The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  He flicks the soggy bacon into the trash can. Tells Kait he’s sorry this trip is so boring, but he didn’t think he could feel so foreign within his own country. The whole point of a road trip isn’t the getting from point A to point B, it’s the stuff that happens between, the people you meet and the sites you see; he may as well have spent the past week sitting on his couch at home, because he knows no more about these places now than he did before leaving. Without any connections or prior knowledge of an area, how is he supposed to infiltrate it? He can check tourism websites online, but it’s hard to know which ones to trust, and anyway he forgot his laptop, somehow, before leaving, which means he can only use the unreliable and tedious web browser on his phone. Besides all that, he’s ostensibly a self-reliant adult male; shouldn’t he be able to figure things out without the help of a handheld GPS and access to a comprehensive collection of the world’s atlases and encyclopedias? But how is he supposed to learn anything about the places he’s visiting or find the answers he’s looking for if he stays isolated within his car at all times? How do other people do it, develop that courage to talk to strangers and expose themselves to potential harm (emotional, physical) via impromptu interaction? “That was your job,” he says to Kait, who had learned how to fake confidence from years of meetings at work. He does okay in social settings when he has time to rehearse, to hone his one-liners and filter his conversation topics, but when it came to extemporaneous dialogue, he deferred to Kait. She was the one who had to call plumbers and electricians, had to make dinner reservations and complaints to the credit card companies. She was the one who asked for directions and told rude people, “Excuse me, but my husband and I were actually in line before you.”

  Here’s what else she was good at: ironing clothes, minor repairs like fixing squeaky stairs or patching drywall, maintaining relationships with the neighbors, paying bills on time, organizing family gatherings. Hunter had jobs in the relationship, although he feels divorced from them now. He knew better than anyone how to make her laugh. He cleaned the bathroom, because the sight of dirty bathrooms stressed her beyond all reason. He went grocery shopping every week, and even though she sometimes wished he wouldn’t make so many impulse purchases, she hated going to the supermarket herself. He was a better cook than she was. He was much better than her at using the Internet, a skill that ate away at his concentration and free time, but also made him a valuable teammate at bar trivia tournaments and always gave him something to say, even if he was unsure when to say it.

  He logs on to his Facebook account via his phone. Checks her page again. A distant relative has written on his wall: Much love 2 u n urs Cant believe shes dead, smh. He scrolls through thousands of updates from friends, former classmates, and others whose connection to him is untraceable. Their updates generally alternate between complaints about how hard life is and passive-aggressive bragging about how great life is. A shocking number of people think their responsibility as the curator of a social media page is to report the news after they hear it on TV or to tell everyone what the weather conditions are in their city. A disappointingly large number of people think it is okay to discuss the contents and function of their bowels on the Internet. Everybody is posting pictures of everything, even if the pictures are unremarkable, but the accumulation of useless news and updates creates a social pressure on everyone else to spew out their own stream of updates. If one is not constantly telling the Internet what he or she is thinking, it seems entirely possible that one no longer exists. Hunter does not want to check but he continues checking, captivated despite the insipidness of it all.

  Even though there is nothing he wants to watch on TV, he keeps the set on so there is some noise in the room. While flipping through the channels, he sees a rerun of a show called Happy Homecomings? in which couples search for their dream homes and a host offers them unsolicited advice on their relationship. Normally, this is the type of show he’d ignore, but he and Kait were once featured on an episode of HH? In the twenty-first century, anyone who lives long enough will end up on TV at some point. Fame is a fluke and it is unrelated to merit or value. Hunter and Kait had their turns during their engagement, when they were house hunting and found themselves, through a series of complicated circumstances, roped into being one of two featured couples. Cameras followed them for three weeks just to produce about twenty minutes of content on what is an objectively terrible television show, and although it seemed exciting at the time, it quickly became an afterthought; it was just a weird thing they’d done, with no tangible benefits or consequences except for the rare stranger who recognized them and was excited to meet someone from TV. He has never seen their episode; contractual conditions imposed by the parent company prevented the production company from giving copies to participants, and the night it aired, a massive thunderstorm knocked the power out in their neighborhood. Friends and family had either lost their power or had failed to record it. Soon after, the show was canceled. For Kait, this was a relief, as she’d never wanted to see herself on the screen anyway, and had only agreed to film the show because Hunter thought it would make for a good story and they were paid five hundred dollars each. He has tried many times—before and since the death—to find video clips online, but has come up empty-handed. This episode currently airing does not feature them, and none of the upcoming show descriptions match their episode. So he tries again to find it online, digging through hundreds of pages of search results in the vain hope of seeing her in motion one more time, of hearing her voice.

