The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  After Sherry finally got rid of that boyfriend, she focused on mending her relationship with Kait via shopping trips and massages and pedicures and hour-long chats on the phone, but Kait was too old, had missed her opportunity to form the kind of unbreakable bond children are supposed to form with their parents. Still, she said sometimes, “It’s nice to have a mom again.”

  And so, despite her lingering bitterness about her own unhappy childhood, she would disapprove of Hunter’s callousness toward Sherry now, even though Sherry has never made any particular effort to make Hunter feel welcome, had obviously judged him as not enough of a man for Kait because he was such a departure from her past boyfriends. Kait would remind him now how hard she had worked to bond with Willow and Jack. Probably Kait would tell him you are better than this. In the myopia of his sadness, he’s forgotten that her family is in mourning too. For all their tough-guy posturing, her brothers loved her more than they loved themselves; the morning of the funeral, Max kept repeating that he wished it had been him instead. They had all come to count on her as a surrogate mother when their own mother was incapable of helping them. Besides being sisterless, they are also essentially motherless, because Sherry isn’t strong enough to cope with her daughter’s death. She has led a sad, lonely life, and now she needs to self-medicate just to face her own empty home. She’s groping for some piece of Kait to hold on to, to anchor herself back in the world. If Kait has any agency in the afterlife, then she would want to see her family too. Hunter does not get to hoard the memory of her, no matter how much he might want to. So when he hears Kait say you’re being selfish, he knows she is right. And when he hears her ask why he would taunt a grieving mother, he knows it’s a fair question, and the only answer he can produce is this: because I’m angry and they’re the only people I can hurt.

  A COUPLE MONTHS INTO their relationship, Kait spent a long weekend in Hartford, slept in the guest room at Jack and Willow’s house. On her second night in town, the four of them went out to dinner at a steakhouse downtown. At dinner, Hunter saw her in full professional mode: the eye contact, the brief hesitation before speaking as she considered her words carefully, the firm but genial delivery, the prepared anecdotes designed to appeal to a man of Jack’s sensibilities. It was cold in the restaurant, like a crypt, but she had come prepared with a spare cardigan for Willow to borrow. She got ribeye while Hunter got trout, and she impressed Jack by ordering a Knob Creek on the rocks. She listened patiently while Willow talked about the local government disturbing the area bird habitats. She asked Willow about her time as a volunteer at the shelter. Kait talked more easily with his parents than he ever had, and afterward, sitting on the living room couch, he asked her, “How the hell did you do that?”

  “I’m exhausted,” she said, her eyes closed already.

  “I think they really liked you.”

  “Your dad’s really not that bad,” she said.

  “People always say that. Just wait till you get to know him better.” Soon after, she was asleep in the guest room, and she wouldn’t wake until late the next morning, after everyone had already eaten breakfast. She was frantic then, embarrassed at having slept in, and here he saw the duality of Kait: she could carry herself with poise and confidence in any company, but it would sap all of her resources. People who only knew her casually or through work didn’t understand how anxious she was, never realized that she woke up a half hour early on workdays just to do deep-breathing exercises and prepare herself for a full day of dealing with the world.

  That morning, he told her she could relax, because he’d invented a game and all she had to do was follow his lead. He called it the Guided Life Tour, and it worked like this: he drove to significant landmarks from his past—say, the playground where he broke his first bone, or the hospital where he had his heart surgery—and narrated the story for her, complete with dialogue, scene constructions, fleshed-out supporting characters.

