Unremarried Widow

by Artis Henderson

  In my office one afternoon I looked up from the newsletter I had been editing to see Holly, the receptionist, standing in my doorway.

  “Want to go to the deli for lunch?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” I looked at the pile of work on my desk. “I brought a sandwich.”

  “Come on,” Holly said. “It’s Friday.”

  I flicked my eyes to the half-finished letter on my computer, to the square of blue sky through the window beside my desk, to Holly with one hand on her hip.

  She smiled. “I’ll drive.”

  I pushed back my chair. “I didn’t want to eat that sandwich anyway.”

  The deli was a tiny sweaty place that served homemade iced tea and fried bologna. Steam from the griddle hazed the dining room, and I had to use a pile of napkins to soak up the grease from my lunch. Holly and I talked office gossip and eyed the boys with the big pickups out front. When we were done eating, Holly waited outside while I paid the check. The wife of the couple who had bought the deli a few years back worked the register. She was young and pretty, with a big open smile. She knew most of us from the farm, by face if not by name, and she chatted with me as I handed her my credit card.

  “What’s this symbol here?” She tapped the front of the card with her finger. “I see a lot of different types but I’ve never seen this one.”

  The card came from my bank, a bank for military service members and their families.

  “It’s for the Army,” I said.

  The woman ran the card through the machine and handed it across the counter.

  “Are you in the military?”

  “No,” I said, and because it needed an explanation—because she was waiting for an answer with her smiling face—I said, “My husband was.”

  The receipt made a clicking sound as it ticked out of the machine and the woman tore off the paper and handed it to me with a pen.

  “Did he have to go overseas?” she said.

  I hurriedly signed the receipt. She may not have known where the conversation was headed, but I did. I knew where we would both end up.

  “He did,” I said without meeting her eyes. “He went to Iraq.”

  She handed me a copy of the receipt and I stared at the toothpick jar on the counter and the pennies in a Styrofoam cup by the register.

  “When did he get home?”

  I stood stiffly, conscious of the people in line behind me. What could I say? There was only the truth.

  “He didn’t come home.”

  There was a moment, a shared few seconds, when the woman and I looked at each other and I watched my meaning shadow her face. I felt my cheeks flush and the tip of my nose go red like it does when I’m about to cry and the sadness that flowed like blood beneath my skin threatened to spill out.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said.

  I ducked my head and turned to the door before I could bleed all over her floor.

  “Me too.”

  But I didn’t always tell the truth.

  In the front yard of a foreclosed home, I watched people crawl over the property, all of us looking for a deal. What had we learned from the market collapse? Not a damned thing. A man with a two-day beard and dirty clothes peered through the dusty windows.

  “You an investor?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said, and it was hard not to laugh at the absurdity of it.

  Not that it mattered. He called himself an investor too.

  “What’s your husband do?”

  Did I hesitate? Would it sound better if I said I did, that the lie didn’t slip from my mouth like a fish through water?

  “He’s a teacher,” I said, “and he coaches football.”

  The man nodded and wiped his dusty hands on his jeans. He jumped down from the porch and moved off through the ferns and left me standing there with the lie hot on my tongue, feeling so right I wanted it to stay there forever.

  * * *

  I went back to the hospice group every week. The conversation would pass around the circle, each woman offering up some bit of truth she’d been saving all week, and I found that I started doing that: putting away a morsel to share. I would chance on some memory of Miles and I’d sculpt my story throughout the week, knowing it would be the one time I’d let myself speak about him.

  “Tonight I’d like to talk about needs,” Richard said one evening.

  The fluorescent lights hummed overhead and I hunched inside my sweater. Elsewhere in the hospice building, down corridors I never saw, people were dying. Their relatives stood close, not fully understanding that soon they’d be like us. Some of them would make their way to the Tuesday night meetings and we’d fold them in, as I had been folded in.

  “What do you need right now?” Richard continued. “Take a moment. Look inside yourself. What is it that your body or your mind or your heart needs?”

  There was a pause as we considered. We were all widows that night—the widowers rarely came for more than two or three sessions. “Looking for dates,” Linda would say.

  “How about you, Artis?” I looked up from the piece of carpet I had been examining. “What do you need?”

  I considered my response for a moment and then I offered the tidbit I’d been keeping all week.

  “There was this time Miles and I went tubing behind John’s boat,” I said. “You know, where they pull you?”

  My voice was rough and I had to clear my throat. The other women nodded encouragement.

  “Miles and I were facing each other in the tube and the boat was pulling us hard. We hit a wave and my head snapped forward and my mouth smashed into the top of Miles’s head.”

  I twisted a tissue between my hands as I talked, working it back and forth with my fingers.

  “I touched my face and there was blood all over my hand. I thought I’d lost my front teeth. I looked at Miles and I could tell from his face that I looked pretty bad. I asked him, I said, ‘Am I okay?’ And I think he was scared because there was a lot of blood coming out of my mouth but he said, ‘Yeah, babe. You’re okay.’ ”

  They were listening, the other women, Richard. I kept working the Kleenex between my hands.

