How to Talk to a Widower

did shake my hand heartily at my college graduation, though, and I still had the photo to prove it.
    “Listen,” I said, wishing I’d paid heed to my earlier instincts telling me to stay home and phone it in. But these were the same instincts that had led me to believe that taking the neighbor’s Mercedes on a joyride would get me laid, and they hadn’t been right then nor had they gotten any wiser in the intervening years, so I’d gotten into the habit of basically ignoring them. “I love Hailey and what we have works. She’s beautiful, she’s smart, she’s a great mother, and she’s heads above what I ever thought I could have found for myself.”
    My mother let out a horrified gasp and the wine in her glass sloshed over the rim, staining the tablecloth red. She should really stick to Chardonnay when I’m around. “She has a child?” she croaked, placing her hand against her chest, closing her eyes and taking labored breaths, like she’d just been stabbed.
    I smiled. “Congratulations, Grandma.”
    “Sweet Jesus!” she wailed.
    “Yeah,” I said, getting up to leave. “I had a feeling you’d say that.”
    The last thing I heard as I fled the house was my mother angrily berating my father, like the whole thing was his fault. “Stanley,” she cried, “it’s going to be an absolute train wreck,” inadvertently proving one of her favorite axioms that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

4

----
    How to Talk to a Widower
By Doug Parker

    I lost something after Hailey died. I’m not sure what to call it, but it’s the device that stops you from telling the truth when people ask you how you’re doing, that vital valve that keeps your deeper, truer emotions under lock and key. I don’t know exactly when I lost it, or how to get it back, but for now, when it comes to tact, civility, and discretion, I’m an accident waiting to happen, over and over again.
    Socially, this makes me something of a liability.
    I was standing at the prescription counter at CVS the other day, stocking up on more sleeping pills, when I ran into a friend of Hailey’s. “Doug,” she said, coming over and grabbing my forearm, the diamonds on her eternity band scratching at my skin like the teeth of a small animal. “I’ve been meaning to call. How are you doing?”
    And I know the script, I’ve studied my lines. I’m supposed to say I’m doing fine, or okay, or some days are better than others, or as well as can be expected, and I swear, I opened my mouth to say something like that, but instead I held up the orange prescription bottle and said, “I take all these fucking pills, and I still can’t fall asleep at night, so I take more pills and then I have nightmares that I can’t wake up from because the fucking pills won’t let me, and when I finally do wake up I’m even more tired than before, and it’s not like I want to wake up, because when I do, I just think about Hailey and I want to go back to sleep again. How are you?”
    And she looked nervously up and down the aisle, plotting her escape, and I felt bad for her, but I felt worse for me, so I just shook my head and waved to her like she was across the street instead of close enough for me to see the dark open pores in the skin under her eyes, and I left the store.
    That sort of thing happens all the time now.
    My sister Claire says I do it on purpose, that it’s my way of keeping people at bay, and I guess there might be something to that, but I swear I don’t mean to do it. It just bursts out of me without warning, like a sudden, violent sneeze.
    A few weeks ago, a Jehovah’s Witness or a Jew for Jesus or some other freak on happy pills selling God in a pamphlet showed up at my door, smiling like a cartoon, and said, “Have you let God into your life?”
    “God can fuck himself.”
    He smiled beatifically at me, like I’d just complimented his crappy JCPenney suit. “I once felt the way you do, brother.”
    “You’re not my brother,” I hissed at him. “And you have never felt like this. If you’d ever felt like this, you would still feel like this, because it doesn’t go away. And you definitely wouldn’t be knocking on strangers’ doors with that big, shit-eating grin on your face!”
    “Hey!” he said, alarmed. “Let go of me.”
    And I realized that I had grabbed him by his skinny tie and pulled him into me, that we were nose to nose and I could see my spittle where it had landed on his chin, that he was barely out of