The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  He can never be friends with them—that wasn’t even possible when Kait was alive—but he at least wants to stop being an obstacle between them and being whole. He sits on his floor with a pad of paper—the computer keyboard is smashed and unusable—and writes a brief letter to Sherry:

  You don’t deserve this and I don’t deserve it and nobody does, but it’s what we’ve got to deal with now.

  Kait’s gone and I’m sorry, and I’m back and I’m sorry about that too.

  I’ve been trying to figure it out. How to get by. And I have no idea.

  But one thing I realized is, Kait didn’t belong to me. I acted like she was mine but she wasn’t. I want you to know I understand that now.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, WILLOW arrives, a bag of groceries in hand.

  The first thing she does is cook him a meal. French toast, his favorite as a child, drowned in syrup. She says, “You look like you’ve been starving yourself,” and although that’s the kind of thing mothers are supposed to say and he has always been thin anyway, he realizes she’s probably right, because when she asks him what he’s been eating on the road, he can barely remember; he knows he ate every day, but it was rote consumption, instinctively shoveling food into his mouth when it was placed before him, the unthinking way a dog eats. Probably there were a lot of rest-stop sandwiches and French fries. Probably there were gallons of soda, mounds of salt and sugar, saturated fats that have ruined his arteries, squeezing his heart and solidifying it into a rock. Probably there were no local delicacies and none of the kinds of restaurants Kait would have wanted to visit, their names circled and starred in the guidebook in her purse.

  Willow makes him sit outside on the front porch to eat. Says the environment in his house is toxic and there needs to be a cleansing. Says he needs to see neighbors, reintegrate himself into his own life. The wild grass of the lawn raises up at him like the hair on a threatened cat.

  Everywhere there is something broken.

  THE SECOND THING WILLOW does is suggest he move back home with her and Jack. “It would be good for you,” she says. “And I could use the company.”

  “I’ve got a house here,” he says. “I have friends here,” he says, which is not actually true.

  THE THIRD THING WILLOW does is offer him a joint and retreat with him into the bedroom where they sit on the floor and get high and stare off into the distance and devour a bag of cheese-flavored snack foods. She tells him Jack has been accusing her of being unhappy, and she says, “I’m not an unhappy person am I?” and he decides to treat this as a rhetorical question. She tells him Jack is talking about retiring soon, and says that might be the end of them when that happens. There is no way they can spend all day together; his temperament is not suited for a sedentary lifestyle.

  Hunter asks, “Do you still love him?”

  “He’s a better man than you think,” Willow says. “Raising you wasn’t easy on him.”

  “How do you end up with a guy like him anyway?”

  “It just always felt right. How does anybody explain it?”

  They smoke until it is dark and the clock is still red-eyed and flashing 12:00 and strips of moonlight sneak between Venetian blinds and rest on his legs, like pale fingers holding him there.

  THERE IS WORK TO do. There are rugs to vacuum, floors to sweep, pests to exterminate, walls to paint. There is grass to cut and trash to remove. Standing in the living room where his coffee table used to be (they had stolen it; how had he not noticed that immediately?), Hunter feels like a man who was dropped in the middle of the Pacific and told to drain the ocean. How does one even begin? Willow flits from room to room tilting pictures and swishing dirt off of surfaces arbitrarily, making cosmetic fixes where dramatic changes need to occur.

  What Kait would have done is she would have sat down at the dining room table—now positioned next to the front door of the house, a sign that her brothers tried to remove it but couldn’t fit it through the door without detaching the legs—and made a list. Divided into sections by room, comprehensive enough to include items like dusting the ceiling fans. And so: Hunter makes a list. On two sheets of paper. He then lists the necessary materials to complete the task, and drives Willow to the hardware store in a rental car, because his car is in an impound lot somewhere in Illinois.

  THE CLEANUP ITSELF IS tedious and painful and more than occasionally nauseating. Halfway through the first day, Willow suggests he hire a service, but he says, “I feel like I ought to do this.” He assigns Willow upstairs while he starts outside, where malicious creatures scurry from the lawn as he charges through first with a scythe and then with a weed whacker and then again with the mower. Sweat burns in his eyes, unidentified objects launch and sting his shins, sending a fine trickle of blood down each leg. Each swipe with the mower reveals a patch of land he hasn’t seen in months, every moment leading to a new discovery as he labors under the stubborn September sun.