  They stopped for a late lunch at Santucci’s Pizzeria, and then he continued the tour, opening with a joke he’d been saving all day: “Be sure to tip your guide afterward.” Led her to a rust-colored motel on the fringes of town. Noted the ninety-dollar weekly rates—“They’ve gone up,” he said—and waited until she asked why he stopped at this seedy place hemmed in by liquor stores and strip clubs. “Because,” he said, “this is where I lived when I ran away.” He wanted her to see a dark side, a dangerous, brooding Mystery Man, wanted her to know he could be unpredictable and wild sometimes. Told her about the expulsion from high school because of the pot they found in his locker, the escalation of the fights with Jack, the guilt for resenting Willow for loving him as much as she did. The day he quit his first job, Jack threatened to kick him out of the house, and Hunter decided to call his bluff. Packed a bag and walked right past him, drove away and did not stop until reaching this motel. Jack wanted to do the tough-love bit, wanted Hunter to learn his lesson, so he let Hunter stay there for three weeks. He finally left when the hotel manager changed the lock due to outstanding debts.

  When Hunter visited Kait in Philly a few weeks later—staying in a friend’s apartment because Kait said there was nowhere for him to sleep at Sherry’s house—he talked her into guiding him on a tour of her past. Although he’d been racing to tell her everything he could about his life, he realized one day that she’d barely told him anything. After a full day of prodding, she gave in, drove to a restaurant at the foot of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge. Said, “I can’t do this, I feel stupid.” Hunter told her she would be fine, he wanted to know everything about Beef’s Burger Barn, and so she started again: “Over here, that restaurant used to be a house. A very old house, where three people lived—No, forget it, this is dumb,” she said, shifted the car into drive and sped away, said she didn’t like the game anymore, and then she shut down on him the way she did sometimes, ignoring his questions, turning the radio up loud enough to discourage further talking, her jaw clenched as if wired shut.

  When they parked outside his friend’s apartment, Hunter told her, not for the first time, that she seemed depressed, and he wanted to help her. “I’d like to be alone tonight,” she said, and she didn’t call until the next morning, during which time he hadn’t slept, showered, or eaten, and she said she was sorry, but maybe they should take a break from story time for a while. She wanted more secrets. For both of them. She said, “If we tell each other everything now, we’ll run out of things to talk about later.” She didn’t want him to know too much about her too soon. “You’re a good guy and I don’t want to blow this,” and besides, what would they talk about in ten years? In forty? “You have to ration your stories,” she said, “because a relationship should gradually reveal itself over time,” a stance on which she held firm until the day she died, and now Hunter is left with a host of untold stories, things he will never know about her.

  WHEN HE BASHES THE car into a pothole, he doesn’t stop to make sure everything is still in working order, and so he doesn’t discover until another mile later that he’s been riding on a flat tire. The flapping of the rubber, the imbalance of the car, and the grinding of rim on asphalt finally alert him, at which point he has no choice but to pull onto the shoulder and glower at his car as if he has been betrayed. He has no idea how to change a flat tire; Jack tried to teach him once, but he didn’t pay attention, and anyway it looks even to his inexpert eye like he may have done permanent damage to the car by riding on a flat for so long. His effort to drive coast-to-coast has been derailed after a week due to his own incompetence, and Kait is in the car by herself, watching him while he stands outside sweating profusely, because dammit, it is hot, and why doesn’t he know how to fix anything?

  He picks up Kait, apologizes for ruining the trip already. Stuffs her into his duffel bag, slung over his shoulder. Uses his phone to take a picture of the broken-down car, and then retreats to the relative safety of the Internet, where he can control his own narrative. He loads the picture onto Facebook, the first photo in an untitled al
bum. Caption: Abandoned. After a quarter mile walk down the road, he takes another picture—of the steaming line of asphalt cutting through farmland, dotted by white trucks and occasional state troopers. Caption: Westward Bound.

  SEVEN

  When you dream, you never see her. You only dream about being lost in a cavernous house and searching for her.

