The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  After looking over maps and bus routes, he thinks the only plan that makes sense is to start with Chicago, then work his way through the other finalists on his list of potential new homes. Now he has no reason at all to remain tied to that old place—Kait is here with him, and the thought of returning to the shell of his old life is terrible enough without even considering the possibility that Sherry, Brutus, and the rest will be waiting there to break him in half. So he will look at homes in Chicago. He’ll go to open houses. He’ll move from there to St. Louis and do the same. He will learn everything he can about each city, and maybe if one of them is as perfect a fit as he’d hoped, then he will stop there and begin a new life with Kait in a new home, with a new job and new friends and new family and a new self. Because this plan is coming together at the last minute and there are a few landmarks the Internet tells him he should see along the way, he devises a convoluted route that gets him to Austin, Texas, by way of Nebraska, then South Dakota, then Oklahoma. After that, he will head west.

  THE GENERAL ATMOSPHERE OF an interstate bus ride is best described as oppressively sad, but at least Hunter doesn’t have to drive anymore. As a passenger, he’s not worried about crashing because he trusts the professional driver, and also how often are bus disasters reported on the news? Sometimes it happens, sure, but Hunter suspects those events are pretty rare and that their relative rarity actually leads to them being over-reported. Perhaps just as important as the safety, though, is the fact that this bus knows exactly how to get to Chicago and drives with a purpose.

  In a college creative writing class, he once wrote a short story about a young man on a Greyhound bus, running away from home and going “anywhere the road will take me.” The story ran twenty-seven pages (despite a fifteen-page limit), and was full of Big Revelations about Human Nature and The Way We Live Today. There was a Down-on-Her-Luck Single Mom. There was a Noble Stripper Chasing Her Dreams. There was a Gritty Blue-collar Worker. There was a Creepy Old Man, heaved off the bus by the group, which had cohered into a family halfway through the trip. A pivotal scene featured the narrator talking to a Wise Hobo who was tired of riding the rails and spoke entirely in homespun aphorisms. The narrator said to the Hobo, “At least you’ve lived; I’m a nonentity,” a comment Hunter himself had once uttered to a beggar on campus, because the only problems Hunter had ever faced were the most generic suburban white-kid problems anyone could imagine, and it made him miserable to think how sad that was. In real life, the homeless man flicked the bridge of Hunter’s nose and told him to go get fucked by a rhino. In the story, the Wise Hobo sympathized and told the narrator he understood, said it’s better to live life in the muck than watch from the sidelines. Said if ennui and ironic detachment could bring someone down so hard, then the Narrator ought to challenge himself and face real drama in his life, see what he’s made of. The last line of the story read: “Maybe we all have something to learn from one another after all.” His classmates called it mature and funny and engaging, even though he could tell some of them hadn’t really read it, and they’d just assumed it was good because it was long. He was also pretty confident that, yes, it was good, and, yes, he was witty and smart and talented, and so even when the teacher critiqued it, picking at all the loose threads and describing it as overwrought, Hunter decided that he was going to start telling people he was a writer, because he liked hearing people praise his work, and he liked the notion of being a Man of Letters, a person whose job it is to sit in his home and think about Important Things, then issue proclamations about those Important Things, living what appears to lay people to be a sedentary life, but which actually requires intense mental gymnastics. He knows now that it was a wrongheaded and juvenile dream, that very few people actually get to live the life of a public intellectual, and that anyway his great attraction to it was that it seemed important without actually involving a lot of labor, like a shortcut to being someone people cared about. He knows he’s incapable of being that person he pretended to be, but the problem was he never found a new goal; by the time of Kait’s death he still hadn’t determined the person he was supposed to be. Envisioning a life of rubbing his temples and telling people I’ve just been buried in my work all day long, he changed his major to English, took a few more creative writing classes, read most of the books he was assigned, skimmed enough of the other books to be able to fake it (surely his professors had done the same; how could anyone have encyclopedic knowledge of hundreds of novels?), and graduated with a BA in English and a 3.1 GPA that he now admits could have been higher, but, as he contended to Jack and Willow every semester when his grades came in, aren’t grades, after all, simply an arbitrary system of measurement designed to appease state accreditation boards and status-driven nerds, and isn’t the true measure of intelligence how much knowledge has been gained rather than whether one received a B or a B+ on a reading quiz on Beowulf? When, a year into their relationship, he recounted these arguments to Kait, she cringed at his description of the grading process, boasted her 3.8 GPA in finance, and said, “So what if grades are arbitrary? If everyone else cares about them, you have to care about them too,” and to a certain extent she was right; it was the GPA (and the ancillary honors) that enabled her to get a good job out of college and maintain a strong credit score and would ultimately lead them to their house, which was not exactly an estate, but was the kind of place that people often called adorable and charming. Hunter admitted she was right; it had made him feel better at the time, he said, but rationalizations don’t get you far on job interviews; recruiters want numbers and they want results. If he were back in school now, he said, he would put in a little more effort, spent more time actually trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with his life instead of deferring the issue.