  Near midnight, the phone buzzes in his hand, jolts him from his trance. He expects it to be Sherry, who has been calling nearly every night and leaving angry voicemails. This time it’s Brutus. He’s drunk and wants to know where the fuck is his sister.

  “She’s on vacation,” Hunter says, hoping that if he keeps repeating this, it will eventually be true, eventually she’ll just come home and everything will go back to normal.

  “Where the fuck are you going with her?” Hunter hears the chaos of a bar in the background.

  “Anywhere we feel like.”

  “You think this is funny?”

  “How could it possibly be funny?”

  “I like how you’re all the sudden a real tough guy when you’re hiding,” Brutus says. “You try and get tough up around me, I’ll stomp your dumbfuck head in.”

  “She didn’t even like you, you know that?”

  “No respect for nobody, that’s your problem.”

  “The whole family. She wanted nothing to do with you.” Hunter feels himself clenching an involuntary fist.

  “Think you’re better than us because why? You got rich parents? You read some books before?”

  “She called you all white trash. Didn’t even want me to meet you.” This is barely a half-truth; she loved them, even though they often embarrassed her. His rational brain tells him he’s being cruel and Kait would disapprove of his lashing out, but his rational brain is powerless when pitted against his grief, which tells him the only thing that will make him feel better is to make Brutus feel worse.

  “If it wasn’t for her you’d of gotten beat already.”

  “Tell your mom to stop calling me too.”

  “You keep fucking with my mom, and—”

  “You just pretend I’m already dead,” Hunter says. “Pretend we’re both gone forever.” Brutus unleashes a torrent of curses and semi-coherent threats; rather than hanging up, Hunter sets the phone on the table next to Kait and allows the insults to wash over him like an aggressive white noise. He imagines what it would be like to actually fight Brutus, the swiftness with which he’d be knocked out, the taste of blood on his tongue, his brain rattling against his skull. He would deserve it, but would it make anything better? Could the physical pain at least distract him for a while? Would it somehow help her family understand that he’s not doing any of this for pleasure but to punish himself for his failure as a husband?

  He didn’t meet her brothers until he and Kait had been
dating for about six months, and she rarely talked about them. On her twenty-fourth birthday, she semi-invited Hunter to a party at her mother’s house. “You can come if you want,” she’d said. “I mean, you don’t have to, it probably won’t be that fun.” Things were getting serious between them, and Hunter figured now would be a perfect time to finally see the place where she’d been raised, and to meet the whole family in one shot. He’d never said it to Kait, and he’d never realized it himself until the moment was upon him, but he wanted her family to become his family, he wanted to be assimilated into the group and to have something more than the strained love of Jack and Willow.

  On the drive to Kait’s house the day of the party—she drove, he passengered—she bombarded him with warnings and disclaimers. Told him the uncles might give him a hard time, but they’re okay, mostly, except for Uncle Bobby, but he won’t stay long because he doesn’t like the way everyone stares at him when he drinks. The brothers, she said, are nice, you just have to give them a chance. Her preferred euphemism for describing unpleasant relatives was they’re not like you and me. Gripping the emergency brake as if trying to choke it, she turned to him and said, “It’s okay if you don’t want to go in, I can tell them you got sick or something.”

  The first one to greet them was Uncle Bobby, who hugged Kait and picked her up, passed her to Uncle Somebody, who passed her on to Uncle Somebody Else, who nuzzled her with his goatee as if greeting an infant, and within seconds, Hunter was standing alone in the doorway.

  “You the boyfriend?” Uncle Bobby said.

