The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  Now that she’s dead, people are suddenly very concerned about what she would have wanted, and every time they say it, you feel the implication that you’re dishonoring her memory by failing to do all the things she would have wanted.

  EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE A night person naturally, have often referred to yourself as nocturnal and stayed up until four a.m. watching movies when you lived with your parents, you got in the habit of going to bed when Kait did, tucking her in, sitting beside her, a book open on your lap while you watched her body rise and fall with each breath, but now you don’t even know when to sleep. You eat out of boredom, out of biological necessity. The phone doesn’t ring. The doorbell is silent.

  Most of your free time is spent gazing at your laptop screen, browsing from one website to the next, not out of any particular interest in what you’re reading, but because following the infinite pathways online is a perfect distraction; it’s a way to keep busy without actually being busy. You challenge yourself to go as long as possible without blinking. You read news articles and encyclopedia entries and research the histories of sitcoms and bands. You check Kait’s Facebook page—still active, now a monument, messages pouring in from shocked friends and acquaintances—just in case she is posting from beyond the grave. She barely updated the site when she was alive, though; there are just a handful of updates, a few pictures, all the same old ones you have on your phone and have already viewed enough times to have them memorized. You move on to exploring other people’s pages and are inundated with mostly useless information regarding the lives of your friends and famous people alike, everyone rushing to fill the void with an endless stream of banal details about themselves, and even though you know it’s a waste of time, and even though your head throbs and your eyes are bloodshot and your wrist creaks and your back screams at the thought of slouching on the couch any longer, and the consumption of thousands of empty mental calories makes you feel physically ill and you hate yourself for not being able to stop, you don’t hate yourself quite enough to actually stop.

  KAIT HAD THIS THERAPIST for years—she claimed doctor-patient privilege trumped husband-wife privilege and wouldn’t say why, exactly, but she occasionally was beset with a depression that could shut her down for days, turn her into a different person entirely, and so it was good for her to have someone else to talk to. The therapist was into new-agey type stuff, some of which struck you as absurd, an opinion you long-ago learned not to voice—every time you criticized some goofy new technique, Kait said, “You’re too cynical sometimes.” One thing the therapist suggested was that when Kait’s self-esteem was low, you should lift her arm, like a referee raising the arm of the winning boxer, and declare her Champion of Something, as in good morning to the World Champion of Waking Up! or thank you to the World Waffle-Making Champion! Something about adrenaline and endorphins, physiological responses to receiving praise. It seemed to work, actually, gave her enough of a boost to face a stressful day at work or to cope with a fight with her mother. You try raising your own arm, now, and it doesn’t feel the same. It feels like masturbation, except more hollow.

  KAIT WAS SMART. YOU’RE smart too, but while you know a lot of trivia and have a good vocabulary, she was useful-smart; you would have beaten her on Jeopardy! because you know who Vasco da Gama was and you know all the abbreviations on the periodic table, but she knew how to read a map and pay bills on time and balance a budget. All your intelligence got you was a job at the front desk of a rental car agency, while she was a financial advisor at TrustUs Bank. It was her idea to get life insurance policies when you were both young and healthy. Low premiums, high payouts. Just in case, she said. You never know, she said. Your premiums were higher and the payout lower due to the congenital heart defect you’d had corrected via surgery as a child, and you remember saying to her, “You’re worth more dead than I am,” and she said, “Yeah, hopefully you’re not the one who dies first.” You remember, vaguely, laughing. And so it’s because of her that you find yourself opening a check from Allright Insurance for three-quarters of a million dollars, accompanied by a letter offering sincerest condolences from Allright’s CEO. It’s because of her that the bank teller appears to have a minor stroke when she sees the amount you’ve written on the deposit slip.

  IF IT’S POSSIBLE FOR Kait to see you, you know she sees a man incapable of living on his own, a parasite that has lost its host, a rudderless ship content to drift from the beginning of life to the end without doing anything noteworthy or even trying to maximize a depleted existence, and you know she is deeply, deeply disappointed in you, and yet she still loves you anyway, which somehow makes the whole situation even more pitiful.

