The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  Between towns, Hunter tries to will himself into hallucination as he looks out into the undulating, endless desert. Maybe they could get stranded here, so that they would have to band together and become real adventurers, lopping off the tops of saguaro in search of water, sucking rattlesnake venom out of punctured thighs. They would discover their inner strength and carry one another (metaphorically, physically if necessary) toward salvation—an oasis, or the road, or an uninhabited cave. Inside the car, it is easy to lose that will to survive. The world blurs by in the window like an unpleasant dream.

  ON THE MORNING OF the second day, he receives a phone call from Jack. Amber is in the shower and the others are getting dressed. Hunter steps out into the hallway to answer.

  “You checked out,” Jack says.

  “I told you I wasn’t done.”

  “Yeah, okay, sure. But I’m done. You understand? Your mother and I, we are both done.” A cleaning cart parks at the end of the hall, a tiny Latina assiduously avoiding eye contact.

  “What, am I supposed to apologize? You still want me to feel bad?” Hunter says.

  “I don’t care what you do.”

  “What if I got kidnapped? Or killed? You would have just left me there.”

  “This is what you have to understand: I tried to help you and you didn’t want my help. So you are on your own. Let the whole damn thing crumble to the ground. Just do not come back here looking for sympathy. I’ve instructed your mother not to help either.”

  Jacks hangs up before Hunter can respond.

  SITTING NEXT TO PAUL in a diner in Ash Fork, Arizona, Hunter keeps an eye on the car—and Kait—through the window, prepares himself to spring into action if anyone attempts to steal her. Amber is wearing a tank top, her shoulders shaded with muscular definition, like she used to work out three times a week but recently took a break. Her skin looks sticky in the heat, she breathes through slightly parted lips, her nose irritated by the dry air. She is not Kait. She is young and alive. Unscarred, undamaged. Pulsing and energetic. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t ogle her, would have more tact than that, but she is the first woman with whom he has spent any time since Jessa, and Jessa does not count because Hunter is trying to believe that the Jessa incident never happened. Amber does not look at him, which makes the ogling more discrete but also more discouraging. She rarely looks at anyone besides Austin. When Austin excuses himself to go to the restroom, she watches the swinging door in the rear of the restaurant, doesn’t say a word until he returns.

  The diner sounds like every other diner in the history of the world; silverware scraping against cheap dishes, a squealing kitchen door flapping open, unnecessarily loud conversations, a hodgepodge of oldies and Motown on the jukebox. The vinyl seat sticks to the backs of Hunter’s legs; he peels them up, the sucking sound audible to everyone in the booth.

  Paul, drinking the first of his four daily coffees, says, “Good trip so far,” his throat rumbling. Hunter nods. Amber nods. She does not look away from Austin. Her fingernails are brittle and unevenly gnawed. Eyes brown like loafers. She looks much more attractive when she’s not smiling than she does when she’s smiling.

  Paul twists a coffee stirrer between his teeth. “Your grandmother and I were on a lot of drugs back when we passed through here,” he says. “I ever tell you about when we were in Nevada? In the desert, it was a hundred and ten. And we were all doped up on quaaludes, so we stripped down. Naked as a pair of shaved cats. Ran as far into the desert as we could until it hurt our feet too much to touch the sand.” Austin pokes Amber in the ribs, gives her a look like he’s picturing her naked now, and she presses her shoulder into his. “Only, once we got out there, we couldn’t figure out how to get back. Burned my feet up real good that day,” he says, arms crossed over his chest, a hollow laugh rattling out of him.

  “I guess that’s not on the agenda either,” Hunter says.

  “Naw, my partying days are over.” He digs a poker chip out of his pocket, shows it to Hunter. “Sober six years,” he says. That explains why no one has even suggested going to a bar on this trip. It explains the rosary that dangles out of Paul’s pocket while driving, his fingers rolling over the beads during long silences. “Cold turkey. Ask her,” he says, gesturing toward Amber with his knife. “I used to be crazy.”

  “We weren’t allowed to see him much,” she says. “Me and my brother.”

