The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  Jack knocks again, a single gunshot crack. He jangles his keys in his pocket, checks his watch again. He will not go away until Hunter opens the door. If Hunter does not open the door, Jack will purchase a sledgehammer and knock the door off its hinges, then bill Hunter for labor and materials. It shouldn’t be a surprise that someone has found Hunter. He’s been leaving a trail of digital breadcrumbs—the most recent a photo of him and Kait hiding inside a pillow fort in this hotel room—but did it have to be Jack who showed up?

  As Jack winds up to knock again, Hunter swings the door open. Jack walks past him into the room, flicks on the overhead lights and opens the blinds, floods the room with sunlight. “Get dressed,” he says. “We’ve got a busy day.”

  AN HOUR LATER, THEY’RE sitting on a park bench on the campus of Oral Roberts University. Jack has a meeting here today, says he arranged it since he’d be in town anyway; a chance to check in on some of his contacts (Jack has contacts and he has business partners; he does not have friends). Over Jack’s shoulder, Hunter has a clear view of the world’s largest pair of praying hands—a sixty-foot tall bronze sculpture at the entrance to the school.

  “Did you need to bring that thing here?” Jack says, pointing at the urn.

  “This is my wife.”

  Jack looks away from Kait, grinds his teeth in that theatrical way he has to ensure people know he is frustrated. “How long are you going to do this?”

  “It must have taken them forever to make that,” Hunter says, looking at the praying hands.

  “Your mother is worried about you.”

  “I read that thing weighs thirty tons. Can you imagine?”

  “She wanted to come but not everyone can afford to wander around the country on a whim.”

  “You flew two thousand miles just to lecture me?”

  “I came here on business.” Jack stands, motions for Hunter to follow him on a gravel path toward an administration building. “And I came to bring you home.”

  “Why shouldn’t I do this?” Hunter says. “I’ve got the money.”

  “You know what this is like? This is like that month when you gave up on cheese. Or do you remember that time you were going to take boxing classes?”

  “This is nothing like any of that. Someone is dead.” Hunter thrusts Kait into Jack’s chest, and then releases his grip on the urn, lets her drop, wants Jack to catch her and be forced to hold her, to feel the physical weight of her death in his hands, because he is much more adept with concrete ideas than he is with abstractions. Jack steps backward, arms at his sides, and Kait thuds into the gravel. The urn gouges a divot into the pathway, a fossil recording Kait’s brief passage here. Down on his knees, investigating the cube, Hunter finds no new damage. “How can you just let her fall?” Hunter says.

  “You’re the one who chose to drop her.” He turns, continues walking toward his meeting, does not look over his shoulder to check on Hunter. Hunter and Kait rise from the ground and follow him.

  “You know, you’re not the first person to have someone die,” Jack says when Hunter catches up. “My mother died when I was eight. My father was dead before you were born. I lost three cousins last year. This is what happens.”

  “So, what, I don’t have the right to be sad just because other people die too?”

  “You sound like your mother.”

  “You sound like an asshole.” They pass under the hands, swallowed by their shadow. Jack checks his watch.

  “You want to be mad at me because life is hard, fine, be mad at me,” Jack says. “I’m not the one who did this to you.” When they enter the administrative building, Jack tells Hunter to sit in the lobby and wait for him while he goes to his meeting. Hunter sits, eyeing the floor like a high school student stuck in detention.

  KAIT WOULD HAVE BEEN fascinated by the giant hands. Hunter was never particularly religious, never raised that way, and in college loved to quote the Marx line about the opiate of the masses, but Kait was raised in a Catholic family and a Catholic neighborhood. She rarely attended Mass, and when Hunter launched into diatribes about the institutional corruption of organized religion, she nodded and agreed. But like every Catholic he knows, she also couldn’t shake the feeling that she should be doing something spiritual anyway. She was the one who insisted on getting married in a church, for example. He didn’t like the idea, not only because of the length of the service, but because it would require him to spend months trying to convince a priest that he deserved to get married. She asked him, “Don’t you believe in any god?” He said he’d never seen a good reason to believe in one. When she said, “I’m not sure what I believe in,” he repeated one of Jack’s favorite mantras: you have to have conviction because there’s no room in life for doing things halfway. Still, she insisted that if they had children, they would be baptized. Just in case, she said, as if God is a contingency plan. She seemed to want to have faith, even though she couldn’t explain why, and so they kept religious artifacts in their home—a crucifix in the bedroom, a small statue of St. Joseph in the foyer, supposedly for good luck—and she still prayed at night, crossing herself and willing herself to believe.

