The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  The girl says, “He looks like he needs help. Do you think he needs help? I think he needs help.” Her lover nods and the older man makes a humpf sound to indicate agreement.

  “I’m fine.”

  The girl eyes Hunter like he’s a stray dog. She touches the old man on the elbow and gives him a look Hunter understands immediately: it’s the same one Kait would have given him if they’d found a stray, the look that says we need to save this poor guy.

  The older man takes a deep breath, then extends his hand toward Hunter. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go find a diner. Get you something to eat.” He pulls Hunter up to his feet. The migraine still pressing on him, Hunter blinks through the dizziness he feels upon standing.

  Jack will arrive at the hotel within the hour, and if Hunter isn’t ready to go, he will be irritated for the rest of the day, making the flight home unbearable. But these strangers are friendlier than Jack and he can’t remember the last thing he ate, so suddenly his hunger seems urgent. Given the circumstances, he would prefer almost anything to sitting alone in his hotel room for an hour and waiting for his father to take him home. This trip needs to end on his terms, however it ends, not because his father is dragging him home like a child out past curfew. What if this drive to the diner is the key to the whole journey? What if Kait is waiting there for him at the door, and she takes his hand and they fly away to some other, better time and place? What if he’s really hungry and just wants to shove some fried food in his mouth and forget it all for a minute? He conceals Kait in the bag with the pills and follows them to the car, riding in the front while the young couple piles into the back.

  THE OLDER MAN SITS next to Hunter in a diner booth, Hunter trapped against the wall, the couple across from them. The man’s name is Paul, and he is much older than Hunter had guessed. Beneath his baseball cap, he has only a horseshoe of silver hair to match his thick mustache. He is barefoot, his moccasins sitting vacant beneath the table. He’s in his sixties, the grandfather of the girl, Amber, and they’re in the midst of a road trip from North Carolina—a college graduation gift. Thirty years ago, Paul drove Route 66 with his wife, and for years Amber has wanted to replicate his trip. The lumpy guy, whose name is Austin, is here because he is the boyfriend, and Paul thinks he needs to get some living in before he starts working long hours in the insurance industry, which Paul sees as the exact opposite of living. It took no effort for Hunter to learn these things, because the three of them haven’t stopped talking since he got in the car. The waitress delivers stacks of pancakes to each of them.

  “These are the best damn pancakes I had all day,” Paul says, smirking, and Hunter can tell by the others’ blank reactions that this is a pretty standard Paul joke, a variation on something he’s probably said every morning of the trip. He claps Hunter on the thigh like they’re old buddies and asks, “So where you headed?”

  “Trying to get out west,” Hunter says. He shoves a forkful of pancakes into his mouth.

  “You got work waiting for you?” Paul says.

  Still chewing, Hunter says, “Kind of,” and forces more food into his mouth. He focuses on his plate as if to make sure the pancakes won’t run off. He’s glad Paul isn’t across from him, because it’s easier to avoid eye contact this way. To derail the line of questioning, he asks: “Where are you guys going next?”

  Paul heaves a sigh, then says, “Depends who you ask.”

  “He won’t let us get off Route 66, so we can’t see all the stuff we wanna see,” Amber says.

  “What they don’t understand,” Paul says, “is this is the way me and her grandmother went.”

  “We don’t have to do everything exactly like you and grandma did,” Amber says.

  “I know it.”

  “If it’s Amber’s gift, shouldn’t she get some say in it?” Austin says.

  “The giver decides what the gift is,” Paul says.

  Hunter’s phone buzzes in his pocket. Jack is calling. He has ten minutes to get back to the hotel.

  “What if we just, like, take a couple detours and then come right back?” Austin says. “Make the trip longer, but don’t skip anything.”

  “That’s a great idea, babe,” Amber says.

  Paul digs in his pocket and rolls rosary beads between his index finger and thumb.

  “Seems like it wouldn’t be bad for you to see some other stuff,” Hunter says. “Get on a different road awhile.”