  Austin swirls pancake bits in a pool of syrup. Hunter has already finished his meal. He hears Kait criticizing him for eating too fast. “Why’d you quit?” Hunter says, partly curious, but partly because he knows Paul wants him to ask.

  Over the rim of his mug, Paul says, “Quit the day my wife disappeared.”

  “She left because of the drugs?”

  “Vanished. Like one day she was there and the next day she wasn’t.”

  “Where’d she go?” A dumb question, he realizes after he asks it.

  “They say she’s dead, but I never seen no body.”

  Amber squeezes Austin’s hand, and he shakes loose so that he can keep chopping at his short stack. Paul watches the steam rising out of his mug. Hunter keeps an eye on the car, Kait’s ashes pulling on him like a full moon on the sea.

  BACK ON THE ROAD, Amber sleeps with her head on Austin’s shoulder, Hunter remembering the exact feel and chamomile smell of Kait on his shoulder, the nights he sat perfectly still, his leg going numb beneath her while she slept on the couch and he struggled not to disturb her, remembering the times he shrugged her away or intentionally dropped something to wake her up. He turns the radio down, apologizes to Paul for prying about his wife.

  “You didn’t make her disappear.” Paul turns the radio back up—John Prine now, singing about the hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes. The engine’s drone sounds like someone snoring. Paul plows through a pothole and Amber’s head jostles like a puppet’s, but she does not wake up (“That girl could fall asleep on a picket fence,” Paul says). She is sprawled across the seat, her shirt pulling up, and Hunter watches the strip of exposed skin above her waistband in the rearview, pictures his lips pressed against it, swallowing her whole. “Her name was Annalisa. Everyone called her Anna, except me, I used the full name.” Paul fingers the rosary. “I left the house to buy some more gin and when I come back ten minutes later, she was gone. No note, no struggle, nothing. Like she never existed.”

  “Police?”

  “Tried to pin it on me, but no matter how crazy I ever got, I never would have hurt her.”

  “They didn’t look for her?”

  “Said they did, but what the hell are they doing now? Who ever heard of just giving up on finding a person?” He stomps on the brake, skids to a stop behind a slowing eighteen-wheeler. Amber jolts forward, but Austin catches her before she slams into the back of Paul’s seat. Hunter slaps his hands on the dashboard, his breath rushing out of him. This is exactly the problem with driving—even on an empty road, you can die mangled in an accident. “Didn’t see that one coming,” Paul says.

  THE ROAD CARRIES THEM through the Petrified Forest National Park, a place that defines desolation, too barren to even look like Earth. Hunter sees tumbleweeds for the first time in his life. Then the second, third, fourth, and fifth times, until he stops noticing them. The wind here is stronger than he would have expected, sandblasting them. The land itself seems to reject life. There are creatures, naturally; there are creatures everywhere in the world, even in the worst possible places. Some turn up dead on the roadside—armadillos and snakes, victims of drivers like Paul; even though he looks like he is focusing, quietly staring down the center of the road, he doesn’t seem to actually see anything. In the distance, something that looks like a jackrabbit skitters away from the road. Then there is nothing besides rocks, ranging in hue from dark gray to lavender to fiery red, so that the world appears radioactive. Rust colors set against a brilliant blue backdrop so striking it looks fake, like real life digitally enhanced and then posted online. Conical hi
lls loom behind piled stones, the landscape looking simultaneously haphazard and meticulously planned.

  They pull over because Amber wants to take a few pictures. Paul snaps a shot of Amber and Austin, arms wrapped around each other’s waists. Behind them, the world looks necrotic.

  Hunter wants to take a picture of Kait here, but he cannot risk revealing his lie; if the others feel betrayed by his deception, they might leave him here, exile him to the desert for the rest of his life. He mouths an apology to her through the rear windshield, wishes for the others to disappear too so he can dig her out and hold her again, if only for a moment.

  The sun feels like it is drilling into Hunter’s skull, his head throbbing already, battalions of sweat marching down his face and his back. He squats behind the car, sheltering in the only shade he can find but afraid to touch down on the asphalt. Amber lays a T-shirt on the ground and sits a few feet away from him, legs folded up against her chest, shorts cutting into the tops of her thighs, sweat pooling up on the back of her neck, on her knees. He wants to taste it. Austin settles between them. Paul strolls down the road while they gaze out into the distance as if willing something to appear.