  “I prefer the term lover,” Hunter said, smirking, expecting a laugh.

  “What kinda gay shit is that? You hear that?” Uncle Bobby said, smacking a cousin on the shoulder. He flicked his wrist and adopted a lisp, “Oh, pleath let me thee my lov-ah,” he said, while the cousins and uncles and aunts laughed.

  “Just a joke,” Hunter said.

  “Oh good, she’s dating a comedian,” Bobby said. “You want a beer, Seinfeld?” He put his arm around Hunter and led him toward a keg in the kitchen. Brutus—who Hunter recognized from Kait’s pictures—was standing next to it.

  Hunter said, “Do you have any lemonade? I’m not really a beer guy.”

  “Jesus, now I know he’s gay,” Uncle Bobby said. “Fucking lemonade!”

  “It’s good for preventing kidney stones.” Jack had a history of kidney stones. Hunter had seen his tears after passing a stone, heard him try to suppress his groaning by shoving his face into a bath towel, felt his bedroom walls shake as Jack pounded his fist against them from inside the bathroom.

  Uncle Bobby shook his head and walked away, looking as disappointed as if Hunter had just said he doesn’t like America. Brutus handed Hunter a plastic cup full of beer. “If you’re gonna be here, you’ve got to drink something,” he said. Brutus sipped his beer. Hunter slurped along the edges of his. Kait seemed to have disappeared.

  Brutus’s arms were marked with at least seven visible tattoos, all of which involved flames and/or skulls. Hunter was the only nontattooed person in the room. At least three people had inked their throats. There were tattoos on knuckles and kneecaps and elbows, and even one person who was proud to show off that he’d recently marked the inside of his lips with the words BITE ME.

  Everyone migrated to the basement, and Hunter soon found himself conscripted into a family darts tournament, partnered with Brutus. Kait was down there already, doing shots with her cousins; she introduced them and Hunter immediately forgot their names, felt them sizing him up from across the room for the remainder of the night. The other brothers were downstairs too, but they were still young then—Billy was sixteen, Max only ten—and they tailed uncles and cousins, aping their mannerisms and speech patterns.

  Hunter and Brutus played the first game of the tournament, and even though he was the only sober one playing, Hunter missed the board entirely on his first two shots. Brutus punched the wall and shouted, “How do you get a name like Hunter when you can’t aim for shit?” They were eliminated in the first round.

  Hours later, still in the basement, the uncles and cousins having mostly dispersed, the younger brothers began furtively sipping on the dregs of abandoned beers. Kait was half-asleep, too drunk for conversation. When Brutus ran out of cigarettes, he asked Hunter if he smoked, and Hunter said, “Not cigarettes,” thinking he could regain some credibility with the family by implying he at least did drugs, and Brutus said, “Jesus Christ, there’s fucking kids down here.”

  Kait passed out around midnight, and nobody would help him carry her to the car. Uncle Somebody said a man ought to be able to carry his own woman. They had to sleep there, Kait in her old room, Hunter on the basement floor, a thin blanket between himself and the cold slap of the concrete. In the morning, he pretended to be asleep, even while the brothers stomped around upstairs, hiding behind closed eyelids until Kait found him. “Sorry about my brothers,” she said, leaning over him, her breath tickling his ear. “You get fifty points for this one.”

  THE POINTS SYSTEM WAS a game they played, instituted early in the relationship, when she’d bought him tickets to see an indie band called Walrus Tuskers Trio, accompanied him to the show even though she hated the band, couldn’t understand the appeal of anything classified as aggro-experimental rock; afterward, he told her she’d earned fifteen points for trying to tolerate the things he liked. She said, “I didn’t know we were keeping score,” and he said, “Oh yeah, definitely.” He pretended to pull a scorecard from his back pocket, said: “And I’m winning.” From that point forward, they kept a running tally of points earned. Some actions warranted a standard score—cooking dinner earned a minimum of three points, with bonuses for taste and degree of difficulty. Starting her car for her on frigid mornings was worth five points. Buying gifts on nontraditional occasions was worth twenty-five points. It wasn’t possible to lose points, as that sort of punitive urge would undermine the spirit of the game. High scores were never the point; awarding points was like giving out gold stars, just a way to say thanks, to say I’ve been paying attention and I appreciate your effort. In the end, she was ahead, of course she was ahead, but he was close.

