How to Talk to a Widower

the leather couch like peeling fruit leather.
    Feeling a little woozy, I go to check on my pants. The wash cycle is over, so I throw them into the dryer and then look for the bathroom. There’s a sheet of plastic taped over the doorway to the powder room, and through it I can see the stripped walls and exposed studs and wires of a renovation job in progress, so I head upstairs, my socks sinking into the plush carpeting, stirring up static electricity that zaps me through my fingers when I inadvertently touch the wallpaper. The hall bathroom is full of bath toys, and there’s a strange, donut-shaped contraption on the toilet seat, ostensibly to keep the boys from falling in when they’re crapping, and it doesn’t look terribly sanitary so I decide to use Suzanne’s bathroom. This means I’ll have to go through her bedroom, which could be construed as an invasion of her privacy, but I’ve mopped the puke off her floors and I’m babysitting her son, so we’ve got to be past all of that, right? Besides, she specifically told me to make myself at home, and at home I don’t crap on a plastic piss-stained hemorrhoid donut with Cookie Monster smiling creepily up at me like a puppet with a bathroom fetish.
    Suzanne’s bedroom is done in a dark gray, and her king-sized bed has a quilted leather headboard and is covered in a wine-colored satin duvet with matching throw pillows and sheets. It’s a sexy bed that causes me to slightly revise my impression of her, as does the presence of not one but two identical vibrators in the drawer of her night table that I accidentally open, indicating that she is a woman who takes her orgasms seriously enough to have a backup plan for her backup plan. “Suzanne!” I say out loud, impressed. Still taking generous sips from the Johnnie Walker bottle, I head into the bathroom, which is a cluttered mess from her pre-date preparations: blow dryer, clips, brushes, eyeliners, lipsticks, and other implements of beauty strewn across every available surface. In my somewhat inebriated state, I’m disproportionately touched by all the trouble she went to just to have dinner with me.
    When I come out of the bathroom, I lie down on the bed for a minute, sinking into the pillow mattress, enjoying the sensation of the cool satin against my bare legs. There’s a framed picture on the night table, Suzanne and a girlfriend in their bikinis, holding up colorful umbrella drinks by the pool at some tropical resort. I prop the picture up on my chest and look at her for a little bit. I can’t help but wonder, had our date gone on as planned, if we’d have ended up back here, in this soft, sexy bed. It hadn’t really seemed like an option over dinner, but now that I’m here, I feel like we might have. I close my eyes and try to recall her face over dinner, looking for clues, trying to discern a hidden sensuality, imagining a credible sequence of events that would have led us from stilted dinner conversation to undressing each other and lying down on this crimson softness. Suzanne. There’s an old Journey song by that name, I think. I hum a few bars, but can’t quite remember the lyrics. Journey was such a long, long time ago.
    “Oh my God!” Her voice yanks me out of sleep like a fishhook in the eye, and squinting through the blinding light, I can make out Suzanne standing in the doorway, turning Sam’s face into her thighs, her eyes bulging in shock, mouth wide open, jaw trembling.
    “Suzanne,” I say, sitting up groggily, and in doing so I knock over the picture on my chest and spill the Johnnie Walker, wedged upright between my thighs in what I will later understand to be a somewhat phallic manner, onto the duvet.
    “What the hell are you doing?” she shouts.
    “Listen,” I say, rubbing my eyes while the room spins around me like a carousel. “It’s okay.”
    “You scumbag! Put on your goddamn pants right now and get the hell out of my house!”
    Her face is twisted with rage and disgust, and as I roll off the bed and lurch toward her, she throws her hand up defensively, recoiling in revulsion against the wall. “Stay away from me!” Down the hall, Mason starts to cry. “Oh my God, Mason!” She darts out of the room dragging Sam behind her.
    It feels like slow motion as I run downstairs in a dizzy haze, head pounding, thighs quaking, and yank open the dryer door. My pants come out heavy and soaked, and I realize that I never pushed the start button. I pull them on anyway, wet