  YOU HAD FANTASIZED SOMETIMES about her being dead; actually, fantasized is not the right word, because that makes it sound like you were thinking about killing her, which you decidedly were not, but you had envisioned her death from time to time, imagined what your life would turn into without her. You told her once that you worried that she wasn’t born to be a long-term person, a feeling you couldn’t explain except to say that when you looked at her you sometimes saw her fading away right in front of you. You worried, when she was late coming home from work, that she’d gotten in a car accident and someone was going to summon you downtown to identify the body. You walked through the front door expecting to find her twisted and broken-necked at the bottom of the stairs. Saw, when you closed your eyes, flashes of catastrophes occurring: lightning strikes, rabid dog attacks, tornados touching down on top of her, abductions by Colombian drug lords. Tried to imagine your emotions when she was gone, and beyond the standard sorrow and mourning, here’s the thing you couldn’t admit to her, were afraid to voice: sometimes when you thought about these things, you zoomed past the sadness and loneliness and focused instead on the positive changes her disappearance would have on your life. All the sympathetic attention you would receive. Not having to worry about impressing her every day with surprises and gifts and declarations of love. The women with whom you could conceivably engage in guilt-free sexual intercourse, the varieties of inventive and acrobatic sexual acts they could teach you. The movies you could now see without worrying that they were too boring for her, the family gatherings you could skip, the absence of pressure trying to shape you into a better man, and the word you never considered but that summed all these things up was this—freedom. And now the guilt is choking you, because what you’re feeling is nothing like freedom, and besides, what did you need to be free from in the first place—her love? The best things about you were tied up in her, so where did you even get the idea that marriage was restrictive? How childish could you have been to think life would somehow be better experienced alone, like you’re the High Plains Drifter?

  You’d imagined so many different scenarios, and while it’s true that you never willed it to happen, it seems possible that you generated enough negative energy around Kait that you caused this. And now you have nothing.

  HERE ARE TOPICS YOU learn to avoid in conversations with strangers you meet on the road: marriage, children, where you’re from, where you’re going, reasons for traveling solo, the contents of your cube. And still, you want people to know. On buses and on trains and on ferries, you keep her by your side, display her, buy her tickets, because you want everyone to see that you’re on a spiritual journey. You want them to sense the gravitas of your mission and to understand that their personal trifles don’t mean anything in comparison.

  You want them to know your wife is dead, and that any moment someone they love could be dead too. Sometimes kindly strangers ask what’s in the box, and you want to tell them it’s my dead wife’s ashes, wanna see? but instead you turn away and pretend you can’t hear them. You want them to figure it out on their own, so you turn the cube toward them at an angle so that they can read her name and the date of her death, and you slump and grimace and sigh to call your misery to the surface. There is an arrogance to your sadness, this idea that everyone should care about your circumstances even though they have their own losses to mourn, even though they don’t know you or Kait, and you want them to understand that they should have known Kait. That they should be grieving too, because the world is missing someone important, someone valuable, necessary, like oxygen. There is no dignity in begging for attention, but you cannot stop displaying her, even when you know you should stop.

  YOU DO NOT LIKE the word widower. You have written it, but cannot speak it without spitting afterward. You begin to worry that you might be contagious, that if you give breath to the words “my wife is dead,” it will become an airborne virus, expelled and sprayed onto strangers, who will pass it on to their friends and acquaintances through handshakes, kisses, and hugs, and those unhygienic friends and acquaintances will pass it on to their friends, and so on, until you’ve sparked an epidemic of widower-hood, and a worldwide search identifies you as Patient Zero.

  EIGHT

  A year into their marriage, Hunter decided he was done with Philadelphia and the whole East Coast. It was a place so unfriendly, so dysfunctional, so pathologically negative that he was convinced he’d been tainted by the atmosphere, a Regional Affective Disorder that had exacerbated all of his worst qualities and stunted his personal growth. He’d hoped to be many things by the time he was twenty-five, but he’d become none of those things. He’d hoped to be professionally accomplished, for one, to have a career rather than just a job. To be creatively engaged in something, even if it was writing music reviews for the community newspaper. To have a small circle of trusted friends with whom he had a monthly meeting for lunch or coffee. To volunteer every other weekend at a homeless shelter. To have the disposable income to buy rare gems for Kait and take her out to extravagant dinners. On the Internet, he saw photos of his acquaintances skydiving, attending black-tie events with the governor, getting record deals, going on safaris, winning fellowships for their research. It felt like he’d hit a ceiling at eighteen and everyone he knew had just kept rising. His two greatest achievements were his marriage and owning a home, but Kait deserved more credit than him for both of those accomplishments.

