How to Talk to a Widower

her parents’ house.”
    “Don’t rub it in.”
    “No, it’s nice. I feel like I’m back in high school again.”
    “And my parents are out,” she says, raising her eyebrows in mock seduction. “We could go down to the basement and fool around.”
    I must be blushing because she quickly pats my shoulder and says, “That was a joke.”
    “I know,” I say.
    She steps forward and looks up at me. “What is it, Doug?” she says softly.
    “It’s nothing,” I say, shaking it off. “You just look very pretty, that’s all.”
    She reaches for my arm and then stands up on the balls of her feet to kiss my cheek. “Nice deflection, but I’ll take it.”
    Below the surface, my skin throbs like a sunburn in the spot her lips touched.

    Over dinner she tells me about her childhood, how her parents fought constantly, and still do, and how as a child she prayed every night that they would get divorced. How her father would hit her older brother, Ron, and then, when Ron got bigger, how he started to fight back, and then, to the sound track of her mother’s futile screams, they would go at each other like cage fighters, breaking furniture and smashing dishes, leaving cracks and dents and fist-sized craters in the walls. How her mother ultimately grew tired of fixing the holes and would just hang pictures over them, so that eventually the walls were covered with random pictures in mismatched frames at odd intervals, rosy-cheeked childhood portraits of Brooke over scarred drywall, the pretty lies of the past used to hide the ugly truth. How as a child she learned to spot the warning signs and retreat upstairs to her bedroom, playing her records at top volume until the fighting stopped or the cops came. How every time her father and brother bounced off the walls downstairs, the records would scratch, and after a while the skips in her favorite songs became indelible parts of them, so that even now, when she sings along to certain songs on the radio, she’s always somewhat surprised when the music doesn’t skip where it’s supposed to. In her mind, the damaged version is the true one. Even now, long after her brother has moved out, the brawls still occur every time he visits, and Thanksgiving and Christmas generally culminate with the neighbors calling the police.
    “Jesus,” I say. “How did you end up so normal?”
    “I’m insane on the inside,” she says. “I couldn’t wait to finish college and get the hell out of there. And now here I am, right back where I started.”
    “I know the feeling,” I say. “Once I got out, I never thought I’d leave the city, and now here I am, right back in Westchester.”
    “Are you from here originally?”
    “Forest Heights. Two towns over.”
    “Oh. Rich kid.”
    “We were comfortable, I guess.”
    “You don’t act like a trust fund baby.”
    “That’s because I didn’t have one. My dad was determined not to spoil us. He said kids with money have a harder time learning responsibility.”
    “I can understand that.”
    “I was still a fuckup.”
    “Maybe, but a fuckup with means is much more dangerous. Who knows what damage you might have done if price were no object? I see rich kids in my office at school every day, kids whose allowance puts them in a higher tax bracket than me, and their sense of unconditional entitlement is like a congenital birth defect. Your dad’s a smart man.”
    “He was.”
    “Oh, is he gone?”
    “No. But he’s … different now.”
    “How’s that?”
    “He had a stroke that caused him some brain damage.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Thanks. Actually, we get along much better now.”
    Brooke sighs wistfully. “I wish my dad would have a stroke.”
    I laugh, and then I make her laugh, and we eat some more and we laugh some more, and people come and go, and somewhere behind us a waiter drops a tray, and a family sings “Happy Birthday,” and outside the window pedestrians pass by, kids on skateboards, people walking dogs or pushing strollers or holding hands, enjoying the last few days of mild weather, and all the while something is growing between us like a magnetic field, invisible but palpable, surrounding us, cordoning us off from everyone else, until it feels like there’s the rest of the world, and then there’s Brooke and me, and I remember a greeting card that was popular back in high school, that had a picture of two yellow chicks in an egg, or two kittens in a cut-off milk carton, or two baby monkeys on a tree