  “Maybe you all should’ve done the planning instead of me.” Paul stands and thrusts his foot into his moccasin as if trying to smash a spider. “Why even listen to the one who’s been here before.” He tosses his fork onto the table and stomps toward the bathroom.

  Amber twists a strand of hair around her index finger, looks like she wants to yank it out. Hunter says, “Was that my fault?”

  “He gets like that sometimes,” Amber says. “The trip wasn’t even his idea. Me and Austin were gonna do it alone, but then at the last minute he kind of forced his way in. Offered to pay for everything, so we figured why not? But then sometimes he seems annoyed we’re even here.”

  “Weird.”

  “We get along and all, so it’s not that weird. But, yeah, also it’s a little bit weird.”

  “The problem,” Austin says, “is we’re looking for a little more, I don’t know. Fun? Adventure? Something.”

  Hunter’s phone buzzes again. He pictures Jack standing outside his hotel room, banging on the door. Going to the front desk to demand entry. He nearly answers, but then thinks he should at least finish his meal. Thinks he’d rather not have to run away from breakfast without an explanation. Thinks how much more pleasant it is to be with people who don’t know anything about him. Amber asks him who’s calling, and he shrugs. “Must be a wrong number,” he says, switching the phone to silent.

  Paul emerges from the bathroom shaking water from his hands, walks past them into the parking lot. But Paul is just getting something from the car. He returns to them a minute later, drops a map on the table along with a handful of tourism pamphlets, and says, “Listen, I know you’re not having fun.” Amber opens a pamphlet. “Look it all over and let me know what you want.” He downs the rest of his coffee.

  While Amber consults the pamphlets, making check marks on the ones she wants to visit, Austin unfurls the map and Hunter notices a small town about a thousand miles southwest of their current location: Peridot. Kait’s birthstone, the peridot earrings he’d given her for her birthday and that she was wearing the day she died, fluorescent light glinting pale off her ears as she lay in a gurney, rolling away from him.

  Paul orders another round of coffees. He and Hunter sip quietly while Austin and Amber spend the next twenty minutes scribbling all over the map, circling towns, writing notes in the margins, and running their index fingers alongside each other’s in lines steady as railroad tracks.

  THEY LEAVE THE DINER at seven o’clock, just about the time when his flight will be boarding. Hunter asks Paul to take him back to the hotel, because there is no other place to have Paul take him. There is no other explanation to offer. On the short ride, he prepares himself for a confrontation with Jack, during which Jack will revel in telling them that he’s a fraud, that he’s just some lost boy who needs his daddy to come and save him from the world.

  When they pull into the lot, there is no sign of Jack. If he were here, he would be leaning on his car, arms crossed over his chest like a bouncer. He must already be at the airport, having decided the best punishment for Hunter is to give him exactly what he wanted, to leave him alone.

  “Thanks for joining our little breakfast party,” Paul says, engine idling outside the hotel entrance. He shakes Hunter’s hand.

  Amber smiles and says it was fun to meet someone new. Austin claps him on the back and says, “Good luck getting west, buddy.”

  If Hunter returns to that hotel room, he may never leave it again, at least not until the money runs out, and then he might start working there, cleaning rooms and ch
ecking businessmen into their junior suites for the night. He has only one opportunity to salvage this trip. It will mean sacrificing his itinerary, but there is no other reasonable option. He is still holding on to Paul’s hand. “Son, you okay?” Paul says.

  “How bad would it be if I asked to hitch a ride with you?”

  “You trying to pull a game on me?”

  “I’m stuck here. My car’s broken down. And the rentals are all booked. And I need help.” Paul eyes him warily, clearly trying to determine whether this scene will one day be part of a dramatization on Unsolved Mysteries. “And my wife is waiting for me.”

  He shows them his wedding band, tells them his wife got a job in California and had to move out ahead of him. He had to stay behind and tie up loose ends, was hoping to see some of the country on the way out to meet her.

  Amber thinks this is a very cute story, and she makes the awww sound young girls make when they hear cute stories. “It’s like the dude in that book,” Austin says. “You know. The book from freshman year? The long one.”