  SAY YOU’RE TWENTY-NINE. A white, college-educated, home-owning male in the prime of his life. And say you’ve spent roughly half of those twenty-nine years doing nothing, or talking about what you’re going to do later, which makes you actually about fifteen when it comes to real life experience. Say you waste whole days as if there is unlimited time on Earth, despite all evidence to the contrary, and you can’t explain why, not even when your wife pushes you to show more gumption and “just try it for once,” not even when you have squandered several days nearly immobile in your house and your body and your brain are demanding an explanation. Say you claim to your wife you don’t even know what she means by it, although the truth is, the specific etymology of it is irrelevant compared to the idea it represents. Say then your wife decides to die on you without any warning and you’re now an ostensible fifteen-year-old with no experience and no idea how to take care of yourself.

  What do you do now?

  FOUR

  Three things happen that force Hunter to do something. First, he begins receiving phone calls from the people at the bank, not because they want to offer sympathy anymore, but because they want his money. That is, they already have his money, but they want it in a different way. They want permission to remove it from the checking account, play around with it for a while, share it with their friends with vague promises of riches and all the risk on Hunter’s end. They suddenly find him much more appealing and valuable, and they convey this revised estimation of his value via constant contact, via warnings about the depreciation of currency in a standard checking account. No matter how many times he tells them to leave him alone, they will not, because that is not what banks do—leave people alone. What they do is they push and push until people give them what they want, and then they ignore phone calls from people who desperately need answers. Too cynical, Kait would say.

  Second thing that happens: Sherry appears at the house, demands the ashes. She looks like the “Before” picture in an ad for miracle sleeping pills. She says she’s worried about Hunter’s state of mind, can’t trust him with Kait; she wants to dump the ashes in some park somewhere because supposedly Kait always loved this park even though Hunter never heard her mention it even once. Hunter refuses, says they need to wait for the perfect time and place, and Sherry says, “We need to get this over with so we can move on.” She holds her palm out and says, “This isn’t a negotiation.” Hunter tells her she has to go, and closes the door. The next day, she returns with the brothers. Brutus, acting as their spokesman, says, “We deserve to be there when you do the ashes.”

  Blocking the doorway, knowing if they breach the threshold they will take Kait and he will never see her again, he tries to explain that, in case they all didn’t notice, he’s her husband, and he’s the legal guardian of the ashes, so while they may have known her first, that doesn’t mean they knew her better. For example, how could any of them think she’d want to be plopped in the grass at some nondescript park in Northeast Philly just because she’d been there before? In fact, her having been there is enough of a reason not to bring her back, considering her dreams of world travel, and besides, how could they have failed to notice that she hated Northeast Philly, ran away from it as soon as she could? Max doesn’t like when people talk bad about the Northeast, because it’s the best fuckin’ neighbor
hood in the city, he says with conviction, even though he’s never been anywhere else in his life, and now he lunges at Hunter. Hunter steps back and slams the door on Max’s foot. Max leaps back, yowling in pain, and Hunter pushes the door shut, locks it, barricades it with a bookcase. They come back the next day expecting an apology, and Sherry shouts through the window that she wants Hunter to undergo a psychological evaluation to determine whether he’s the appropriate caretaker of her daughter’s ashes. She’s hired a lawyer, she says.

  Third catalyst to change: rummaging around the basement looking for nothing specific but feeling like he needs to unearth something, Hunter finds, buried beneath layers of Christmas decorations, a wrapped gift with his name on it. Three months in advance of their anniversary. (What else has she hidden here? Are there gifts for his fortieth birthday? A watch for his retirement?) A card, inside of which she has scribbled a note—her handwriting was always shockingly poor, loopy and stout, like a parade of jaunty fat men—that says how excited she is to have spent another year with him, how much she loves Hunter and appreciates his support even on days when she’s not as nice as she wants to be, has come to rely on seeing him every day, wants him to know he is the most important thing in her life. The card says, “You’re a better man than you think, and I can’t wait to see what happens when you finally believe that.” She’d always had greater faith in him than he had in himself, always seemed to believe he was capable of making meaningful contributions to his community and his family. She never specified what those contributions would be or how they would happen, whether they would be career-related or otherwise, but she repeated her vision to him with such conviction that it seemed more prophecy than fantasy. The note ends like this: “I love the man you are, but I can’t wait to see the man you become. Four years is not enough; I want another forty.” The gift, it’s a globe, a nice one, classy, handcrafted in Malaysia. The sort of thing aristocrats keep in their study. She has taped a note to the globe. It says, “Tell me where you want to go, and I’ll follow you.”