  While they lay in bed one night, he asked her who she prayed to, and she couldn’t say exactly. “It just helps me sometimes,” she said. “Why does it bother you so much?”

  “What’s the point in praying if you don’t even know who you’re speaking to, or why?” he asked. “It’s the same as having an imaginary friend.”

  “Just because you can’t see God doesn’t mean he’s not there.” She rolled onto her side to face him, pressed a hand on his chest, roughly where she assumed the soul was contained. “There are some things you have to take on faith.”

  “You’re only saying that because that’s what they teach you to say.”

  She made the sign of the cross on him, smiling, and said, “Tonight, I’m going to pray for you to see the light.” That was funny, Hunter had to admit.

  THE TV IN THE building lobby is muted. Occasionally a pair of shoes clicks metronomically past him on the tile floor. A secretary taps out text messages furiously. Fluorescent lights buzz like angry wasps. Hunter unlocks the cube and invites Kait to escape, to reveal herself like a genie and grant him his three wishes, and then he snaps it shut and locks it again. While locking and unlocking, a motion effortless as clicking a pen, he wishes now he’d had her faith, thinks maybe religion isn’t entirely bad after all. Most of his thoughts over the past few weeks have been essentially the equivalent of prayers. Even though he thinks he knows who he has been talking to, there is no guarantee that she can hear him or that her soul even exists, and he could just as easily be unloading his emotions on a box filled with dirt, besides which, how can he even be sure the funeral parlor delivered him the correct ashes, maybe this is a stranger in the box or not even human ashes at all, so there is a certain leap of faith occurring even on that most fundamental level. Besides that, there is something appealing about the size and scope of the enormous praying hands at Oral Roberts, or any of the other colossal monuments he and Kait have seen on this trip, like the sculpture of the Native American warrior Crazy Horse being carved and dynamited into the side of a South Dakota mountain, a work seventy years in the making with perhaps another seventy to go. Besides a great accumulation of wealth, memorials on the scale of the European cathedrals and Egyptian pyramids require bottomless reservoirs of love. He thinks now that he could use his remaining insurance money to commission a sculpture of Kait to be displayed on their lawn, maybe even a whole series of them, so he could praise her in all of her natural states, from sleeping to eating blueberry muffins for breakfast to planting flowers to trimming her bangs in front of the bathroom mirror to relaxing in front of the TV with a glass of wine.

  Everyone wants to memorialize their loved ones, but nothing they do ever seems adequate.

  Jack’s meeting lasts three hours, during which time Hunter pokes around on the Internet until his phone battery dies, and then watches t
he silent TV screen, which is populated by hundreds of women who were allowed to live longer than Kait for reasons still undetermined. When Jack emerges from the elevator, Hunter is half asleep. Jack says, “Did you just sit here doing nothing the whole time?”

  STANDING AT THE RENTAL car, Jack says, “Listen, your mother wants me to give you a hug.” He leans into Hunter, Kait pressed between them, and he withdraws after a few firm pats on Hunter’s back. He tells Hunter to get in the car, and doesn’t speak until they’re about a half mile down the road, the bronze hands receding in the rearview. “Here’s the deal,” Jack says. “I’m meeting those guys tonight at a steakhouse in town. We have some hurdles to clear, so I might be out late. There’s a seven-thirty flight home tomorrow morning. Earliest I could get.” He switches lanes without signaling, speeds past a minivan. “I got you a seat. Cost extra because it was last minute, but I’ll cover it.”