  “That’s what I need,” I said. I looked up into their faces. “I need someone to tell me it’s going to be okay. Even if it looks like it won’t.”

  The sun had set by the time Jimmy Hyde pulled into my driveway, and when I went to greet him, all I could see was his silhouette in the dark. It was better that way. Easier to negotiate the space between us.

  “Let me grab something out of the trunk,” he said.

  He stepped around to the back of the Jeep and lugged a rectangular cardboard box out of the rear compartment.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  He walked past me, through the carport and into the backyard.

  “Can I get a light out here?”

  I flipped the switch to the twin bulbs overhead and he smiled at me in the suddenly bright light. He looked the same as the last time I had seen him at Fort Rucker.

  “I bought you a grill,” he said. “Had to run by Walmart to pick it up. That’s what took so long getting here.”

  “You bought me a grill?”

  “You said you wanted me to cook kebabs.”

  I laughed. I had. Jimmy, who was also deployed, had been one of the few soldiers to contact me after the notification and the only one to keep messaging me after the others had stopped. I was in the habit of writing Miles, as I was in the habit of loving him, and Jimmy’s e-mails slid easily into the space created by Miles’s absence. But now I wondered what I implied in those messages. Did I suggest that if Jimmy came for a visit, there might be more than friendship between us? Did I hint at romantic possibilities? Did I flirt? I must have. Because a subtext beat beneath our every action, a thrumming reminder of a promise I seemed to have made. I’d like to tell you I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was somehow innocent in all this. But I was not. God help me, I wanted
Jimmy there—and not just for dinner. I wanted his hot breath in my ear. I wanted his rough hands on me. I wanted to close my eyes and let myself imagine this was another R & R, another long-anticipated return.

  I watched Jimmy assemble the grill from the back step of the porch. We were almost the same age and nearly the same height. He was a little older, a little taller, built slim but broad through the shoulders, self-assured and cocky in a way I am not. I disappeared into the house to put on a pot of yellow rice, the kind you buy at the grocery store in gold foil packets, and I stood at the stove and stirred while the sound of tinkering floated in through the open kitchen door. After a time I covered the pot with a metal lid and stepped outside to check Jimmy’s progress. The grill stood upright—finished. I handed Jimmy a box of matches and he laid one to the pyramid of charcoal briquettes he had stacked. The flame caught and crept upward, spreading from black square to black square, until the entire pile glowed. I carried out a tray of skewered beef and he arranged the kebabs on the grill. While Jimmy cooked, I went back into the house to the bathroom off my room. I looked at my face in the mirror. My nose was red from the cold and my eyes seemed smaller somehow. My face looked all wrong; I had become unrecognizable to myself.

  In the kitchen I grabbed two beers from the fridge and outside I dragged a white plastic chair close to the grill.

  “How are things in Iraq?” I said.

  Jimmy took a sip of his beer. “Not too bad. We fly a lot.”

  “Is it hot?”

  “It’s cold this time of year.”

  The meat smoked over the fire and he turned the skewers with a pair of tongs.

  “How’s it feel to be home?”

  “It feels weird,” he said. “Hard to relax.”

  He took another mouthful of beer.

  “Anyway, R & R’s only for two weeks.”

  When the kebabs finished cooking Jimmy set them on a platter and carried it into the house. We ate at the table in the dining room and Jimmy did most of the talking. He spoke about his family, about people we both knew from flight school, about the deployment. He started to tell me about a mission, a dangerous flight during a night storm, but I stopped him.

  “Could we not talk about this, please?” I stared at my plate.

  Jimmy looked over at me, surprised, before catching himself.

  “Of course,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  After dinner he washed the plates and silverware by hand and I dried and put everything away. When we had finished, he leaned against the sink.

  “I guess it’s time for bed,” he said.

  “I guess it is.”

  We stood facing each other but neither of us moved.

  “Good night, then.”

  I turned as if to go into my room, but slowly.

  “Wait.”

  I stopped.

  “Come here.”

  Jimmy put out his arms and I stepped into them. I buried my face in the spot below his shoulder and he stroked my hair. But when he put his hand under my chin and tilted my face to his, I turned away.

  “I can’t kiss you,” I said.

  He stepped back, uncertain. Hadn’t everything we’d done led to this point?

  I stepped close to him again.

  “I mean, not yet,” I said.

  He led me into the room that I would think of from then on as Jimmy’s room, a place I abandoned after his visit.

  “Could we light a candle?” I said.

  I listened to Jimmy walk into the guest bathroom, where I had placed two votive candles in round glass holders, leftovers from the wedding. He stepped outside to the grill for the matches and then carried the lit candles back into the room, shutting off the lights in the house behind him. He set one candle on top of the dresser and one at the side window. As I stood beside the bed, he lifted my hair away from my neck then leaned down to kiss the place where my neck joined my shoulder. I let him kiss my collarbone. When he reached for the hem of my shirt, I raised my hands over my head. He slipped off my blouse, turning the cotton inside out, and the pearl buttons skimmed my nose on the way up. I pulled my hands down quickly to cover my breasts.

