How to Talk to a Widower

porn?”
    “Well … ”
    “Russ.”
    “It was homemade.”
    Claire’s head pops up from under the covers. “What was on it?”
    “Pretty much what you’d expect.”
    “Do you have them here?”
    “Claire!”
    “I’m just asking.”
    “Please don’t help me,” I say. “So this disc—”
    “Discs.”
    “Discs. They’re of Jim and Angie?”
    “Yep.”
    “You get off on watching your father have sex?” Claire says.
    “Hell, no. Most of it is just Angie.”
    “Angie alone?” Claire says.
    “She has toys.”
    “Where are the discs now?”
    “The originals are back in his dresser.”
    Downstairs, Jim begins pounding on the door again. Between Russ and Claire, we are going to have to get a new door. Something stronger, steel reinforced.
    “You made copies?”
    “So he wouldn’t miss them.”
    “Smart,” Claire says approvingly.
    “Shut up, Claire. How many copies?”
    “Enough.”
    “Russ. I’m trying to help you out here.”
    Russ sighs and runs his hands through his hair. “I have this Web site.”
    “Oh … fuck.”
    He shrugs. “My friends are all obsessed with Angie. They begged me. And Jimbo never would have even known about it if he hadn’t been snooping around in my hard drive. Serves him right for violating my privacy.”
    “You put naked videos of your father’s wife on the internet and he invaded your privacy?”
    “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
    I shake my head. “Okay, come with me.”
    “It’s not safe for me out there.”
    “I know. I need you to lock the door behind me.”

    Outside, Jim is trying to climb up the drainpipe to Russ’s room, which would be almost comical if it didn’t look like he might actually make it. “Jim,” I call up to him. “Get down from there.”
    “I’m going to kill that little shit,” he gasps, sweating profusely as he pulls himself up a bit higher, his feet scraping furiously against the brick wall before finding awkward toeholds on protruding mortar and pipe brackets. The muscles in his arms flex and extend under his taut skin, threatening to burst through. I turn to Angie for some help, but her plan seems to consist solely of leaning languidly against the car and looking good. It occurs to me that the notion of horny teenaged boys pleasuring themselves to naked videos of her is not something she’s terribly upset about.
    “The neighbors have probably already called the police,” I say to Jim’s ass, which is now at eye level. “You really don’t want to be breaking and entering when they get here.”
    “It’s my house,” he grunts, pulling himself up a little higher. Pretty soon he’ll be in position to hoist himself up onto the lower roof over the front door, and from there it’s an easy swing through Russ’s open window.
    “Angie,” I say. “Will you help me out here?”
    “Come down, Jim, you’re making an ass out of yourself,” she calls to him without conviction, then looks at me and shrugs. She has always adopted the attitude of an innocent bystander to the wreck of Jim’s first family. Jim keeps shimmying his way up the pipe, sweating through his shirt, grunting as he goes, his ass crack smiling down at us from the back of his sagging jeans. He’s about six feet off the ground now, and within striking distance of the roof.
    “Get your ass down here, Jim,” I shout. “I mean it.”
    He looks down scornfully at me. “Or what, Doug?”
    “Or I’ll bring you down.”
    Jim’s face breaks into a contemptuous sneer. “I would pay good money to see that,” he says. And I don’t know where this bizarre situation was headed before he flashed me that you-and-what-army look, but the sneer pisses me off. The sneer leaves me no choice.
    I climb up onto the porch railing, take a deep breath, and then, before I can chicken out, I jump at him. My plan is to throw my arms over his shoulders, but I don’t get as much hang time as I’d anticipated, and I end up with a fistful of his sweat-soaked T-shirt, which tears loudly as I slide down his back, and at the last instant I manage to wrap my other arm around his waist and grab on. His legs instantly lose their purchase and swing off the wall, his slippers coming loose and falling to the ground, and only his grip on the drainpipe keeps us from tumbling backward off of it. “Fucker!” he screams, trying to shake me off, and I can feel the pipe shaking, the brackets straining to support our weight. “Get the fuck off me!”
    “You get the fuck off