The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  None of the self-proclaimed Bad Bitches is married. They’re all a year past college, mostly in long-term relationships, and mostly enamored with the idea of having a wedding, and they’re all deeply, openly resentful of the bride-to-be, a girl named Jessa, who laughs every time someone in her group calls her a slut, and who will probably eventually realize that they mean it to be hurtful, but they know they can get away with saying anything to her while she’s this drunk. The first thing Jessa says to Hunter, leaning in close and whispering, is, “Everyone thinks I’m drunk just because I fell off the bar stool.” She holds on to his arm to stabilize herself. Her cheeks are puffy, nose red, hair disheveled and mascara streaked, but still she looks like she is probably pretty when she’s not pumped full of enough toxins to require hospitalization. The rest of the girls keep feeding her drinks, and Hunter takes a few sips of her Watermelon Throwdown, ostensibly to protect her, at which point he learns that WTs are delicious. Kait did not drink what she called girly drinks, said daiquiris and piña coladas were nothing but sugar, too many calories, so Hunter has never tasted anything like this, did not realize alcohol could taste so much like not-alcohol, that something so sweet and fruity could even be in the same genus as beer. Within an hour of meeting the bachelorettes he has consumed three cocktails, and he finds himself following the girls to another bar, which they say has even better drinks than ThrowDowns does. They all think it’s very sweet that he still loves his wife even after she’s dead. “It’s like something from a movie,” according to the girl who stole Kait’s seat. Her name is almost certainly Lindsay. It’s possible they’re all named Lindsay.

  “I hope when I’m dead, my husband carries me around forever,” another Lindsay says. “And if he doesn’t, I’ll haunt his ass.” They have all been raised on Hollywood romantic comedies and seem to think the ideal representation of love is something like obsession or stalking. They think love means sex, still, and they are much more interested in weddings than they are in marriage, much more interested in naming babies than in raising them. They embrace every aspect of the mass commoditization of marriage, even the fact that the wedding day has now grown, through one-upmanship and clever marketing, from a single evening event to a full weekend affair. They want destination weddings and expensive brunches and white horses and the most expensive flowers in the world. They are only six years younger than he is, but they make him feel ancient. He surely had primitive views on love and sex when he was in college too, but he cannot remember himself then, and every effort he makes to do so feels like trying to access the memory of a stranger.