  “I’m not wearing a bra,” I said.

  Jimmy smirked. “I know. I’ve been trying to get a look all night.”

  He rested his hands over mine, cupping the fingers that cupped my breasts. The fine hairs on the underside of his arm brushed my wrist. Already the room felt warmer. I sat on the bed and he sat beside me, kissing my bare shoulders. I dropped my hands, my face red and hot, and then I closed my eyes and let him look at my body. After a time I reached down to unsnap my pants, then rolled onto my back and pulled them off. I wore white underwear, laced, with a gold clasp on the left hip. I reached to him beside me and tugged his shirt over his head. I could feel the heat from his body on the cloth. His skin was light, like mine, and freckles covered his torso. A light patch of hair stretched from his chest to under the waistband of his jeans. He stood up to unbutton them and then let the pants drop to the floor. We were both in our underwear. He climbed back onto the bed and we sat together on the comforter patterned with chrysanthemums in red dye. I hugged myself against the chill and Jimmy pulled back the covers and together we slid into the sheets. From that vantage point the bedspread looked darker, like lips reddened from too much kissing, like the normally pale parts of the body that go flushed and livid from lovemaking. It blushed as if ashamed.

  In tennis they talk about muscle memory, about the body learning the moves of the game so that during a match a player can react without thinking because the body already knows what to do. My body remembered the steps but not the partner. He was smoother in places, rougher in others. His frame was all wrong. When I finally leaned down to kiss him, the shape of his lips felt strange against mine and I realized this is what it feels like to betray someone you love.

  The candle on top of the dresser burned down to a nub, and the low flame cast shadows against the wall. I thought of Van Gogh’s night café at the long end of the evening, the darkness drawing in on itself, the absinthe already drunk, the madness gathered and dissipated, leaving only the taste of burnt sugar on the tongue. The room had been cool when we first stepped in but the air had warmed from our bodies, from hot breath on breath, from fingers on thighs, stomachs, hips. In the heated space, Jimmy’s palms smelled like ash. The room filled with the scent of him and soon I smelled like him too. He smudged over me like a handprint on the wall.

  The loneliness that followed Jimmy’s visit felt like a physical blow. It left me panting. But over the next several weeks I abruptly ended what had been between us. I stopped writing and I became distant when we spoke on the phone.

  “I need—” I searched for the right word. “Time.”

  Later I combed through my e-mail archives and deleted every message Jimmy and I had exchanged. I threw away his letters. I told almost no one about his visit and I erased all evidence of him from my life. I was terrified someone might discover what I had done.

  In the military certain myths circulate. When men are deployed they rag on each other about “Jody,” the imaginary man back home who’s fucking their wives.

  “Better watch out,” they say. “Jody’s going to get her good.”

  Another myth: the widow who sleeps with half her husband’s unit. The men talk about it and so do the wives. Mostly the wives. They talk about that poor woman in Charlie Company who slept with her dead husband’s commander, and when he left her she slept with one of his stick buddies. He left her too. She moved on to the enlisted guys and slowly worked her way down the ranks. The wives shake their heads at this part of the story and roll their eyes because everybody knows that’s what widows do.

  “What, I’m going to date somebody a year and a half, two years after John died?” Teresa said to me much later. “Everybody would call me a whore.”

  14

  The knocking came in the night. The sound pulled me sharply, angrily out of sleep but in the bedroom all was
dark. No headlights poured in from outside, no porch light shone from across the way. I pushed back the covers, waited for the blood in my head to settle, and crept first to the kitchen and then to the living room. A nimbus from the orange street lamp glowed behind the curtain as I lifted the edge and peered into the yard. Nothing. I moved through the house and onto the rear porch, irritated, my eyes straining against the night as I peered out every window, searching for some clue in the dark.

  A few days later, the microwave started coming on in the night. A sharp beep! followed by a volley. Beep! Beep! Beep! The interior light glowed and the rotating plate whirled while I stood barefoot in the kitchen, fumbling for the power cord in the dark.

  When the landlord phoned to check in, I mentioned the problem.

  “Everything okay in the house?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Everything except the microwave.”

  “The microwave?”

  “You know, how it comes on at weird times? By itself?”

  “I never had that problem,” he said. “The microwave worked fine when I lived there.”

  At the library I checked out books on ghostly visitations that said hauntings often occur in the early hours of the morning, the time when the veil between the living world and the afterlife is thinnest. I shook my head, disbelieving. But also believing a little.

  After the Tuesday night hospice meetings, I started having dinner with some of the widows from the group. One night I brought up the knocking.

  “Oh, that’s happened to me,” Bea said. She waved her manicured nails dismissively, like this was nothing. Like she wasn’t surprised.

  “I’ll hear pans clattering in the night,” Linda said. “Loud banging from my kitchen.”

  I toyed with my fork. My pots banged in the night too.

  “Or the lights will go dim,” Connie said. “I’ve heard—I know this sounds crazy, but I read it somewhere—that spirits can tap into electric currents.”