  Taking a break, he goes inside to refill his ice water and finds Willow also on a break, fanning herself with a feather duster. She says, “These hands were not made for hard labor,” displaying them as if modeling jewelry. “Neither were yours,” she says, grabbing Hunter’s hands and pointing out the calluses, the blood crusted beneath fingernails. She has taken several breaks already, but he does not criticize because he doesn’t want to sound like Jack, and anyway this isn’t her mess. Later, he takes more frequent breaks himself, lingering on his porch with a quart of lemonade, presiding over the conquered lawn for all his neighbors to see.

  By the third morning, he knows they have made progress, but it’s hard to gauge because there still is so much to do. At times, it feels like he is just shifting the mess from one room to another and then back again. Their morale sinking, he and Willow break for an early lunch.

  Willow volunteers to pick up takeout while Hunter sits outside on his porch steps. At least here he can see the lawn, weedless and orderly. He hunches forward, leaning on his fist, and feels himself falling asleep.

  A car engine hums down the street and stops in front of his house. He looks up and sees Jack, not wearing his standard khakis and dress shirt but jeans and a T-shirt. “Your mother told me there’s a lot of work to do here,” he says, walking past Hunter and into the house.

  THE PROCESS TAKES FIVE full days of hard labor, inside and outside. It entails the hauling of dozens of heavy-duty trash bags to the curb. It requires the sorting of sentiment from waste. It demands that Hunter face the limits of his endurance. Willow renounces physical labor and assumes the role of supervisor, offering well-meaning but unhelpful tips like, “I’m not sure that’s the best way to use a roller,” and “I don’t think you’re supposed to do it like that,” and “There has to be some easier way to get this done.” Jack barely speaks. He consults the list and moves on to the next task and later crosses items off the list. He seems to have adopted an argument-avoidance strategy that is based largely on silence, which, so far, is more effective than anything else they’ve ever tried.

  By the last evening, Hunter is limping, his posture twisted from dull pains in his neck and back, most of his muscles sore as they awake from atrophy and are tested for the first time in years. His fingers are locked into a claw from all the tugging and hammering and hauling. The next morning, he gets up in stages and his feet remain numb until he has already been walking for a few minutes. He is trying to grow a beard because he thinks it’s the perfect look for this kind of work, but at the moment, all he has achieved are clumps of wispy hairs scattered about his mouth like the fuzz on a dandelion.

  EVERY ROOM IS REPAINTED, every surface cleaned. Light bulbs replaced, holes in drywall patched, furniture rearranged, stolen essentials replaced. The carpets in most rooms have been removed, exposing hardwood floors. The now-useless pieces of furniture—Kait’s dresser and wardrobe, for example—have been donated to Goodwill, along with her remaining clothes. The few possessions of hers that weren’t stolen by her family (her alarm clock, a couple pairs of sho
es, the peridot earrings and necklace somehow untouched, maybe a gesture of forgiveness) are packed into a box labeled KAIT that is carried down to the basement and placed alongside the Christmas and Halloween decorations. Her photo albums are stacked neatly on a shelf in the spare bedroom closet, where he can find them if necessary but doesn’t have to see them every day. The globe is set up in the living room, adjacent to the couch, where he can see it and spin it and envision the world from the comfort of his home. They rehang photos, Hunter standing on a stepstool above his television, placing a level on top of a portrait of him and Kait—hands clasped around her wedding bouquet, she’s wide-mouthed with laughter as he looks into her eyes—while Willow stands beside him, waiting to catch him if he stumbles.

  In the evening, the three of them sit on the couch, Jack sipping on scotch while Hunter and Willow smoke a few more joints. Willow asks Hunter again about his trip. He has told them nothing so far, but the combination of the sense of accomplishment and the pot are making him talkative, words machine-gunning out in a way they haven’t in months. He describes the sights and the broken-down car. Does not mention Jessa or the Bad Bitches. Says he saw so many things he never thought he’d see, and finds himself scrolling through the photos on the phone, narrating the events and filling in details about Amber, Paul, and Austin. They allow him to sputter until he runs out of things to say, and the last thing he says about the trip is this: I’m glad it’s over. When he’s finished, Willow says he should write his story down, not to share with anyone, but to process his grief, to better understand himself and remember the person he was at the lowest points of his life. “There’s value in remembering the negative,” she says.