  Without Kait, he was a failure, so he began researching new places to live, places where he could reinvent himself. Criteria: vibrant arts scene, large and diverse population, a wide variety of career opportunities, some historical importance, good restaurants, generally liberal, generally young. He narrowed it down to six finalists before telling Kait about his desire to move. The top choice was Chicago (runners-up: Seattle; Victoria, British Columbia; San Francisco; St. Louis; and Austin). In addition to meeting the other requirements, Chicago was a good hub for domestic travel, and Kait was familiar with the area from her time as a student at DePaul. She’d told him once the only reason she moved back after college was because she was too young to live on her own so far away from home, but now, he reasoned, she was older and more mature and they would have each other. He presented the case to her in as much detail as possible, including a three-page handout detailing demographics, average home prices, school ratings, and other data. “You really put a lot of work into this,” Kait said.

  “I wanted you to see I’m serious.”

  She crinkled the edges of the handout. “But we can’t actually move.”

  “We can do anything we want. Literally anything. It’s not like we’re chained up here.”

  “But we kind of are. I have a job, and we have this house. And I like it here, and also how are we even going to find a good place?”

  He produced another printout. “I’ve been looking. These ones all look pretty good, and if we fly out for a long weekend—”

  “This is crazy. We can’t just move halfway across the country on a whim.”

  “It’s a two-hour flight. We can come back here any time we want.”

  “But if we stay in this house, it’s a zero-hour flight to get back here.” She skimmed through the home listings. “Anyway, you can’t try on new cities like sweaters. That’s not how things work.”

  “You’re always talking about adventure,” he said.

  “Yeah, I want to go on vacations to other places, I don’t want to live in them.”

  “Did you at least look? How great is that second house?”

  “What’s the rush to get out of here anyway?” she said. “You didn’t kill someone, did you?”

&
nbsp; “My parents have lived in the same town their whole lives. Did you know that? Jack grew up on the same street they live on now.”

  “You’re nothing like your dad.”

  “This is just a place, you know? It’s never been the right fit for us.”

  “Since when does everything have to be perfect? What if some things just have to be good enough?”

  He shuffled his papers. Clicked on a few links. “What if also I killed a guy?” he said.

  “Will you still love me if I testify against you? I think I’d be really good at being a witness,” she said.

  HE COULD HAVE THE car repaired, wait a few days in rural Illinois, and then continue, but he is afraid of losing his momentum. He takes a cab to the nearest bus station, buys a ticket to Chicago, and while waiting for the bus to depart, he decides to map out the rest of his trip. Without the car, he needs to have more of a plan, because he’s now at the mercy of bus schedules and mass transit. Kait was the superior planner. Her intense level of organization was often a defense she’d erected against her insecurities, the dogmatic belief that if she spent enough time planning, then she could overcome all of her perceived deficiencies. She was the one who’d wanted to begin learning French and Italian, and who had bought atlases and European guidebooks. She was the one who insisted they spend at least two hours per week watching travel documentaries, just so they would know what to expect. She was the one who would have mapped out the itinerary down to the hour and who would be telling him right now that you can’t just get on a bus and expect a trip to materialize spontaneously. You need to act upon the world, she would have said. He reminds her now that it’s part of his charm (or at least he thought it was), one of the things she always loved about him (or at least he thought it was), the breezy nonchalance with which he’s able to approach a major project, the way he provided balance for her Type-A anxiety. And yet, the nonchalance has led to a trip that is now two weeks and over a thousand miles long, with no discernible progress to show for the time and effort.