  At that time, he was still ostensibly pursuing the writing life, so she asked to see what he’d been working on, and all he could show her was the old Greyhound story, on which she made notes and copyedits and offered him feedback. She told him “This is really good, you should keep working on this.” She prompted him, in front of her family, to tell them about his work, which only served to reinforce their perception of him as an effete intellectual, and later when he asked her not to do that again, she apologized, said she was just proud of him, said she liked that he was different from them, that his creativity and curiosity distinguished him from her friends’ husbands and boyfriends. She sent him text messages in the mornings wishing him a good day of writing, saying, “I know you’ll come up with something great.” At first, he tried. Because it was good to feel like he was doing something worthwhile, to consider himself a writer again as opposed to considering himself nothing at all, and because he wanted to reward her faith in him, but within a week he realized he didn’t actually like writing. He just liked the lingering cultural significance of having written. Still, he pretended for three months, holing himself up in his bedroom and skimming the Internet for hours, always deferring Kait’s requests to read his work-in-progress. “You can’t read it until it’s done,” he said. One evening over dinner, he told her he probably wasn’t cut out for writing, and she said nothing at all, after which point he never pretended to write again.

  AN UNABRIDGED LIST OF jobs held by Hunter Cady between ages 16 and 29 (plus: reason for leaving):

  • Cashier at Santucci’s Pizzeria in Hartford, CT (fired over philosophical debate with manager re: the practice of charging a quarter for extra napkins)

  • Summer intern at Cady Manufacturing (terrible working relationship with Jack)

  • Sandwich designer at Gaetano’s Grinders in Hartford (fired for repeated lateness)

  • Landscaper with Celtic lawns, Hartford (summer job only)

  • Clerk at Underground Records, Hartford (shop closed)

  • Barista at Whole Latte Love in Philadelphia (quit when he got a better job)

  • Library assistant at Temple University (graduated, position limited to current students only)

  • Intern at Philad
elphia Daily News (quit, didn’t want to work in a dead medium)

  • Technical editor at Farrelly Information Services in Hartford (job too soul-draining, left after ten days when he went to the supply closet to hide from the tedium and his manager was already in there doing the same thing)

  • Substitute teacher in Hartford Public School District (a terrible idea from the start)

  • Tour guide, Philadelphia Zoo (seasonal work only)

  • Marketing and Development for Building Blocks, a nonprofit organization supporting children in low-income areas of Philadelphia (failed to reach fundraising goals)

  • Writer of fictions that will open minds and change lives (harder than it looked)

  • Contact Center Professional at Dependable Rentals (wife died)

  There were times over the past half-decade when Hunter wondered whether he should have skipped college entirely and gone into a trade, learned to fix elevators—an industry on the rise, he would have said every day—or building bomb shelters or just about anything besides having spent four-point-five years in pursuit of an English degree with a minor in Philosophy that was long on intrinsic value and short on practical applications. Because understanding Petrarch doesn’t pay the gas bill. Being able to quote Kant doesn’t help you upsell a customer from a compact car to an SUV. But he’d been convinced, like so many of his classmates, that going to college was some sort of guarantee of future happiness, and also it delayed his entry into the real world and granted him what Jack calls the luxury of aimlessness, a phrase he surely read in some book filled with tips on how to become a tycoon. Jack enjoyed reiterating the Legend of Jack Cady, self-made man, who never had the luxury of aimlessness, and who made the mistake of granting that luxury to his son, who didn’t have to pay for school and whose mother kept him on an allowance until he turned twenty-four.

  In the months leading up to Kait’s death, Hunter had applied to ten colleges to pursue graduate studies in a variety of business-adjacent fields. He wasn’t enthralled by the subject matter, but at least this way he could make better money and follow through on some of his lofty promises to Kait. She didn’t like the idea of losing his income while he was at school, but still it was her idea for him to apply. “You can’t keep living like this,” she’d said. “You’re too smart to be renting out cars and sitting around the house.” She helped him fill out the applications, copyedited his personal statements, tracked the deadlines. He’d wanted to keep the applications a secret as long as possible, but Kait had mentioned them to Jack, and Jack started e-mailing him grad school application tips and offering to look things over for him, to make calls to old friends with connections in admissions departments. By the time of Kait’s death, Hunter had only heard from one school, a rejection from Wharton, which was to be expected, but he’d treated that application like a lottery ticket, just in case. The responses from other schools are probably piling up in his mailbox now, reminders of a time when he thought planning for the future was a sensible and responsible thing to do.