  Their final act is to plant a bush in the backyard. Willow’s idea, not his. The notion being that this land has been poisoned by an untimely death and the subsequent depression and wanton destruction, and he needs to make amends. He also needs to allow the land to make amends to him, she says. And although she wants him to plant an apple tree or something ostentatious like that, he talks her down to a hydrangea bush, which is placed in the far corner of his backyard, where Willow says it will bloom every summer.

  That evening, Hunter falls asleep before sunset, and he does not wake until noon the next day.

  By then, Jack is already gone—he had to get back to the office, couldn’t wait any longer for Hunter to wake up—and Willow has set her suitcase near the front door. She says, “Don’t worry, I’m not leaving yet,” by which she means her flight isn’t scheduled until the evening. He asks what’s the rush, and she says, “We still have a day to enjoy together.”

  “What am I supposed to do when you’re gone?”

  “You’re always welcome to stay with us.”

  “Did Jack tell you to come home?”

  “Honey, your father doesn’t tell me to do anything.”

  “You can’t just stay another day?”

  “Your father doesn’t know how to be alone,” she says.

  THE FIRST SEVERAL HOURS Hunter spends alone in his resurrected home are consumed by browsing the Internet. Reading local news he doesn’t particularly care about, researching famous widowers, skimming social networks for people’s most inconsequential thoughts on every topic, finding nude pictures of just about any female celebrity he wants to see nude. Deep into the online binge, he receives an e-mail.

  SUBJECT: Amber Lang has sent you a friend request.

  Then another.

  SUBJECT: Austin Winslow has sent you a friend request.

  Of course they found him online. Everyone everywhere can find everyone else, there is no more hiding. He doesn’t remember telling either of them his last name, although maybe they saw it on the urn. Or maybe he did tell them, subconsciously wanted them to track him down. So he clicks through and views their profiles, sees that Amber has posted over a thousand photos of herself online, ranging from posed shots in formal wear to drunken pictures of her passed out on a toilet, pants bunched around her ankles. She likes to use emoticons to express emotion. She looks strangely unlike the girl he remembers from the trip. Austin’s profile is pared down and sanitized to protect the corporate job he probably starts next week. In his only picture, he is wearing a tie that fits him as comfortably as wings on an elephant.

  Hunter’s first impulse is to click a button accepting their friendship, to open up his online life to them too, to invite them to see his photos and know his favorite movies and books and to read his opinions on his neighbors and his pet peeves, and in exchange for their tolerating his every whim and thought, to listen to their beliefs and responses to everything that interests or annoys them. To inflate his number of friends—he’s lost some since Kait’s death, but there are still three hundred people in the world willing to call themselves his Internet friends. To trick himself into believing there is something more to social networking than vanity, in which everyone can position themselves as the most important person in their own little world and to have their vanity reinforced by the cadre of hangers-on that every single person has, regardless of their relative levels of popularity. He thinks about clicking that button to accept their friendship, but then he stops himself. He clicks the other button, the one that says ignore, and he closes his laptop, steps away from it like it’s a rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike.

  He denies their friendship because maybe it’s best to leave that part of his life behind. He had some memorable times, and it was a pivotal moment in his life, but why does he need it to linger? The fallacy of these shallow online friendships is in the belief that it’s possible to continue preserving every moment, to maintain all relationships and feelings and experiences from the entirety of one’s life. Some things are meant to be temporal, he thinks, and there is a reason humans used to move on instead of clinging to every bond they’d ever formed. Nobody’s hands are big enough to hang on to every moment for eternity. He shoves the laptop under a couch cushion so he can’t see it, and then declares that today is the first day of the Month of No Internet.

  HE SLEEPS RIGID ON the edge of his bed, only venturing toward her side to search for her scent in the pillow, or to gather her stray hairs from the sheets and drop them in the trash. Some days he finds himself clutching the emptiness against his body, the absence of the cube heavier than the cube itself ever was. He still talks to her, a continuous narration of the day’s events.

