How to Talk to a Widower

say. “Although it really wasn’t much of a bang.”
    “Ice!” Mason screams, glowering at me over his mother’s shoulder.
    “He likes ice,” Suzanne says, combing his hair back with her fingers.
    In the freezer I find a hard blue ice pack, the kind you throw into coolers, and the instant it touches Mason’s forehead, he stops crying like someone flipped a switch. Suzanne hands him to me, and, to my surprise, he comes willingly, nestling against my chest, holding the ice pack to his head with solemn urgency. Then she wets a dishtowel and starts rubbing Sam’s neck and back with one hand, pulling off his vomit-crusted shirt with the other, whispering and cooing to him as she goes. This display of maternal competency, the effortless blending of compassion and efficiency, is something that I of all people should find attractive, having been married to a single mother myself, but it leaves me cold, although the cloying stench of vomit in the air might have something to do with that.
    Sam’s running a fever of a hundred and four, and after paging the pediatrician, Suzanne decides to take him to the emergency room. Having prematurely dismissed her nauseated sitter, she’s now faced with the unenviable choice of bringing Mason along, or asking me to babysit. “I hate to ask you,” she says, slipping a fresh T-shirt over Sam’s head. “But I don’t know what else to do.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I’m great with kids.”
    “It’s way past his bedtime. I’ll put him to bed upstairs and you can just hang out in the living room and watch TV. You won’t even know he’s there.”
    “It’s fine. I’m happy to help. Just tell me where you keep the mop.”
    “The mop?”
    “I normally don’t mop vomit until the third date, but it just feels like we’re clicking.”
    She smiles. “I’m sorry about our date. I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” she says, and then blanches at what might have been perceived as a sexual innuendo.
    “It’s fine.”
    “You really don’t have to clean up.”
    “Trust me. I really do.”
    She carries Mason back to his bedroom, leaving me in the hallway with Sam, who looks like the world’s youngest hangover victim, leaning up against the wall for support, dazedly rubbing his eyes. “I know how you feel,” I say sympathetically. Suzanne emerges a few minutes later, hurriedly throwing a coat on Sam as she hustles him to the door. “Make yourself at home,” she says to me. “Help yourself to anything you want.” And then she’s gone.
    It takes longer than you’d think to clean up vomit. The mop just seems to be spreading it around the floor, so I switch to paper towels, eventually going through three rolls. Then, after I’ve mopped again, I gather all the paper towels into a garbage bag and throw it in the garage, along with the mop, which is beyond saving at this point. But even after all of my cleaning and spraying the kitchen floor with Lysol, the smell of vomit seems to be following me, and that’s when I discover the stiffened puke stain in the shape of Italy on my pants, just below the knee. I locate Suzanne’s washer and dryer in an alcove off the kitchen, pull off my pants, and put them in with a little detergent. After setting the machine on permanent press, I walk around the house in my tighty-whities for a while, examining her pictures—all evidence of her ex-husband has been surgically expunged—and then poke around the pantry and the fridge, looking for a snack. In a cabinet above the fridge I discover a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, and I hesitate for a moment, but I’m anticipating a long night and she did say I should help myself to anything I want, so I pull down the bottle, some Ritz crackers, and a Sesame Street juice box as my chaser, and settle down in the living room to watch some television. She’s only got basic cable, which she was wise not to disclose earlier because it may very well have been a deal-breaker. Every channel seems to be showing a medical drama or a police procedural where the well-dressed cops spend half the show in a dim hi-tech lab that looks more like a nightclub, trying to mine drama out of running tests on a piece of clothing fiber, and Suzanne’s DVD collection seems to be limited to animated Disney movies. I channel surf fruitlessly for a half hour or so, and before you know it, I’m a third of the way into the Johnnie Walker. When I stand up, the skin of my thighs separates audibly from