  IT DOESN’T SEEM RIGHT, at first, to accept his anniversary gift three months early, or at all, given that this upcoming anniversary technically will be invalid, but Hunter figures why not treat these as her true last words and honor what amounts to her dying wish? He can use her insurance money to pay off the mortgage completely and to fund their first great vacation together. She died before he’d fulfilled many of his promises, but this is a goal he can still achieve.

  He spins the globe and jabs his index finger blindly at it. Lands on the United States, East Coast. Spins again, jabs again, US again. Five times this happens, until he thinks perhaps the point is that one needs to explore one’s own country before gallivanting around the rest of the world, speaking pidgin French and crowding onto tour buses in order to push past strangers to glimpse the Eiffel Tower. Perhaps what the globe is telling him is that what a mature traveler does is he takes his wife with him on a tour of his own country, learns about his roots before he imposes himself upon other nations.

  THE PLAN IS THIS: the plan is to go west. What other direction is necessary? He’s seen the Atlantic, frolicked in it briefly with Kait, doesn’t necessarily need to see it again. So why not aim west and keep going until they have to stop? Details are best figured out later, Hunter says to Kait as they pass through a tollbooth. The key isn’t the destination so much as the act of moving away from where he is. It’s something he’s always talked about doing anyway, late nights in college with roommates, passing a makeshift bong around the room, wistfully diagramming their hypothetical cross-country journey. He’s listened to Dylan. He’s skimmed Kerouac. He knows that if you’re a disaffected young American and you’re looking to find yourself, then the place to look is somewhere between your current location and the other side of the country.

  NORMALLY KAIT WAS THE driver, but that’s not an option anymore, so now she’s strapped into the passenger seat, Hunter cruising in the right lane behind a convoy of freight trucks. He got his license at sixteen like everyone else, but only because he wanted to keep up with his friends, and because Jack made him take the driver’s test, said it would be his first step into the world of self-reliance. At the time, the idea of driving, in theory, seemed deeply appealing due to the freedom and the speed and the potential for picking up girls, but the reality of driving is that three-quarters of the cars on the road are piloted by lunatics and incompetents, a succession of blazing two-ton missiles weaving dumbly toward their targets. When Hunter tells people about his anxiety about driving, they generally assume he’s been in a bad accident, a PTSD situation, but the truth is, no, that’s not it at all. What happened is he took driver’s ed classes, which consisted almost entirely of watching graphic videos of gruesome car wrecks, and by the time he got behind the wheel he knew not to trust anybody or anything, and this skittishness has only intensified over the past decade, since moving into the city and forsaking his car and generally relying on Kait to chauffeur him everywhere.

  So, then—he stays in the right lane, moving at exactly the speed limit, a line of trucks a force field between him and screaming sports cars.

  HE PULLS INTO A rest stop in central PA, needs a coffee. He started drinking coffee after college, when he was unemployed but also inexplicably drowsy every day, told Kait the drowsiness was probably due to the ol’ ticker, which despite having been healed when he was an infant would never be quite as strong as one with a properly formed ventricular septum, and although he has never liked the taste of coffee, he likes the way a coffee cup looks in his hands. Passing through the rest stop with disheveled hair and carrying a warm cup o’ Joe, he feels like a true adult male, almost fatherly, nods at a pair of passing truckers, tugs on the brim of his cap, implying centuries worth of accrued masculine knowledge. Cradled in his other arm is Kait, who sure as hell cannot be left unattended in the car, because one does not just leave one’s most valuable asset sitting unattended in the car, no matter how badly one needs a cup of coffee.

