How to Talk to a Widower

a receipt in my suit pocket, the residue of a vanished life. Against my better judgment, I peel open the receipt and there it is in smudged blue ink, the soups we had, her steak salad and my boneless rib eye, the bottle of Chianti, the Granny Smith apple cobbler we shared for dessert. And now that night comes flooding back to me in razor slashes of lucidity, Hailey’s tight red dress, her hair pinned back behind her slender neck, the way she threw her head back to laugh, and more than anything, the sense memory of what it felt like to be whole and to be hers, what it used to feel like to be me. And that familiar, quivering ache returns to my belly, the heavy emptiness in my chest, but I will not cry. I close my eyes and I’m there again, sitting across from her, drinking her in like wine as the scabs in me come undone and the wounds reopen, and the searing pain of losing her is brand-new again, a red-hot poker stirring my guts. But I don’t cry.
I had a wife, her name was Hailey. Now she’s gone. And so am I.
    There’s a red bra hanging on the bathroom doorknob, where Hailey left it a lifetime ago. I pull it off and throw it into a dresser drawer. Then I take everything off the top of her night table; books, catalogs, a perfume bottle, a ponytail holder, and drop them into the top drawer, along with the lipstick I found in my jacket. The strength goes out of my legs and I sit down on the corner of the bed—Hailey’s side—and I can feel the tears forming, but I blink them away. Because even now I can hear the muted slide and bang of Russ’s dresser drawers as he gets ready in his room, and Claire’s high-heeled footsteps tap-dancing across the tiled kitchen floor, and they’re like sounds from beyond the borders of your dream, luring you back to the waking life. So I allow myself just a few more quaking breaths, a few last moments of feeling lost without her, and then I pull myself up off the bed and head downstairs to get Claire to help me with my necktie.

    The rehearsal dinner is taking place in one of the club’s smaller banquet rooms, where the caterer has set up an elaborate buffet. There’s a three-piece band up on the bandstand playing soft dinner music, the lights have been dimmed and large standing candelabra have been set up around the perimeter, bathing the room in a warm, gothic glow. In typical fashion, my mother has transformed an intimate dinner into a major event, and by the time we arrive, the room is already teeming with friends of my parents and relatives I’d prefer not to see. Claire points out the two manned bars set up on either side of the buffet, like a flight attendant indicating the emergency exits, and as she and Russ go to find our seats in the cluster of banquet tables set up in the center of the room, I make my way around the edges of the crowd, as inconspicuously as possible, until I’m standing at the bar. Two quick shots for courage, and when that doesn’t work, another two for distance. Then I get a strong Jack and Coke to nurse, and wade reluctantly into the sea of guests.
    This is the part I’ve been dreading, the unguarded scrutiny of people who have known me forever, the pointed looks, the wet-eyed hugs, the emotional arm squeezes, the suffocating pity of those who think they know, filling the air I breathe like anthrax. I am a celebrity of sorts, rendered larger than life by the dark things to which I’ve borne witness, and the trick is to keep moving, like a movie star leaving a nightclub, smiling for the cameras without breaking stride. I assume the look of someone on an urgent errand, moving quickly through the crowd, nodding hello without stopping to talk to anyone. All around me, relatives materialize like evil spirits: Uncle Freddy, my father’s much younger brother, who we thought was so cool when we were kids because he wore motorcycle boots and did his hair like Jon Bon Jovi. Now he’s bald and beer gutted, has three kids with two ex-wives, and bags under his eyes with the craggy texture of alligator skin. My cousin Nicole, the reformed lesbian, who came out after college and then came back in to marry Peter, her high school sweetheart. My cousin Nate, a few years older than me, who told me what a rim job was when I was eight, and gave me my first-ever puff of a cigarette at his brother Barry’s bar mitzvah. Barry, who paid Claire twenty dollars to show him her boobs when we were fourteen. Aunt Abby, my mother’s sister, who beat breast cancer