  The only thing in his life he’d ever fully committed to was loving her, which he tried to demonstrate via the completion of what some people call the little things, things like washing the dishes and rubbing her feet without being asked and going dress shopping with her on weekends and making the bed even though he didn’t care whether the bed was made or not and anticipating when she would come home stressed from work craving a glass of wine and a bowl of mint chocolate-chip ice cream. He often argued that romance isn’t about Big Gestures, but rather about the accumulation of the so-called little things. Big Gestures are not repeatable and cannot solely be counted on to keep a marriage afloat. It’s not the candlelight dinner on the waterfront, he said to her, but the guarantee of leftovers warming on the stove for you when you get home from work. It’s not rose petals scattered across the bedroom floor, but the neatly made bed and the nights spent watching movies together while sharing popcorn. It’s not about hot-air balloon rides and champagne, but the comfort of having someone holding your hand when you’re stuck in traffic. She nodded and acknowledged that he did all the little things, agreed that the little things are the glue of a good relationship, but he could tell she was disappointed to hear that he was too cynical to even believe in romance, if only for her sake. So, during the Month of Being Romantic, he left a note in her lunch bag every morning, a reminder that he loved her, that he would miss her during the day. The first began with this line: “I can’t see you right now, but you look beautiful.” He bought a fresh bouquet of flowers every three days, so that there were always bright colors popping in the room to enliven a gray November. Cooked extravagant fish dinners (this month predated the vegetarian transition and also overlapped partly with the Month of Eating More Seafood) and served them with obscenely expensive wine. One Friday, he removed all the furniture from the
living room by himself, rolled up the carpet and stowed everything in the basement, so that when she returned home from work he could serve her a glass of wine and invite her to join him on the Largest Residential Dance floor in Philadelphia. After dinner he cued a romance playlist and they swayed and rocked and gyrated for hours before desecrating the dancefloor and falling asleep in the flickering candlelight.

  SHERRY CALLS HIM IN the morning. After a full night of web browsing on his phone, he’s nursing an Internet hangover (symptoms: mildly blurred vision, headache behind the ears, stabbing guilt, a vague sense of impending doom). She says she needs to know where her daughter is, and Hunter says, “I sent you a picture. Should I have attached a GPS to the urn?” Sherry calls him a cocky little bastard, and he says he can’t really talk right now, he has places to be. Before he hangs up, Sherry says, “If I was you, I’d stay gone. You ever come back, we’ll be waiting.”

  KAIT AND SHERRY WERE not close. The schism in their relationship was rooted in a longstanding dispute over Sherry’s self-destructive attraction to abusive and controlling men, specifically an ex-boyfriend who, according to Kait, was ugly and petty and probably one of the ten worst people in the country besides her father (whom Hunter had never met and whose only contact with Kait was the occasional letter, mailed every few years from a different prison, saying this time was rock bottom for real, this time he’d cleaned up and made amends and gotten right with God). Sherry’s ex-boyfriend, according to Kait, made everyone around him worse by association, and Sherry drank too much with him, became neglectful and too consumed by her own fear to care for her children, refused to listen to reason when confronted about him. They stayed together for six years, until Kait was in college, and only broke up because he had taken a swing at Max in front of the whole family on Thanksgiving. “No wonder I’ve dated so many assholes,” Kait said once. “Not you. I mean—before. You know?” She rarely divulged information about her dating history, but he knew she’d strung together a solid half-decade of emotionally abusive and controlling boyfriends who had inflicted long-term damage on her, had taught her not to trust anyone, had convinced her to hate herself and to always feel a lingering sense of guilt and shame when she did something good for herself. One of those boyfriends, a deadbeat named Finn who still palled around with Brutus, was so jealous that he would sit outside the bathroom door with a timer because he was afraid that she would sneak out the window and run away from him, and even still sometimes drunkenly texted pictures of his penis to Kait, telling her to come back where she belongs.