ONE THING HUNTER FORGOT to do before leaving the house was to tell anyone where he was going. He departed only a few hours after making his decision; during that interval, he downloaded a mortgage payoff form and then mailed the largest check he will ever write, stuffed a bag full of clothes, and cooked himself several grilled cheese sandwiches, because he was suddenly beset by a ravenous hunger. There was no time to call Willow and Jack, and anyway, Willow would have wanted to tag along with him, and Jack would have tried to talk him out of it, told him there are more fruitful ways to invest his money. Kait’s family didn’t deserve to know where she was, not after the scene they’d made at his house, and besides, they would have tried to hold him back, either via some kind of legal injunction or, more likely, Sherry sending her meathead sons to his house to pound the desire to travel out of him. He considered e-mailing friends, but realized most of them would be glad to have him gone, didn’t want the specter of premature grief hanging over their heads. They are all busy getting married and buying homes and making babies, and they don’t need him lurking along the periphery of their lives, reminding them what happens to the best laid plans. Hunter is the first among his peers to have had a marriage end, Kait is the first person their age to die without warning, and it is easier for them all to look away, denying that it could ever happen to them. And so their inevitable quiet rejection of him is enough to revoke their right to know his or Kait’s whereabouts.
So, okay, he didn’t forget, exactly. But that’s what he tells Willow when she calls him two days later. He’s in Somewhere, Indiana, parked along the roadside and having a picnic with Kait in the grass beside a pasture. There are birds and there are mooing cows, and there is a very unwelcoming border collie on the opposite side of a fence, but there is also him and there is Kait. What Willow says first is, “You cannot outrun your grief.” Hunter shrugs but does not reply. Chews. “You need to be surrounded by people with positive energies,” she continues.
“Do you realize I’ve failed at everything I’ve ever done?”
“Oh, my son. Your soul is so damaged right now.”
“If I can’t even finish this, then what good am I?”
“Your value does not derive from a list of completed tasks,” she says.
“But maybe it does,” he says. Maybe that’s exactly how one’s value is defined, by tasks completed and not completed, by promises kept and not. Their marriage was built on a promise of some brighter future, of a lifetime of travel, of him learning to love himself the way that she loved him. But she died before he could ever reward her faith in him. If he is ever going to redeem himself as a person, he needs to keep the promises he made to her; he needs to somehow discover that person she believed he would be.
Willow offers to fly out and meet him, drive him home to Hartford, where he can live with her and Jack again, at least until he’s feeling more like himself. She says, “You need to be encircled by love. You need to be immersed in it.”
“I have a new home now,” he says. “I belong to the road.”
“Poetry doesn’t become you. You know that,” she says.
“Have you ever heard how loud an actual farm is? It’s ridiculous.”
“Your father says he’s okay with you coming home. He’ll move his office out of your old room. You can stay here as long as you need to.”
“I mean, like, cows and chickens. And donkeys! Have you ever heard a real donkey?”
“Please don’t reject my spiritual embrace. Your mother wants to heal you, Hunter.”
“And the tractors and the birds and everything else. There’s so many things.”
HUNTER MOVED TO PHILADELPHIA for college because he wanted to get away from home and because Temple University was one of the only schools that had accepted him; he’d overshot with most of his applications, tried for too many Ivies and selective private schools, hoping his strong SAT scores would overshadow mediocre grades. During his first semester in the dorms, he received occasional e-mails from Willow asking about his transition, and occasional e-mails from Jack telling him he really ought to respond to his mother’s e-mails, but otherwise he spent those first four months effectively disconnected from his parents. This was before social media. It was a time when it was possible to be physically separated from other people and not know the intimate details of their lives.
