How to Talk to a Widower
already told me about what a pretty face she has. I’m asking you about her ass. It’s a yes/no question. Listen, put your husband on the phone.”
“And was that by C-section or vaginal delivery? Okay. Find out and get back to me.”
“It’s got nothing to do with trusting you. All due respect, Rabbi, but your profession is in no way a guarantee of your aesthetic sensibilities.”
Ultimately, she settles on Suzanne Jasper, a divorcée in her early thirties who is being championed by Mike. She is his next-door neighbor, and he would have dated her himself if he weren’t madly in love with Debbie. I’m fast learning that attached men want to set me up with the women they secretly lust after, to date vicariously through me. They would if they could, but they can’t so I should. According to Mike, Suzanne’s life fell apart a few years ago when the fourteen-year-old girl her husband had met in a chat room and arranged to meet at a motel in Connecticut turned out to be an FBI agent trolling for sexual predators. Judging from her nervous demeanor over dinner at Mineo’s Italian Bistro, Suzanne is still getting over the shock of it all. Her smile looks strained, like she’s lifting weights under the table, and her laugh, which comes too quickly, is jagged and high-pitched. But she’s got piles of long blond hair, smoky blue eyes, and a sharp, self-deprecating wit. And she likes me instantly because I have all my hair, and no ex-wife or competing kids. I have been touched by an act of God. I am appealingly damaged: young, slim, sad, and beautiful.
The problem with dates is that you invariably have to talk about what you do, and for me that will mean talking about my column, which will mean talking about Hailey, which is not something I want to do. So instead we talk about our childhoods and siblings—I can usually get some good mileage out of being a twin—and then we talk about movies, which is fine with me because I’ve seen everything, then the colleges we attended, and then, scraping the bottom of the conversation barrel, bad date stories.
And things are going fine, or as fine as things can go between two shaky, broken people whose previous lives were shattered overnight, and she’s undeniably sexy, in a muted, bug-eyed sort of way, and I’m actually starting to wonder what it would be like to kiss her, and what kind of underwear she wears, when her cell phone rings. “Oh crap,” she says, flipping the phone closed. “Sam’s sick.”
Suzanne has two young boys, Sam and Mason, and they seemed cute enough when I came to pick her up at her house an hour ago. But when we walk in now, Sam, the five-year-old, is standing on a chair and puking violently into the kitchen sink, and Mason, the three-year-old, is perched on the kitchen table, crying his head off. The babysitter, a chubby high school girl with a mouthful of braces and dime-sized chin zits, looks panicked and practically throws herself at Suzanne’s feet when we walk through the door.
“Oh my God! How could he throw up so much?” Suzanne says, eyeing a large puddle of puke on the hallway floor.
“That was me,” the girl says, embarrassed. “The smell of vomit makes me sick.”
“Perfect,” Suzanne says grimly. She grabs a twenty from her bag. “Go home, Dana.”
“Are you sure?” Dana says, but she’s already pocketing the money and heading for the door.
Suzanne runs into the kitchen and puts her hands on Sam’s shoulders. “It’s okay, baby. Mommy’s here.” Sam looks up at her, his face and shirt caked with dried puke, and emits a sad whimper before turning back to the sink to puke. “Oh my God,” Suzanne says, feeling his neck. “He’s burning up.”
Meanwhile, Mason’s cries are unrelenting, so I take a step toward him, looking to calm him down, but he backs away from me and falls off the table, banging his head on the edge as he goes, and I’d have thought he couldn’t get any louder, but Mason’s got range, and now he digs deep and lets loose with a bloodcurdling scream that makes the small hairs on my neck stand up. He keeps it going for so long, that I worry he’ll stop breathing and pass out, or have some sort of kiddy stroke. Suzanne scoops him up in her arms and says, “Breathe, baby,” while Sam continues to heave over the sink. “It’s okay, Mason, the man was just trying to help you.”
“Ice!” Mason cries.
“Could you get him some ice from the freezer?” Suzanne says.
“Sure,” I
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