  “And, what,” Paul says, “you tie us up and rob us ten miles down the road?”

  “I think I’m the one taking the bigger risk here,” Hunter says. “How do I know you three aren’t murderers?”

  “Boy, if I was a murderer, you’d be dead by now,” Paul says, which is not nearly as reassuring as he seems to think it is.

  “I read somewhere that you should try to do one good deed every day,” Amber says. “This would be perfect. And anyway, this is why you do road trips. This is what’s supposed to happen.”

  “Think about his wife,” Austin says. “I know Amber would be freaking if that was me.”

  A plane roars overhead, causes the car to shudder. Paul rubs his eyes and stares down at the floor as if the solution to this problem is written on his moccasins. Amber grabs Austin’s hand, squeezes it while watching her grandfather hopefully. Paul says, “You got to pay tolls and gas.”

  Hunter thanks him and then runs upstairs to get his bag. Paul, Amber, and Austin could turn out to be kidnappers or sadists or evangelicals, but they could also become friends, and so even though there is a zero percent chance Kait would have approved of this plan—there is adventure and then there is recklessness, there is opening yourself to new experiences and then there is risking your life just to avoid a confrontation with your father—he decides she’s been outvoted and buries her in the duffel bag before stuffing her in the car trunk. A few minutes into the ride, Amber says, “So, Hunter, tell us about your wife.”

  FIFTEEN

  Mornings are the worst. That moment before you open your eyes and your brain starts working again and you return to the conscious world. Remembering.

  SOMETIMES THE WEIGHT OF the sadness presses down on you so hard you can’t breathe.

  CRAZY PEOPLE TALK TO inanimate objects. In a few months, you will stop being bereaved, and you will become eccentric, and then you will become disturbed. This is the progression. But what if that’s the only way to grieve? What if it’s the only way to be fair to her? It worked for people in the Middle Ages. Why shouldn’t you be allowed to cling to this? Why shouldn’t your misery be a monument to your love?

  ONE OF THE JOYS of marriage is complaining to each other, huddling cynically against the outside world, viewing it together and deeming it undeserving of your presence. Sitting in a café and quietly judging other people and knowing intuitively that your wife agrees with your judgment. So who are you supposed to complain to now? Who is supposed to confirm your worldview and let you know you’re right? If you don’t have a partner for this activity, then it becomes antisocial behavior rather than the connective tissue of a relationship. The presence of that other person validates your continued membership in a society.

  FOR THE REST OF your life you will be the man with the dead wife, and people you haven’t seen in years will still dumbly ask, “How’s Kait?” which will make you feel guilty for answering honestly, so sometimes you’ll say, “She’s fine,” because they’re not comfortable with the truth and because it’s easier to pretend that’s what she is. They will move on with their lives and continue assuming everything is fine with you because you said it is fine, and because it is impossible to allow oneself, no matter how charitable or empathetic, to be burdened by every neighbor’s quiet struggles.

  WHEN YOU SEE ANOTHER tourist losing his composure over a minor setback—like the man who hurled his phone out the bus window because he got bad reception on the highway to St. Louis, or the woman who suffered a complete meltdown at the Arby’s in Davenport, Iowa, when they ran out of roast beef and who berated the employees so ferociously that they had to call the police to remove her—you feel smug in your misery. They’re everywhere, these people who cannot function in the face of inconveniences, like long lines or a broken pair of sunglasses, people who explode into rages because someone ruined their picture in front of a historic monument, and when you see them, you think, what would these people do if they faced real trauma? How could they possibly survive an actual loss? Would they just stop breathing on the spot? You, you’re sad and you’re on the run, but you also are maintaining a stoic façade, and seeing these unstable people makes you feel better about your own weakness.

  YOU LIKE TO THINK your grief is individual and unique and objectively worse than the rest of the world’s, but the brutal truth is, it is not, and this fact is not as comforting as some people seem to believe.