  THE FUNDAMENTAL DISAPPOINTMENT OF the bus ride is that the relative safety and the direction are there, but what’s lacking is what has been lacking from the start: nothing seems to be changing. He is viewing the country at a remove, as if watching a documentary about someone else’s more interesting cross-country trip, which is not at all the point of travel, is it? The point is to engage with the world, to meet new people and experience adventures and accumulate stories to tell, and to return home a transformed man. What he should be doing is making footprints and taking soil samples and learning the names of the local flora and fauna. He should be hacking a new path into the wilderness rather than watching the roadside through a rain-streaked window. There’s something too utilitarian about riding isolated across the country, flumping in the backseat of a Greyhound and silently gazing off into the distance; this is the sort of approach one takes when trying to complete a job, a courier delivering important documents to a client, and although Hunter has very important cargo in his care, there is no specific endpoint, there is no one waiting to collect Kait from him.

  He decides the first step to improving his journey is to talk to the man seated across the aisle from him. The man is rumpled and musty, like he’s been stowed and neglected in a trunk beneath someone’s bed for the past ten years. His mouth is hidden behind an unfortunate mustache, and his nose is barely a stub, as though it’s been punched deep within his face. Like everyone else on the bus, including Hunter, his ears are plugged with earbuds, and he is staring down at a cell phone, jabbing at the screen occasionally. He looks away from the screen every fifteen or so minutes, but then only to glance out the window or stare up at the ceiling as if engaged in prayer. He waits for the man to look up from his phone, and waves at him like a diner calling for his waiter, but the man pretends not to see. Fifteen minutes later, he tries again, and this time the man sizes him up, then points to his ears as if the buds in there have been inflicted upon him and he’d like to talk if only these damn things weren’t here. Hunter gives up and fiddles with his own phone.

  He snaps a photo of himself and Kait, adds it to his fledgling Facebook album, which he has since titled Postcards. Caption: Kait, checking out the scenery. Within five minutes, he has received a half dozen comments, people clicking on the little thumbs-up icon beneath the photo, liking it in the vaguest possible way (Do they like that he’s on the road? Do they like having a distraction from work? Do they just like acknowledging the existence of digital photography?), and one comment, from a guy he knew in high school: Dude, WTF LOL!, a response that is admittedly not entirely comprehensible, but which is at least an acknowledgment.

  Over the next hour, he will refresh the website twenty times, never fully clear what type of reactions he is hoping to receive, but he is certain that what he wants is reactions. And the responses do trickle in—more Likes and more comments, most of which express something along the lines of still can’t believe she’s gone . . . RIP, or else they’re saying that’s not right, you shouldn’t joke about this, or they’re offering help, as in let me know if I can do anything for you, and he devours the responses, finds them wholly unsatisfying but also needs to get more, wants more people to respond and validate his sadness, his right to feel broken, is deeply frustrated when he refreshes and nothing has changed, shaking the phone as if it is the phone’s fault that not enough people care about his photo album.

  The woman in front of him turns and says, “Something wrong back there?” She’s missing a front tooth and her skin is so damaged it looks like she has spent her adulthood lying on the surface of the sun.

  “No,” Hunter says, “it’s just that I posted this thing on Facebook—”

  “Didn’t ask for a story,” she says.

  “Actually, you kind of did—”

  “I just asked you to shut the hell up and quiet the hell down and let the hell go of my seat,” she says, turning away from him. He realizes he’s been leaning forward against her seat, gripping it with his free hand as if dangling from a cliff’s edge.

  “Sorry,” he says, “it’s just that I’m on this road trip—”

  “Don’t care,” she says, balling up a sweater against the window and burying her face in it.

  When the bus pulls into a gas station, the driver announces that passengers have exactly ten minutes to smoke and buy refreshments and mill aimlessly about the parking lot. Most of the passengers are deflated-looking men wearing unironic trucker hats and dusty jeans; now they look away from their phones and they light one another’s cigarettes and in conversation they become increasingly loud and animated, gesturing as if hoping to injure the air. The women are too thin to be healthy, cigarettes clamped between their lips, eyes like storm clouds. The men have bad beards and red faces the color of uncooked beef.

  He sees, standing in a circle of older men, a woman around his age, in a tank top and cotton shorts with the word DIVA written across the butt, a trash bag full of clothing resting at her feet. When
she bends to retie the flaps on her bag, he steals a glance at her cleavage, senses the eyes of every other man checking her out, the instinctive group eye groping that men do in crowds. Kait never wore clothing like that, didn’t even wear lingerie on special occasions because she had some weird, lingering Catholic guilt thing regarding sex, which isn’t to say she avoided sex with Hunter—that was never a problem for them, they still engaged in regular, satisfying sex, especially on weekends when she wasn’t exhausted from work—but she was very traditional and reserved and would apologize to him when she screamed too loudly, believed that feeling pleasure was somehow sinful, so he knows she would frown upon him ogling this girl right now, and she would disapprove of the girl herself for choosing to present herself in such a way (Kait’s preferred term in these cases was skank). The girl does not seem to notice him.