If he’d read the e-mails more carefully, he would have been more prepared for the dramatic change in his home. He would have seen Willow referencing things like “uncovering my spiritual side,” and Jack writing, “I want to warn you your mother might be losing it.” But he didn’t read the e-mails carefully, and so he was disconcerted when he saw Willow in the airport terminal dressed like a wood nymph in a flowing white gown and a necklace that looked like it was made from thistles. When she flounced over to him and grabbed him by the cheeks, planted a loud, performative kiss on his forehead, and announced, “My beautiful boy has returned to the nest!” Hunter worried that perhaps she’d had a stroke just before arriving at the airport, or she’d been replaced by a clone who looked like her but was definitely not her.
“I’ve had a spiritual awakening,” she told him on the drive home. “I know who I am now, and I’ve discovered the way to express the self I have always been.”
“Did Jack have an awakening too?”
“Your father doesn’t have time for self-discovery anymore.”
“Well, they say the self is always in the last place you look.”
“I know you’re making fun of me,” she said. “But I don’t care.”
Jack was waiting for them at the front door. He took Hunter’s suitcase and shook his hand, then said, “Just wait till you see what she did to my house.”
In only four months, she had transformed their unremarkable suburban home into a place that looked like it would sell moonstone crafts and house a fortune teller in the back. She had hung a beaded curtain between the living room and dining room. There was incense burning somewhere. Willow inhaled deeply before announcing, “Welcome to your new home.”
“What the hell happened here?” Hunter asked.
“The house has always been like this, but its identity hadn’t manifested itself before,” Willow said.
“So you see what I’ve been dealing with,” Jack said. “You were gone a few weeks, and all of a sudden we’re living in fantasyland.”
“As you might expect, your father doesn’t understand,” Willow said.
“And now you’re all caught up on the last four months,” Jack said. He carried Hunter’s suitcase upstairs and led him to his bedroom. “I didn’t let her touch your room. Well, almost.” There was a small stone carving of Buddha sitting on his bookshelf, but otherwise the place was as he’d remembered it, right down to the rumpled sheets and the Nietzsche he’d never read but had dog-eared and left on his bedside table in case a girl ever came over. “Listen,” Jack said, laying a hand on his shoulder like a bishop conferring a blessing. “I know you’re busy at school, but you really have to call your mother sometimes. This has not been good for her.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty intense downstairs,” Hunter said. “Sorry I left you hanging.”
Jack smirked, gave Hunter’s shoulders a squeeze, holding him at an awkward distance with outstretched arms, like a boy at his first middle school dance. His hands lingered on Hunter a beat longer than they should have, and Hunter saw a loneliness in Jack’s eyes that he’d never seen before, the vulnerability of a man who felt disassociated from his own life. “It’s good to have you back,” Jack said, and left the room, shutting the door behind him.
Although the scope of Willow’s commitment was grander than usual, she had experienced many awakenings in Hunter’s lifetime. Before his birth, she was a Realtor specializing in high-end homes. She’d had a breakthrough early in her career selling a few large properties to pro athletes—she was, in her words, still a jock then, and could relate to them. At that time, Jack was working two jobs but Willow was the breadwinner. He
doesn’t mention it now, but the seed money for his first business—a manufacturer of parts for high-end appliances—came from Willow, and these days Willow doesn’t mention it either, only makes vague references to her past lives. She lost her realty job when she asked to extend her maternity leave an extra month; the postpartum depression had hit her hard and she knew she wasn’t yet capable of returning to work. Jack’s success cushioned them from the blow of her firing, and so that extra month stretched into a year and then two years, and Jack found he liked the idea of being the provider while his wife (rather than some college-dropout nanny) stayed at home to care for his child day to day. By the time Hunter started school, she was so far removed from the workplace that the world had redefined her not as Willow or as a Realtor but only as Hunter’s mother. Since then, as Hunter has become more independent and her daily responsibilities have dwindled, she’s been chasing one identity after another, including but not limited to: painting, first in watercolors, then in oils; community theater, both acting and directing; knitting, which only got as far as a few half-finished scarves; volunteering for nonprofits, first delivering meals to shut-ins and later as an organizer at an abused women’s shelter; a few semesters teaching real estate basics at the adult learning annex; canvassing for local Democrats, often against Jack’s business interests; a brief foray into day trading; online poker player; a year as a devoted Catholic, including a full baptism ceremony; and a failed attempt at becoming an alcoholic, which didn’t work out because some days she just couldn’t bring herself to drink any more gin. Jack had encouraged some of the early awakenings, but after they didn’t stick he had declared Willow incapable of following through on anything, a lost cause. During her summer of gardening, Hunter, then fourteen, and Jack sat in the kitchen together while she tended to her cucumbers, and Hunter asked Jack why it bothered him so much to see Willow trying new things. Jack said, “Your mother doesn’t realize there’s a difference between being happy and being not-unhappy. But we have to let her figure it out for herself.” Willow has told Hunter how long it took Jack to settle down—he was thirty before he’d ever gotten an actual paycheck rather than working odd jobs that paid under the table—but once he determined to become Business Jack, he fully embraced the role and, in Willow’s words, “stopped evolving.” For reasons both practical and personal, he’s eliminated all traces of young Jack, hiding old photographs and rarely speaking about the time before his reinvention.