  “I’m not done yet,” Hunter says.

  “Oh no?” Jack laughs. “What’s next on your big agenda?”

  “I don’t really know where I’m going,” Hunter says.

  “That’s always the problem, isn’t it?” Another lane change, stomping on the gas pedal.

  They pass a sprawling RV park, filled to capacity, each RV with a happy family. It is only in Hunter’s sightline for only a few seconds, and then it is gone, but he sees every detail. He sees the retired couple inside the bright blue camper near the roadside, the husband arranging turkey and swiss on crustless bread for his wife, and Hunter knows they are in the middle of a trip for which they’ve been preparing their whole lives. He sees the jumbo camper in the back of the park, teeming with six children and a golden retriever, the harried parents sending them to run around somewhere so they can be together in silence for a few moments and try to remind themselves why they thought this was a good idea in the first place. He sees brothers and sisters fighting with one another, and he sees teenagers twiddling with their phones to contact distant boyfriends and girlfriends. He sees thousands of camera flashes, everyone wanting to record this moment, envisioning future scrapbooks and online albums. He sees patriarchs double-checking itineraries and unfurling maps onto the hoods of RVs, circling destinations with their pens in order to convey a sense of authority. These are all people traveling with other people, which makes them tourists; he is a person traveling without other people, which means he long ago crossed the line separating tourist and drifter.

  Jack jerks the wheel to zoom past another slow-moving vehicle, mutters something about Midwestern drivers. Says, “Tell me something—how are you going to survive without a job?”

  “I’ve got plenty of money.”

  “Right now you do. What happens in five years?” At a red light, Jack drums his fingers on the steering wheel, stares up at the light, so that he can charge through at the exact moment it turns green. “No answer. Let’s try this one—is the money invested? Do you expect it to just grow on its own?”

  Holding his phone, Hunter says, “Do you have a car charger? Battery died.”

  “Kait’s mother won’t stop calling. You know that? She keeps talking about lawyers and police. I’d say it’s a bluff but she probably doesn’t know any better.”

  “She’ll get over it.”

  “Do you understand you’re being selfish? That you’re hurting people?” They pull into the hotel parking lot, engine idling. Jack unlocks the doors.

  Hunter says, “Can I go out to dinner with you?”

  “Not when you’re like this. When’s the last time you washed your clothes?” It has been a while. He started reusing dirty shirts last week rather than wasting time in laundromats. “This is business here, not family fun time.” Jack makes a show of rolling up his sleeve to check his watch.

  “Do you cheat on Mom when you’re on the road?”

  “You want to think everything’s simple, but it’s not all simple.”

  “Why would you marry her if you didn’t want to be with her?”

  Jack squeezes the steering wheel, stares straight ahead as if he’s still speeding down the highway. “I know you’re angry. This is not what you wanted your life to be. It’s not what I wanted for you either. But it’s how things are.”

  Hunter steps out of the car. “You should go to your meeting,” he says. Jack waits a moment before backing out of his parking spot, and then he is gone.

  •••

  BEFORE HE LIES DOWN in bed, he receives an e-mail from Sherry: “Because we don’t trust you anymore, we’re going over your house. I and Brutus are going to take what’s ours and what’s Kait’s. You want to keep her, fine. But you can’t lock us out forever, it’s easy to break in a place.” He pictures them rifling through his possessions, dumping out his drawers and ransacking the house. Cutting holes in the drywall on the hunt for hidden treasures. Like a family KGB searching for evidence to prove that Hunter was a bad husband, for reasons to justify their contempt. He thinks about the things Kait would never want them to see—the mess in the spare bedroom, the purple vibrator in her underwear drawer given to her as a gift by a bridesmaid and as far as he knows never used, the antianxiety meds she’d begun taking about six months before her death. He thinks about the things they’ll take with them. Her clothes, anything that fits Sherry. Her boxes of college memorabilia—scrapbooks, graduation gown, old notebooks, his only connection to that period of her life. He imagines them physically tearing these memories out of his mind, severing all ties he’s ever had to her. If they could get away with it, they’d torch the place after clearing it out. They’re grieving too, it’s understandable that they’re so upset, why shouldn’t they be heartbroken by their loss, but why do they want to punish him? For being depressed by his wife’s death? For not being enough like them, not being a drinker and a fighter and an expert at darts? For not being the kind of guy they wanted Kait to marry, but instead being the kind of guy she wanted to marry? They want her possessions, but they don’t know who she really was. They love who they think she was, and right now they’re in the house trying to unearth a person they lost long before she died.