  Another round of drinks. These places are all too loud for holding conversations, too loud sometimes for Hunter to hear himself speak, but the girls laugh at everything he says anyway. Probably they would be doing this for any guy who chose to follow them around for the night, but he has always wanted to be the Funny Guy in a group of people, often envisioned himself at the center of a circle spouting witticisms and eliciting rounds of head-tossing laughter, and for the first time in his life he thinks he gets the appeal of this lifestyle. The drinks keep coming. Hunter poses for his own set of penis-straw pictures. They’ll end up online, captioned Some guy we met . . . So random! He takes pictures too, of the girls holding Kait, Jessa’s lips firmly pressed against the cube. Uploads them. More drinks. The girls embark on a bachelorette scavenger hunt, which is how Hunter finds himself crafting a veil out of toilet paper, and also how he becomes the official Bad Bitches liaison to the other men, because the hunt entails the collection of items like condoms, men’s business cards, and a man’s boxers, in addition to the performance of a specific set of actions by Jessa. He recruits men to sample liquor off her neck, to remove her bra without removing her shirt, carry her on their shoulders while she shouts “I’m Getting Married!” The drinking continues. The scavenger hunt checklist tells Jessa to gives Hunter a lap dance. She sits him in a chair in the corner of the room beneath a strobe light. Her movements jerky and only semihuman. Grinding against his crotch as if she wants to hurt him. Hunter gripping her hips to keep her from falling off. Placing a shot glass between his legs and picking it up with her mouth. Then they’re outside, strangled by still summer air. A dozen pairs of stylish heels clacking on the sidewalk. Charging toward another bar. More drinks. Hunter paying. The girls toasting him and Kait. Feeling like a mascot, entertaining but disposable. Onslaught of dumb questions about his dead wife. Do you miss her? Do you think about her a lot? Are you still sad? Was the funeral hard? Was she pretty?—the question they all repeat. He shows them her Facebook page and the girls are relieved to see that she was, in fact, pretty. So many Lindsays rubbing his back, telling him how pretty she was. Michael Jackson music, rhythm familiar like a heartbeat, the girls shrieking and rushing to the dance floor, Hunter drunk enough to join them. The girls encircling him beneath flashing lights, the floor disappears and reappears at random. Group hugs and group photos. Jessa falling twice. Hunter’s ill-advised Jesus joke when she falls a third time, the looks of drunken disgust from the good Catholic girls. Ordering a pitcher of water. A round of energy drinks spiked with alcohol, the taste of purple. The room rocking, floor lifting up and then gently floating back down like a ship in temperate seas. Memories of the African cruise he and Kait never took. Constriction in his chest, a nearly immobilizing fullness. The girls are chewing gum, mouths flapping open so he can see all the way down their throats, down past their souls and into their overfull stomachs. He tells Jessa if he looks hard enough he can see into her soul. No response, no movement, eyelids sagging. It is entirely possible that she is already dead. Hunter’s touch, cursed. But then the James Brown songs, the speakers oozing sex and the voice demanding that they get up offa their things, Jessa resurrected by the funk, dragging him back to the dance floor, her ass against his groin, sweat against his sweat, her teeth scraping across his skin, telling her, “I want to kiss you on the mouth.” Telling her, “I bet you look better naked than I look naked.” Following her, or leading her, into the men’s room. Pressed against the stall door, fumbling with Jessa’s skirt. The air in the room sticky. Her pulling away. Him standing behind her as she vomits, she still grasping at his crotch as if reaching for a lever. Kissing her again, the taste like rotten apples, her tongue, rough. Hands crawling over him like spiders. Eyes closed, the room stands still. The sound of his belt unbuckling. Bouncers arriving. Disappearing into an alleyway.

  IN THE MORNING, HE’S by himself in a hotel room, and the ashes are gone.

  He will spend the remainder of his life canvassing the country in search of his wife’s remains. A mission of penance, of vengeance. He’ll be a drifter, just another nameless creep lurking on the edges of towns, insisting that someone has stolen his wife from him. A phantom, driven by a singular, maniacal focus on retrieving the ashes, harboring dreams of someday hunting down the person who stole them. Like something from a campfire horror story—The Forlorn Widower.

  The pen at his bedside tells him he’s at the Days Inn in East St. Louis, but he has no idea what that means, or where he could be in relation to anything else in the world. Still half-drunk, his stomach upside-down, his vision backward, he tries to re-create the events of the previous evening, remembers noise and flashing lights and penis hats and Jessa. Sees no evidence of her in the room, assumes she left him here and then stumbled home to her fiancé to make a tearful confession of infidelity. The fiancée may be on the hunt for him now, seeking his own vengeance. If it comes to that, Hunter will not run.

  The exhaustion of weeks on the road catching up with him; his joints ache and he feels a listlessness like he’s oxygen-deprived.

  Somehow his duffel bag made it here with him. He tears it open and dumps the contents on the floor, finds only soiled clothes. He remembers bringing the ashes to ThrowDowns and is pretty sure he left there with Kait, but maybe not? Maybe he dropped her when he ran off with Jessa. Maybe he forgot about her the moment another woman called him cute.