  In the car now, he is listening to music, his stations, not hers. He is driving through the city, sticking to back roads to avoid traffic; he wants to revive their old game, take them both on a guided tour of the past. The tattoo on his forearm is visible at all times when he is driving. Since he has been tattooed, nobody has asked him about the R.I.P. Kait, although he has caught a few stares in the grocery store, a middle-aged woman studying him sadly as he reaches for an apple and exposes his loss. Hunter pulls over alongside a strip mall, turns the radio down, engine still running, and says, “This Chinese restaurant here, that’s where you and I went for our first meal after we bought the house. You remember? We went inside and there were no seats, but you’d been talking about Chinese all day so we said we were okay waiting a half hour, and then the half hour turned into an hour, but we’d been waiting so long it didn’t make sense to leave then. So we waited and while we waited you talked about all the work we had to do in the house, which I wasn’t happy about because you know how I hate painting, but you were so excited about making it our place. And then the food—it was the best Chinese food I’ve ever had. So good, like great-sex good. And you liked it too, but you got sick before we even finished, ran outside, right here by this pole and first you spit, which was funny because for some reason you didn’t know how to spit right. But then you threw up. Everywhere. I remember the chunks of pork, that’s what I remember most. And the color—duck-sauce orange. Like it was glowing. And then you were sick for a few days, but I took care of you. Remember that homemade soup?”

  The next stop is a post office outside of which Kait once found a rubberb
anded roll of twenty-dollar bills, and then spent the next hour trying to find the money’s rightful owner. The amazing thing about that day was that nobody seemed to want the money; Hunter had never imagined it would be so hard to give away free cash, but everybody was honest, nobody lied and pretended it was theirs. Eventually, Kait turned it in at the post office lost and found, and even called the next day to see if someone had picked it up. Hunter spent the rest of that night talking about what they could have bought if they’d held on to it. The things they could have owned. Just more things he would have had to throw out after her death.

  He drives past Rittenhouse Square, points out a bench and reminds her of the time a stray cocker spaniel stole a sandwich right out of her hand. Outside city hall, he narrates the story about the group of teenagers pelting him with stale hot dog buns from a passing car. He drives through all of the city’s neighborhoods, from Northeast down to Southwest, stopping to tell her stories about record stores he patronized during the Month of Owning Vinyl, a country club they visited for a golfing date, bars where they met friends and he tried to talk to her while she got drunk, awnings they huddled under during thunderstorms, mailboxes they’d leaned on during casual conversation, patches of grass where she’d once stood, rays of sunlight that had reflected off of her skin, air molecules she’d exhaled and breezes that had rippled through her hair.

  It’s nearing fall, the air crisp like apples, wind cool but not biting, the sun setting soon after people return home from work. He drives through the dimming light, past the city limits, and parks on a tree-lined suburban street. Tells her, “We would have made friends here, in that house over there. I would meet this guy at work after I got a new job, and we would have had double dates and dinner parties, and sometimes we would come out here because it’s so quiet and it smells like honeysuckle, which you loved because it reminded you of Christmas. Sometimes their neighbors would come over too, and we’d be like an unofficial part of the neighborhood. There are foods they would cook for us that we’d never had—eggplant and ceviche and butternut squash risotto. There are words they would use that we’d never heard: he used to be in the Navy, so he has these great stories about life at sea and being in battle, and his wife has lived all over the country because her mom was schizophrenic, and listening to her would be like traveling. They listen to us too, when we talk, they want to know things about us, where we’re from and what we believe in and why, and you would be in there amazing them with your great job and your generosity, and I would do okay too. And later their kids and our kids would be out in the backyard chasing lightning bugs, and right here, here on the sidewalk where I’m parked is where you would come outside to catch some fresh air and to get away from the kids for just a few minutes, but you would always come back and I would never have to worry about you. We would have moved out here eventually, to be closer to our friends and so the kids could play together, and there would be school board meetings and graduations and fiftieth birthdays and arthritis and kids’ weddings and grandkids, and one day I would trip on the curb over there and take a bad fall, break a couple of bones, and you would start to feel tired and irritable earlier in the day, and we would neither of us look like we used to, but we would be here together, that’s where we would be. You can see it, through the windows. Me and you in the kitchen peeling carrots, not talking because we don’t even need to talk anymore to know what the other is thinking.”