  He should call a neighbor or a friend to check on the house, but doesn’t have phone numbers for any neighbors and only interacted with them out of social obligation. He can’t think of anyone who is a close enough friend to defend his house against a band of marauding Dixons. Telling Jack is out of the question; he may be able to help, but Hunter would rather have his house burned to the ground than to be deeper in debt to his father, to endure more of his condescension, another of his lectures. After landing on the East Coast, he will have to rush back to his home and survey the damage, call the police and insurance companies, waste even more time trying to recover his losses.

  HE WAKES AT SIX o’clock, buckling under the pressure of a migraine, which makes it nearly impossible to do anything. He feels like he’s recovering from a bout with the flu. Jack will be at the hotel soon. He will force Hunter onto that flight, and then they’ll be home, and Hunter will have failed to cross the country, failed to give Kait the trip she deserved, and then what happens? He just goes back to work for another forty years until someone tells him it’s time to retire?

  Hunter rolls out of bed, still wearing last night’s clothes, and carries Kait with him toward the pharmacy two blocks away. He buys a bottle of pills for the migraine and consumes three times the recommended dosage, then sits on the curb by the pharmacy door, his head feeling like a cracked egg.

  Maybe a half hour later, still on the curb, Kait in his lap, he takes his first photo in days, the pill bottle next to Kait. Caption: Searching for a cure.

  A car parks directly in front of him even though the parking lot is empty. He assumes Jack has found him. He will not put up a fight, because he knows he will lose. But the driver is a stranger, looks like he’s in his early fifties, wide-chested and spry, springing from the car toward the pharmacy, while two younger passengers climb out from the backseat. They’re closer to Hunter’s age, one male and one female, a
nd he has to resist the urge to thrust Kait in their faces, warn them that no matter what has led them here, this is the ultimate fate of every love story.

  The young guy looks like a hand-rolled cigarette, lumpy and pale, with bright red hair that curls out over his ears. His mustache sits like a caterpillar on his lip, dramatically darker than his hair, probably grown as a joke. He fits into his clothes like biscuit dough bursting out of the tube. He’s clearly a strong guy, much more so than Hunter, like a former rugby player who has let himself go. His cheeks are stippled with acne scars. He wears a T-shirt that says THIS SHIRT IS ONLY FUNNY IF YOU GET THE JOKE. The girl looks like Kait. Except for the brown eyes, and the slightly shorter legs, and the narrower hips. And her hands aren’t right either—Kait’s were delicate with spindly fingers, and this girl’s are meaty and perfect for opening jars. Her breasts are larger than Kait’s, and her hair is dyed blonde, unlike Kait’s natural chestnut. But when he looks, he still sees Kait, still sees himself standing next to her.

  The couple stretches and leans on the car, movements synchronized. The guy sneaks a kiss while the older man shops inside the drugstore. The young guy wraps his arm around the girl’s waist as they gaze off into the distance. They look like they’ve just reunited after a long absence, like he’s returned from the war and she’s afraid to let go.

  The older man bounds outside and calls to Hunter. “Hey,” he says, his voice rusty and sharp. “You from around here?” Hunter shakes his head. “We’re looking for some place to eat.”

  “There’s probably something down that way,” Hunter says, waving down the road.

  “Well, where the hell you been eating at?”

  “I’ve been sticking to room service.”

  “Looks like you haven’t been eating anything at all,” the older man says. The young couple closes in and all three stand over him. “You okay?”

  “It’s been a long couple of days,” Hunter says, looking up and shielding his eyes from the rising sun.