  His knees ache
from dancing, head throbbing and swollen, mouth dry like British humor. Somewhere in St. Louis, someone else is holding on to Kait. He flips the mattress, just in case, searches the drawers and finds only the Bible. Kait’s mother was right not to trust him. Her brothers might actually murder him now, and who could blame them? He killed their sister then tossed the ashes aside for a drunken one-night stand. Kait insisted they were only hard on him because they were protecting her, and although that seemed a convenient excuse, he doubted it was true. A pair of chirping birds on the windowsill mocks him. The room smells like the inside of an old refrigerator, feels sealed shut. Jack would tell him this is why he shouldn’t have left home in the first place, this is what happens when you never take responsibility. Willow would defend him, and Jack would rattle the ice in his rocks glass, shake his head, say he has work to do, and lock himself in his office until midnight, thundering away at his keyboard, rhythm steady as a freight train. Underneath the bed, Hunter’s phone is buzzing and flashing, demanding attention. He has twenty e-mails to check, a dozen text messages, several missed phone calls. Out of the twenty, only a few will end up being worth checking. Ninety percent of all incoming communication is useless, but that doesn’t stop it from coming. Kait enjoyed opening the mailbox at home even though it was almost exclusively junk mail and bills; she said you never know when you might find a surprise in there, and so every couple months Hunter mailed her a letter to remind her that he loved her and that she was beautiful and smart and better than him. The missed calls are from Sherry, who has left him three increasingly hysterical voice mails, the first of which says: “I been talking to the news stations. One of them wants to do a story on how you took Kait from us. See how funny you think it is when the whole city sees what a scumbag you are.” The text messages are unintelligible, garbled messes sent by Jessa between four and five a.m. It’s possible she’s in some kind of trouble, but, taking inventory of his feelings, Hunter finds that he actually doesn’t care at all what happens to her. If not for her and the Bad Bitches, he wouldn’t have lost his wife. Her fiancée should kick her out of the house, cancel the wedding before he gets in too deep and she breaks his heart. Kait never cheated on Hunter, there is no doubt; if she ever had, she would have been so consumed by guilt that she would have told him immediately. He slipped once when they were dating, got high with hometown friends and found his high school crush sitting on his lap, his hand lifting up her shirt and kneading her bare breasts; their sloppy make-out ended abruptly when he felt his phone buzz in his pocket and knew it was Kait, took it as a sign from the universe, slid out from beneath the woman and then left the party without telling anyone. Later, he told Kait he didn’t know how it had happened and didn’t know how to stop it, but the truth is, he knew exactly how it had happened because as soon as he’d seen the crush he’d remembered how much he’d lusted after her, and found the ounce of pot to be the perfect excuse to fulfill a teenage fantasy. Did last night count as cheating on Kait? Did he actually stoop to using his dead wife as a pickup line? For all his condescension to Jessa’s attitudes toward love and marriage, wasn’t his own view just as simplistic and unsophisticated? In so many ways, his life has been a fantasy too; it’s all just a matter of degree. His e-mail delivers him comments on the latest additions to his photo album—photos whose existence he’d forgotten but which now offer the hope of solving the mystery of the missing wife. When he told Kait about the incident with the high school crush, Kait did not cry or shout. She said she appreciated his honesty, and said, “It’s okay this time, as long as it never, ever happens again.” Her forgiveness actually made him feel more guilty because he knew he deserved to be yelled at, to be banished to the couch for a week, to be periodically reminded that he was the one who had cheated and she wasn’t. He took five photos last night. In the first one, Lindsay is on her knees in front of Hunter, grasping his unbuckled belt, a faux-naughty expression on her face, the other girls laughing. Kait is on the table beside them. In another, he and Kait are onstage, performing karaoke. According to the caption, the song is “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green. Photo number three shows them all posing with a homeless man, smiling gap-toothed as he grabs on to Jessa’s hip with one hand and holds the ashes in another. Caption: Making new friends. Photo number four shows the group inside another bar, a pair of phosphorescent drinks resting on top of Kait midtable. She used to desert him at parties, have a few drinks and wander off—he called her the Mingler, a comic book character with the superpower of making small talk with any stranger. Hunter told her he’d rather do big talk, if only people would engage him, but she wanted to know how people were supposed to engage with him if he sat scowling in the corner with arms crossed. Where had she gone last night? Had someone stolen her? Only Hunter, Jessa, and one Lindsay remained in the last picture. They were slumped against the bar, eyes bloodshot and skin greenish in the light. After the Christmas party at her boss’s house, Kait said, “I wish you were a real artist so I could at least call you eccentric.” The name of the bar is visible on the glass Jessa is holding. He looks up their phone number, calls them, but no one answers. It is only eight a.m. He takes a cab there and waits, leaning with his back against the door.

