How to Talk to a Widower

branch, and it said
Me and You Against the World,
and then on the inside it said,
Personally I Think We’re Going to Get Creamed,
and looking at her now, with the candlelight dancing across her porcelain face, I wonder if she’d have been the kind of girl I would have wanted to give a card like that to back then, and if I would have been the kind of guy she’d have liked to receive a card like that from, and I suspect not, but that was then and this is now, and maybe only after she’d been raped and I’d lost my wife in a plane crash did we become the people we are at this very instant, and none of it should have happened, but it did, and so we eat and we laugh and the people come and go, and it’s me and her against the world, and maybe we’re going to get creamed, but we’ve both been creamed before, and there’s something strangely comforting in that knowledge, and so I look up at her and I can feel the naked emotion, as yet undefined, embryonic, burning across my face, can see it reflected in the dark, twin universes of her eyes.
    “I wanted to kiss you when I picked you up,” I say.
    “I wanted you to,” she says.
    It’s suddenly very quiet, like the restaurant is filled with extras who have been instructed only to simulate conversation.
    “I was nervous. I don’t know exactly why.”
    “I know. It’s okay.”
    “I’m not nervous anymore.”
    It’s so quiet.
    “I like the way you look at me,” she says in a light whisper.
    “Come closer,” I say.
    Her lips, soft and moist, collapse against mine, and I can feel the heat of the table candle on the underside of my jaw as our mouths open, just a little, to form a tighter seal, and she tastes of white wine and the basil from her salad, but underneath it all I can taste something else, an organic sweetness that is only her, the flavor that I know I will always taste whenever we kiss. It’s a tender, unhurried kiss, more confirmation than exploration, and when it’s over we stay close, our heads hovering over the little table like helium balloons, eyes wide, complexions flushed.
    “That was nice,” she says.
    “Yeah,” I say.
    “I think you should ask for the bill.”
    “You charge for that?”
    She laughs and kisses me again. And only then, as I scan the restaurant for our waiter, do I see Laney Potter, sitting with Dave and another couple at a corner table in the back, staring daggers at me even as she responds to the conversation going on around her. And I should have known, in a town with only three decent restaurants, that something like this was bound to happen, but that doesn’t make the sudden chill in my belly any less icy. I try to focus on Brooke, but suddenly she sounds far away, and I can feel the moment we’ve just shared getting away from me. Laney’s presence is making me squirm, like I have an indelicate itch I can’t scratch in public, and I can feel her eyes on me like hot lasers, burning through my skin layer by layer, and it’s only a matter of time before I burst into flames. I am trapped, like the sitcom kid out on a date when he’s supposed to be home studying, and then his parents come into the restaurant and he has to hide behind his menu and assure his date that everything is fine even as he yanks her down to duck under the table.
    I need a moment alone to regroup, so I excuse myself and head back to the restrooms, which are through an alcove and down a narrow hallway decorated with framed prints of pinup girls from the nineteen fifties. There’s only one other diner in the men’s room, a short, bald guy in a suit standing at the urinal and talking on his cell phone. “Wear that lace thong that I like,” he says. “The black one.” He is not talking to his wife, who is back at their table waiting for him to order dessert, and I’m no better than him, this multitasking man who can piss one-handed and have phone sex with his girlfriend and take his wife out to dinner all at the same time. “That’s right, baby,” he says, shimmying on his tiptoes as he shakes out his last drops.
    I enter the far stall and lean against the wall, wiping the sweat off my neck with toilet paper, trying to achieve a Zen state of calm by taking deep breaths. I hear cell-phone guy leave, the bastard doesn’t even wash his hands, the hands that will touch one woman intimately and then another. Then I hear the bathroom door open again, and the click of heels across the tiles. A woman’s heels. They travel across the