When Hunter left for college and Willow was alone most days, it was no surprise she embraced yet another new life path. And while the intensity of her commitment has waned since then—she no longer seems like an overzealous college sophomore who just discovered the Dead—she has remained on that path for a decade, so that Hunter is convinced it’s no phase anymore, but actually the person his mother wants to be. “It’s not so weird,” Kait said once, when he suggested she would eventually grow out of it. “It takes women a long time to be comfortable with who they are. Everyone says you have to get to at least forty and then you stop caring what other people think.” It was important to Kait to believe in the magic of forty, the confidence it would bestow upon her. “I think it’s cool she finally gets to be who she wants. Just you wait till I’m forty and you’ll see.”
JACK CALLS IN THE evening. Hunter pulls over, uses the call as an excuse to stretch his legs. This area of the road is as desolate as any other, indistinguishable from the previous two hundred miles. He sets Kait on the roof, circles his car while talking. Jack wants to know who is taking care of the house. No one is. Why should they?
“Because the house is an asset and the contents of the house are assets, and you should protect your assets,” Jack says. “Someone needs to mow the lawn, run the water, open and close windows. This is basic stuff, kid.”
“You want to take care of the place? Willow has a key.”
“I have a job, Hunter. I can’t just disappear whenever life becomes inconvenient for me.”
“You think you always have to remind everyone you have a job.”
“Sometimes I think you forget what adults are supposed to do during the day.”
“I had a job, but then my wife died. I don’t know if you heard.” Hunter sees shadows along the roadside in the distance. He’s certain there are serial killers on this road; in every story about murderous drifters, these are the kinds of places to which drifters will drift.
“Someone had to stay here. The company can’t just shut down for a weekend.”
“Priorities.”
“Responsibilities. There’s a difference.” Hunter imagines Jack closing his eyes and inhaling deeply in his exaggerated gesture that announces I am trying to be patient with you.
“I’ve got responsibilities too,” Hunter says. “I made promises to my wife that I didn’t keep. You of all people should appreciate that. I’m trying not to fail at something for once.”
“What I need you to understand is: this is not the way I wanted things to be.”
“No? Because this is exactly how I wanted things to be,” Hunter says, and he wants to hang up but has never actually hung up on anyone, and besides, he knows Jack will keep calling until he feels like he has made his point.
“I’m not trying to fight with you,” Jack says.
“Then what the hell are you trying to do?”
“I don’t know. What am I supposed to do here? You tell me what I’m supposed to do.” He sighs, slow and long, like a balloon with a pinhole leak. Hunter thinks it would be a grand, impressive gesture to hurl his phone into the field, but knows he can’t afford to lose his one remaining connection to the world. Besides, is it still an effective act if nobody sees it? “Bad things happen to everyone,” Jack says. Hunter mentally hangs up, holds his breath so Jack can’t even hear the air expelling from his lungs, wants him to know what it feels like to speak into a void. “This might even turn out to be a good thing for you. It’s about time you learn how to take care of yourself—”
“Hey, Jack, if they find me dead out here, don’t worry about taking off of work for the funeral.”
