all out!
Claire’s disembodied voice, half crying, half shouting, comes floating through the windows and across the yard to us.
    “Sounds pretty bad,” Russ says, throwing me the ball. It lands in my glove with a resounding smack.
    “It is,” I say, winding up and throwing it back. I overthrow a little, but Russ extends and easily makes the catch.
    “Does anyone actually stay married anymore?”
    Throw … smack.
    “I don’t know.” Throw … smack. “It does seem like an epidemic.”
    Stop trying to make deals with me, Stephen. This isn’t the Middle Ages. You can’t negotiate a marriage!
    “Do you think you and my mom would have made it?”
    Throw … smack.
    “I’d like to think so. We had a pretty good thing going.”
    “That’s true. But then again, you were still in the honeymoon phase.”
    Throw … smack.
    I stop to think about it for a moment. “It wasn’t perfect. I mean, we fought sometimes. Your mom liked to have everything organized, and I was a total slob. And sometimes she got self-conscious about being so much older than me, and I wasn’t always as reassuring as I should have been. Sometimes I even teased her about it.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I’m an asshole.” I shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I liked the idea that someone like her would worry about losing me.”
    Throw … smack.
    “That must have pissed her off.”
    “I think it just made her sad.”
    Throw … smack.
    “So who knows what would have happened down the road?” Russ says.
    You think I like doing this? You think I woke up one morning and said to myself, Today would be a great day to fuck up Stephen’s life?
    “I think we had a shot,” I say, throwing him the ball. “Your mom had been through a bad marriage already, and it was like she knew where the trapdoors were. There was only one way it would have ended, and that’s if I screwed it up.”
    Throw … smack.
    “And what were the odds of that, right?” Russ says with a light smirk.
    “Exactly,” I say, feeling suddenly deflated. I don’t tell Russ that I can sometimes recall looking at Hailey and shamefully wondering how I’d feel when she was fifty and I was thirty-nine, wondering if I’d have it in me to stay with an older woman once she was actually old. I don’t tell him that there are times, even now, that I experience a dark sense of relief that I will never get the opportunity to fuck things up, that Hailey died before the inevitability of my ruining us, because sometimes it seems inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t have. Fucking things up, after all, was what I did. I don’t tell him that I am still trying like hell to forget the way she sometimes looked at me, like she was seeing me for the first time and wondering how she’d so grossly overestimated my character. How in those moments I didn’t think—I knew—that at some point she was going to get rid of me. There are some things you can never say out loud, even to yourself, sins of the mind that you can only file away in the hopes of absolution at some later date.
    For now, all I can do is shake off the desolation that threatens to descend like a sudden downpour, and punch the pocket of my baseball mitt invitingly. Russ grins and throws me a pop fly, and for the next little while the only sounds are the emerging crickets, the ball hitting our gloves, and Claire’s intermittent screams. There’s something nice about throwing the ball with Russ, and now