  He carries her into the bathroom. The men in there are clad in chainmail, feathered Elizabethan caps, cloaks, knee-high boots. The line at the urinal moves slowly, everyone clanking and grunting to maneuver in their complex outfits. In his jeans and T-shirt, he is the only one dressed for life in twenty-first-century America. He looks down at Kait, rolls his eyes. Whispers, “You ought to see these guys,” and points her toward the man at the sink, whose striped tights are several sizes too small and clinging to his groin so snugly that his testicles bulge out like a frog’s eyes. He mutters to Kait, “This is like that time we went to the ballet,” and imagines her smiling at the memory of that night, when they’d agreed to give ballet a try because they wanted to support the local arts and be more cultured. They had dinner at the trendy Moroccan fusion restaurant downtown, he in his suit and she in her cocktail dress, took a moonlit walk to the theater, sat respectfully through the two-hour performance, and afterward she admitted she’d kind of hated it, which was a relief because as much as he wished he’d enjoyed the show, didn’t want to feel like a generic guy being bored by ballet, he had to admit he just did not get it. “That one guy’s junk really stole the show,” she said, and it was true, the lead was hung like a porn star, and neither of them had been able to look away from the impressive bulge when he was on stage. In their continuing effort to become more sophisticated, they’d also bought a season pass at the city’s oldest theater, attended two plays, both of which they’d found intolerably turgid, and then never went again. Kait said they still deserved credit because they’d given it a shot. “It’s not our fault if we don’t like it,” she said. “We don’t have to apologize to anyone for liking sitcoms more than plays.” The moment she said it, he realized he’d felt this way all along but was either not smart enough to figure it out himself or not courageous enough to own the feeling. Her gift: to see inside him and to understand him better than he ever understood himself.

  In the rest stop’s food court, he sees dozens of women dr
essed in corsets, surcoats, and headscarves. Even though they’re wearing meticulous period dress, they have no problem with the anachronistic image of gulping from a bottle of soda and devouring plates of fast-food pizza. Many of the men are carrying weapons, broadswords and daggers sheathed in their waistbands, but the rest stop employees don’t seem concerned at all. Maybe, he thinks, he has driven through an interdimensional portal and ended up in a world in which medieval norms are intermingled with modern technology. Maybe in a new dimension he’ll have better luck, will learn that there is a magic potion to reanimate his deceased wife, and then, aside from the ogres and the dragons and the disreputable feudal lords, they can get on with the happily-ever-after portion of their lives.

  In the parking lot, he sees a banner welcoming Renaissance Faire patrons, a reasonable, if unexciting, explanation for the weirdness inside. Still, he sits in his car with Kait and imagines the alternate dimension, envisions how they would adapt to their new lives. If Kait could talk—if she could see and hear and she could touch him on the arm—she would say something like if we were in another dimension, we’d have to buy all new wardrobes, and he would wonder where to get fitted for chain mail, which joke she would top with something about how hard it is to find a good blacksmith anymore, and they would continue for twenty minutes, digressing and layering jokes on top of one another until they’d exhausted the thread. Some of his favorite times with her were these preposterous conversations that would never be funny to anyone else in the world; their frivolity only made them more valuable, made him feel like he and Kait were inventing a secret shared language. Once, when they were cooking dinner together—she was always his sous chef, reading him recipes and prepping ingredients—she said she loved meatballs more than anything in the world. He responded, “If I were a meatball, would you eat me?” While many women he’d known would look at him quizzically then, or ignore him, or tell him that’s a dumb question and he should stop being weird, she enjoyed indulging him in these hypotheticals and said, “It really depends how hungry I am.” They traded jokes until they’d developed an entire Metamorphosis scenario in which Hunter Cady awoke one morning from uneasy dreams and found himself transformed in his bed into a savory meatball, and then his wife was faced with the difficult decisions of whether to eat him and, if so, how best to eat him. From that point forward, she occasionally addressed him as Meatball, even in front of confused friends and family, and each time he loved her a little more.