How to Talk to a Widower

shrapnel flying across the lawn. The rabbit looks at me like I’m an asshole. And my mother is probably still talking, even though no one can hear anymore.

3

    MY MOTHER WARNED ME NOT TO MARRY HAILEY. She also told me when I was five years old that I would contract an incurable venereal disease from the toilet seats in public bathrooms, and that the exhaust from passing buses would turn my lungs black if I didn’t hold my breath, and that fast food was generally made out of processed rat meat. So by the time I was twenty-six, which is how old I was when I told her I’d be marrying Hailey, there were credibility issues.
    “You positively can’t marry her,” she told me over dinner, her thin eyebrows bowing under the weight of her conviction.
    I had taken the train from Manhattan up to Forest Heights to see the folks and share the good news that their historically most useless child was actually going to be getting married. They weren’t taking it well.
    “It will be an unmitigated disaster,” my mother said despondently, clutching her wineglass so tightly I worried it might shatter and cut her spa-softened hands.
    “You barely know her.”
    “I know enough. She’s too old.” My mother had been a moderately acclaimed stage actress back in the day, nominated for a Tony award for her portrayal of Adelaide in
Guys & Dolls,
and even though the last
Playbill
in her scrapbook was older than me, like most retired thespians, she had never actually stopped acting. She was always enunciating, always projecting, always selling it to the cheap seats, her eyes wide and expressive, her mouth forever poised to break into some concrete emotion to which she could finally commit.
    “She’s only thirty-seven.”
    “A thirty-seven-year-old divorcée. What every mother dreams of for her son!” Divorcées were only slightly higher than pedophiles on my mother’s extensive checklist of defective people.
    “Her husband was screwing around,” I said, annoyed by my defensive tone.
    “And why do you think that is?”
    “Oh, Jesus, Mom, I don’t know. Because he’s a dick?”
    “Doug!” my father said reflexively, waving his hand demonstratively across the dinner table, in case I’d missed it. “We’re eating.” This would be as much participation as we could expect from him, and you would think the chief urologist at a major New York City hospital could handle the word “dick” with his dinner.
    “Sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to wake you over there.”
    “Don’t speak to your father like that.”
    “Don’t speak to me like this.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like I’m a child. I’m twenty-six years old, for Christ’s sake.”
    “There’s no need to be vulgar.”
    “I thought the situation called for it.”
    My mother downed her Merlot like a whiskey shot, absently holding her glass out for my father to refill. “Stan,” she said wearily, “say something to him.”
    My father put down his fork and chewed thoughtfully on his London broil, thirty chews per swallow. When I was a kid, I would count them to myself to pass the time, placing silent wagers that this would be the night he only chewed twenty-nine times. I never won, and that’s as good an illustration of my luck as anything else. Even betting against myself, I could always find a way to lose.
    “You’re not exactly known for your sound decision making, Douglas,” my father said.
    Okay. Here’s what I’ve learned. You can live your life being nice to everyone, you can be a loving son, a moderately decent student, never do hard drugs or impregnate anyone’s daughter, be an all-around good guy and live in harmony with all of God’s creatures. But crash one stolen Mercedes in front of the police station when you’re fifteen years old and they’ll never let you forget it. My mother was scandalized, terrified about what the neighbors would think, although in this case she was somewhat justified since it was actually the neighbor’s car, but that’s why you pay for insurance, right? If you never file a claim, then they’ve beaten you.
    “And you’re not exactly famous for your emotional support,” I responded to my father.
    “I take issue with that, Doug.”
    Stanley Parker did not get pissed. He “took issue.” He was an Ivy League–educated doctor, trim and fit at sixty-five, with lush silver hair and gold-rimmed spectacles, clinically aloof despite his deceptively warm Mentadent smile. I had no memory of ever being hugged by him. He