  SIXTEEN

  Here is what he tells his new companions when they ask about his life: he tells them he’s moving to San Diego because Kait works for a major environmental advocacy firm and she was just promoted to Manager of West Coast Operations. She’s really into the earth, he says, and she had to get out there right away to start organizing her staff. Yeah, he’s proud of her, loves that she’s pursuing her passions. They’re in the midst of forest fire season, so she’ll probably be busy for the next few months, but they’ll have plenty of time together, and anyway you can’t beat the climate in San Diego. The best part about Kait’s position is that her income alone is double what they were making combined back home, so she told him to quit his job and start chasing his own dreams. He’s a musician, he says. Bass and harmonica, a little keyboard. Playing helps him relax, it’s a refuge. He’s got auditions with a few bands set up already. In the meantime, he’ll be doing a lot of writing, because, oh, didn’t he mention that? He’s a writer too. It’s lonely work, but he loves it. He does not mention that he hasn’t written a single creative word in almost two years. Tells them there’s this roof deck on the new house—he hasn’t been there yet, but Kait has sent him pictures—where he can set up a few chairs and a table and write for hours, looking out over the cliffside toward the ocean. He’s really looking forward to spending long days up there, absorbing the sun, because he finds nature very inspiring, he says, and Amber agrees, she likes nature too. The inside of the house is nice, has plenty of room to start a family, which Kait wants to do, although not right away, not until they see the world. He’ll be a stay-at-home dad, because that’s the tradeoff you have to make if you’re willing to let your wife bring home the bacon. She knows he’s running late, but she’s fine with it. Trusts him. All that matters in the end is getting there and seeing each other again; they have the rest of their lives to spend together, so why not enjoy the sights along the way?

  THEY’RE DRIVING A STEADY four mph below the speed limit, occasional thrill-seeking teens whizzing by while Austin and Amber watch them wistfully. Acres of desert lie on either side of them, a landscape that demands silence. Paul is listening to Arlo Guthrie, tapping fingers arhythmically on the steering wheel. Even in the air-conditioning, sweat beads on Hunter’s face, rolls down his side, and funnels into the grooves above his hips. Feverish. Like the car is hauling victims of typhoid.

  Paul has this way of talking—in bursts, loud and declarative. Like thunder. You can’t predict exactly when it will happen, but you know it’s nearby, the storm cloud
s forming inside his head, sparks jumping from his mouth. “You all are bored,” he says. He seems unaware of the existence of question marks. Does not ask how people are feeling, but rather tells them. Nobody responds, so he turns up the music.

  THEY CROSSED THE ARIZONA border about two hours ago. Cities arise like mirages out of the desert. Not cities, but towns. Villages. Every one of them is a city in miniature, a one-street downtown, a weird landmark, curious tourists, and then nothing. People live here, probably, but it is hard to comprehend why. These towns barely exist—they are places sustained entirely by tourism, and whose residents on any given day are primarily tourists. These are not actual places so much as they are fabrications of places.

  Many of the roadside attractions are quirky and bizarre and manmade with no particular history attached. They’ve seen a large wooden blue whale in someone’s yard. They’ve seen the Cadillac Ranch, they’ve seen a famous gas station and a giant milk bottle and another famous gas station. And he has taken photos of everything, because that is all anyone can do at these places. Everyone lines up to take pictures of themselves alongside the World’s Largest Pair of Concrete Legs, loads them onto the Internet for others to see, and then drives away. It does not seem to matter to anyone whether ten thousand other people have produced the exact same photos and the same memories. The function of travel, so far, has been not to experience things so much as to look at things, nod, and then move on down the road until it is time to look at another thing. Kait wasn’t interested in quirky roadside attractions. She liked major stops, huge museums, memorials to soldiers. Places that attract a dozen tour buses a day during the summer. Had she been in charge, they never would have passed through Texas without first visiting the Alamo, Dealey Plaza, a real rodeo. Maybe her route would have been more fulfilling, or at least more informative. Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, because the real problem isn’t the itinerary so much as the company.