  “Your wife really isn’t worried about you?” Austin says.

  She would be in abject panic at this point, would tell him this is the dumbest thing he’s ever done. Would deduct a hundred points from him, even though deductions are a violation of the rules. “She’s okay with it,” Hunter says. “Kind of a free spirit. Did I tell you she paints in her spare time?”

  “If you ever do something like this, I’ll kill you,” Amber says to Austin. “That’s how people end up getting chopped up and stuffed into trunks.” Her hand rests on Austin’s knee, his legs stretched straight out in front of him. She caresses his bare skin lightly, twists a leg hair between her fingers.

  Amber sees Hunter craning his neck to look for Paul, and she says, “Don’t worry about him. He wanders sometimes.” He’s looking for his wife. He knows Paul is afraid that if he doesn’t keep checking, he’ll drive right past her.

  “Hey, let’s race,” Austin says. Hunter wants to say something about his heart condition, but then Austin adds: “Like your grampa and gramma did.” By the end of the sentence, he has already removed his shirt and flung it to the ground. Amber shrugs and pulls her tank top over her head.

  “Won’t we get burnt?” Hunter says. “I mean, wasn’t that the point of the story?”

  Austin has stripped down to his socks and boxers. “We’ll bring our shoes with us,” he says. Amber wriggles out of her shorts, hips like a pendulum. Her underwear is white with a yellow smiley face on the crotch. Above the face are the words HI THERE!

  “What if Paul comes back?”

  Amber shrugs, unhooks her bra and her breasts droop slightly, nipples turned outward and pointing in opposite directions; bikini tan lines make the breasts look alien on her. She throws her bra in Hunter’s face and says, “You’re gonna lose if you don’t stop talking.” She and Austin finish stripping, their bodies fully exposed. Austin chases her out into the desert. Hunter yanks off his pants, tosses his shirt aside as he begins running, and soon he’s streaking fully nude through the sand, like running on a skillet. Austin actually looks better nude than he does in his ill-fitting clothes, like he used to be in great shape before he discovered beer and late-night takeout, like he’ll be able to work out for a couple months before his inevitable wedding with Amber and suddenly he’ll have his old body back. Powerful calves drive Austin past Amber, and he slaps her butt as he passes. Amber’s body ripples on each step, ponytailed hair bouncing, breasts swaying and allowing Hunter to peek at them as they expose themselves at her side. He doesn’t feel the burning, at least not as a pressing concern. It’s there, but there in a way he can live with, like a squeaky front door, like an ingrown hair on his arm. Wind tearing at his chest and his genitals, he chases until he’s alongside Amber. He grabs her arm, pulls her with him. Just ahead, Austin is hopping on one foot, slowing down so quickly that they plow into him, tumbling into the sand, which at first feels like being submerged in a vat of boiling oil, but then feels something like normal. The three of them tangled, they’re all laughing despite the pain, because of the pain. Delirious. The heat, the feel of skin on skin. Amber’s bare leg draped across his shin, each exhalation of her breath tickling his cheek. She doesn’t think twice about this level of intimacy because he’s not even on her radar; a married man, physically the opposite of her boyfriend, not much older but older enough that he seems old.

  They push back up to their feet, Hunter twisting to hide his erection, Austin not noticing, and Hunter realizes he forgot his shoes. Austin lends him one of his, and together, they hop back toward the car, Amber walking between them to keep them balanced.

  Paul is standing at the car when they return, twirling the keys on his index finger. He has folded their clothes. Eyeballing them, he says, “My fault for telling the story.”

