How to Talk to a Widower

his teens and he was scared. I let go and told him to go away, and he scampered down the steps like a kicked dog. I felt bad for him, but then he shouted “Fucking asshole!” and flipped me the bird, and normally that would have been funny, but it’s been a while since anything has been funny. At least he would have a war story to tell the other God reps over coffee and donuts back at their holy headquarters.
    And just the other day I was in Home Depot picking up some lightbulbs when I saw a couple around my age looking at paint chips. She was pretty and petite and he was wiry and balding and they were both wearing khakis and they were quietly in love. They were talking about the room they were painting, about the color of the carpet, the couches, and the wood of the armoire that housed the television, and the woman had brought one of the curtain ties with her to match, which is what Hailey would have done, and I watched them, showing each other chips, holding them against the curtain tie, and I pictured them back in their taupe room, sitting on their mushroom-colored couch watching television, tangled up in each other. And I was thinking that they could lose each other tomorrow, that one or both of them could be dead before the fresh paint on their walls had dried, and the woman looked at me with alarm, and I realized that I’d said it out loud. And the husband stepped forward like he was going to start something with me, although I guess, technically, I’d already started it, but then he just reached into his pocket and handed me a crumpled tissue and that’s when I realized that I was crying.
    But it’s been a year now, and my family and friends seem to think that’s the shelf life on grief, like all you need is one round through all of the seasons and then you’re tapped like an empty keg, ready to start living again. Time to get back out there, they say. And so my mother calls me regularly, pimping out the latest girls she or her friends have come upon in their travels. But, honestly, what kind of bottom-feeder wants to go out with a depressed twenty-nine-year-old widower with no real career or goals to speak of? I picture strange, skinny women in shapeless peasant dresses, with large glasses and multiple cats that they talk to like children. Or else they’re sad, heavy women, nervously cheerful and self-deprecating, sweating through their foundation as they troll the bottom of the dating barrel in their ongoing quest for an orgasm that doesn’t rely on double A batteries. Or they’re divorcées, damaged, mistrusting man-haters looking for a new spittoon for their bile, or else drowning in fear and loneliness and ready to grab hold of the first man that might possibly share their bed and mortgage payments. And then there are the fetishists, vampires who feed on the blood of grief, who want to lick the tears off my face and absorb my immense sadness into their own swollen hearts, and while that might get me laid sooner than expected, I’ve become quite possessive of my grief, actually, and I’m not really up for sharing it.
    So even if I was ready, which I’m not, I’ve still got to face the age-old problem of not being willing to belong to any of the clubs that would have me as a member.

5

    THE SKY IS FUCKING WITH ME. IT’S ONE OF THOSE militantly perfect spring days, the kind that seems to be trying just a little too hard, the kind you want to smack in the face, and the sky is bluer than it has any right to be, really, an obnoxious, overbearing blue that implies that staying home is a crime against humanity. Like I’ve got anywhere to go. The neighborhood is alive with gardeners mowing lawns and trimming hedges, the mechanized hiss of twirling sprinklers and for those just joining us, it’s a beautiful day and Hailey is dead and I have nothing to do, nowhere to be.
    I’m picking the plastic shards of my cell phone out of the grass when a dark, battered Nissan with tinted windows pulls up to the curb. Angry, discordant hip-hop music and a thick cloud of stagnant cigarette smoke pour out through the open door as Russ climbs out. He’s tall and beefy like his father, dressed in baggy shorts, flip-flops, a faded
Battlestar Galactica
T-shirt, and an iPod strapped to his arm. Hand slaps are executed and cheerful obscenities shouted over the music. A half-filled Slurpee cup comes flying out an open back window, spilling across the sidewalk like blood spatter at a crime scene. Russ smiles and