SURVIVING PENNSYLVANIA IS A heavyweight grudge match, fifteen rounds of being bludgeoned by dullness. Ohio welcomes bedraggled and unhappy drivers; its rest stops are sparkling and its atmosphere sleepy, the people disconcertingly polite. Indiana passes like a camera flash, and Illinois slaps drivers in the face with bitter winds and row after row after row of cornfields.
Hunter checks himself into an Eastern Illinois hotel room, tells the desk clerk he’ll need a wake-up call at six a.m. Says he has to get an early start. Says he’s already behind schedule. The clerk asks where he’s going, and Hunter tells him he’s headed to Chicago. “For research,” he says. “I’m doing research.”
In the room, he and Kait watch TV, and he picks the bacon off his grilled cheese sandwich; already, he is learning that in some parts of America, everything comes with bacon, whether you want it or not. A few months ago, he watched a documentary on the meat industry, skimmed a handful of articles on the topic online, and told Kait he’d reached a momentous life decision: he was going to become a vegetarian. February would be the Month of the Vegetarian Transition. He marked it on the calendar, gave his frozen meats away to his brothers-in-law, purchased vegan substitutes for all of those foods. What amazed him was learning how skilled the vegan food industry is at shaping the essential protein-based nonmeats into the form of actual meats, as in the cases of tofurkey and vegan bacon, even if he didn’t understand why vegetarians needed their foods to still resemble the meats they were rejecting. He worried that the meatlike appearance undermined the gravity of his decision; how would people know he was consciously rejecting the corrupt and inhumane meat industry if everything he ate looked like everything everyone else ate? It’s not like carnivores molded their meats into the shape of vegetables; there is no such thing as pork apples or beef on the cob.
He lasted as a full-on vegetarian for more than two weeks, and Kait did too, a sympathy conversio
n. She didn’t believe he could do it, never said so directly, but it was obvious when she applauded his every meatless evening the way one praises a child for completing simple tasks like cleaning up his toys. Kait had seen him fail at implementing sweeping changes in his life before. She claimed he had a quick-fix mentality, while Hunter insisted, “I strive to improve myself, there’s a difference.” His first effort at improving himself occurred when he was twelve, and his teacher showed the class a video about pollution; he couldn’t shake the image of the Texas-sized garbage island floating in the ocean, and so he embarked on the Month of Recycling, collecting cans and papers and exchanging them at a local plant for two dollars a pound. Jack said it was good to see him finally taking initiative, bragged to friends about how his son had already become an entrepreneur, but the recycling ended abruptly when Hunter was stung on the lips by a pair of bees attracted to the soda cans he was hauling. Later, there was the Month of Fitness, which consisted of doing fifty pushups and sit-ups every morning and night, until one day he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder and decided to take a week off, never got back in the habit. There was the Month of No Hot Dogs. The Month of Maturation. The Month of Being More Reliable. The Month of Reading Books. The Month of No Bad Feelings.
He relapsed on his vegetarianism before Kait did, ordering a Meat-Tastic pizza from Padre’s Paradise of Pizza, arguing that it can’t hurt to indulge now and then. A couple weeks later, he found himself eating a hamburger and hot wings for lunch. He may as well have been drinking a glass of lard, he realized, so he converted back briefly. He would have forgiven himself for those slip-ups if not for Kait’s insistence on maintaining her own vegetarianism. She called it commitment, he called it stubbornness, but regardless, when she died, she was still a vegetarian, completely free of meat-based toxins, and yet she still died. It made the whole veggie/meat distinction seem so insignificant on one hand, but on the other it also seems particularly important in the sense that if he dies today, he will have died having failed at even the most fundamental elements of self-control, which is why he’s trying again to stick with grilled cheese (cheese admittedly being a bit of a gray area, ethically) and French fries, despite the world’s best efforts to entrap him into carnivorousness.
The Young Widower's Handbook Page 7