  PAUL SAYS THE TRIP has been running over budget, so they all share a single hotel room at night. Although Hunter could pay for them to have separate rooms, he would rather deal with the snoring and sleeptalking and clutter of a crowded room than ever spend another night alone in a hotel room. While they all get ready for bed, he steps into the hallway to catch up on his missed correspondence; poor reception in the desert had prevented him from checking in on his phone during the day. Willow has left several messages, via voice, e-mail, and text. She is concerned that he hasn’t contacted anyone or updated Facebook in days. In her e-mail, she writes, “You think I haven’t thought about it? But you can never run fast enough.” She ends the note by saying, “He’s not good at showing it, but your father is worried too.”

  An acquaintance from high school has left a comment on his Facebook wall saying, “Hey, bro, where u been? No pics for a week . . . u didn’t kill urself did you?” An e-mail from Sherry arrives with no text, but a subject line that says “i told you” and three attached photos: they’ve pillaged his house, doors kicked off hinges, food smeared on the walls, windows left open with rain puddling on the carpets. It’s hard to tell from the images the extent of the damage or exactly what they’ve taken, if anything, but the thing that is clear is that they have murdered his home. For what? Spite? His legs crumble beneath him and he feels himself being turned inside out, suddenly he is weightless and looking down at his useless body on the hallway floor and thinking, What is this person supposed to do now? Where is this inside-out person going to go when his trip is over, why did he ever buy into the dumb dream of owning land and having the perfect life with the perfect wife, and why didn’t he ever consider how easily it can all be stripped away without his permission, without the signing of forms in triplicate, without setting up a contingency plan, without reason, without time to establish a so-called support system, without that support system there to support him now, without some sign of a benevolent god, without any fucking reason, without a single warning that no matter what he did there was the distinct possibility that his entire life could be ruined in seconds, without him ever realizing that his desires and his will have no bearing on the way the world turns out because the universe does what it wants when it wants and his only so-called option is to brace himself for the worst and then when the worst happens to deal with it by saying something not-comforting like well, that could have been worse.

  It’s impossible to calculate how long he lies there waiting to be pieced back together, but at some point he reinhabits his body and he manages to sit upright and he sends Sherry a text message to tell her he’s going to call the police. Because that seems like the thing he should do here—call the police. Sherry responds instantly: “Ha!” she says. “Lol!” she says. “Go head call them,” she says. “They’re looking for u.” She sends a half-dozen more messages to gloat about her victory, to tell him she has called the police herself, they have a friend on the force who’s going to fix this situation, and although Hunter hasn’t committed any identifiable cr
imes, he still tenses at the thought of being pursued, wishes he could change his story in the hotel room, telling his companions that he really is a fugitive on the lam, and he needs to know he can trust them. He can weave an elaborate backstory, a criminal enterprise begun for noble purposes, trying to feed his family, then a failed partnership, a betrayal. He could be mysterious and dangerous. He could make veiled references to violence and deals gone wrong. He could duck in his seat when they pass police cruisers and always sit with his back to a wall in restaurants to prevent sneak attacks.

  He returns to the room, lies on a cot positioned between the two beds, unzips his bag and presses a hand against Kait, the cube cold and unyielding.

  HUNTER AWAKES AT FIVE-THIRTY, the sun framing his face on the pillow. Paul is already gone on his walk. Amber and Austin are asleep, her arm snug around his waist. Hunter drags his bag into the bathroom with him. He sets Kait on the counter while he brushes his teeth and whispers to her that these people might be a little strange, but isn’t everybody, and anyway they’re nice. Tells her she might like them. Tells her there’s nothing going on with Amber, he’s not going to do anything, she’s just friendly, and that’s how girls that age are. Tells her he’s sorry he’s been ignoring her, but it just seems easier this way.

  He puts her back in the bag before he showers. Post-shower, he hears heavy breathing on the other side of the door, a headboard rocking, Amber telling Austin to be quiet. If this were a porno film, he could walk into the room and join them, no questions asked. He thinks about peeking but worries he’ll get caught and ruin their fun. He listens on the other side of the door, imagines the look on Amber’s face during orgasm, the feel of her tongue in his mouth. After a few minutes, the noise settles. When he emerges from the bathroom, they’re both fully clothed and pretending to be asleep.

  SEVENTEEN

  If you’d only known. A cliché among clichés, but also the sort of thing you find yourself thinking constantly.