  The manager arrives at ten. A middle-aged woman, red hair pulled up in a ponytail, skin freckled and pale, a large coffee suggesting she worked late last night. Hunter intercepts her before she enters and tries to tell her the story. At first, she seems afraid, but then she takes his hand and tells him to stop crying, everything is okay. He didn’t even realize he was crying, but now he feels the heat in his cheeks, the streams of tears that have rolled down the creases beside his mouth and dripped onto his shirt. She sits him down and hands him a glass of water, offers a shot of whiskey on the house. The thought of more alcohol makes him want to die a violent death. He finishes the water before saying anything. The manager busies herself rearranging glasses behind the bar.

  He begins telling the story, and the manager cuts him off. Plops the Lost and Found box in front of him. Kait is in there, alongside a mixture of cardigans and umbrellas and earrings. The cube is undamaged, mostly. A few more nicks and scratches. The manager says it was found on the floor of the bathroom. The staff spent the night searching obituaries online; they were going to call home the next day, return her to her family.

  He lifts Kait and cradles her against his body. Climbs over the bar and hugs the manager, who holds on to him longer than could be reasonably expected from a stranger. She inhales deeply. “My husband died last year,” she says, and he feels a sudden perverse attraction to her, a surge through his poisoned blood telling him fate has arranged this moment and these two ought to be together. He pulls away, says he has to go right now, and exits before she can call him back, before he does something regrettable. He does not have enough breath to apologize to Kait in the way she deserves. But he tries, for the next two days, hiding in a hotel room and never looking away from her.

  ELEVEN

  Everyone has secrets,” she told you again and again. “It adds to the fun,” she said. You were talking too much and she was not talking enough, and you couldn’t tell whether she was being cagey or if she was trying to politely tell you to shut up. You yourself are often mentally saying shut up, Hunter, sometimes in mid-monologue you’re rebuking yourself for blathering on even though you can tell other people aren’t listening anymore, but you have so many remarkable facts to share and funny jokes to make, and it’s so hard to sit quietly listening, and the more you like certain people, the more you talk to them, because you’re afraid the silence will encourage them to reassess their association with you, and once they start reassessing they’ll find there is no particular reason to be near you besides convenience or a lack of options. Which is why you did about 80 percent of the talking in your relationship, and you would get annoyed when she didn’t remember everything you told her, because you remember every word she ever said to you, at least you think you do.

  COUPLES ARE SUPPOSED TO have
Cute Stories to Tell at Parties, and they’re supposed to have access to each other’s internal lives in ways that no one else does, and you had that, but you also didn’t have it, which made double dates frustrating, because one of the functions of a double date is to measure yourself against the other couple, to compare their cute stories to your cute stories, and to evaluate their shared experiences versus your shared experiences, so that later when you’re alone in your home, you can assess the quality of their relationship and rank them as less in love than you, saying things like They’re kind of weird, right? or I don’t understand why she stays with him or Did you see the way he couldn’t stop playing with his ring? They’ll be divorced within a year. Or sometimes on good nights, I really like those two, why don’t we hang out with them more often? You’re sure other couples met you and then left thinking you talked too much and she too little, and they said things like one day she’s going to get sick of him, and they started applying expiration dates to your marriage, not that they could have known it would have ended this way. The problem was they didn’t see what you were like in private, the way she laughed at your jokes and trusted you and was happiest with simple things like spending an entire day at home with you, eating leftover Chinese and laughing at bad Lifetime movies.

  A PARTIAL LIST OF things you will never know about your deceased wife:

  • What she did—besides “taking a break”—during the year between high school and college

  • How she could have gotten into the habit of opening a can of soda, taking three sips, then putting the can in the freezer and forgetting about it until several days later