The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  He sets her on the nightstand on the right side of the bed, which has become her usual place, and then lies on top of the covers because the room’s air conditioner is malfunctioning. Sometimes on hot nights, he used to take his wedding ring off, said it made his finger too sweaty while he slept, and even though right now he wouldn’t mind having a less sweaty finger, he refuses to remove the ring. He will not move all night, feels greedy taking her side of the bed away. Staring up at the ceiling, he tries to force himself to sleep, but can’t even close his eyes.

  FIVE

  You don’t cry much when you think about her. It’s not that you’re afraid to cry or consider it a sign of weakness; you’ve been trying, squinching your face up and pushing behind the eyes, making animal sobbing sounds, but your eyes are dry as ever. It’s as if the ducts have closed up. You can feel the swelling of tears in your sinuses, your whole head soggy with grief. It would be an incredible relief to puncture yourself and let it all leak out. Before bedtime, you litter the floor in your motel room with debris, hoping to stub your toe while stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night, thus sparking a spontaneous crying session, but all that happens is you bash your toe and you become enraged, begin throwing things, punching walls. The next day, you check out early and are twenty miles down the highway before management will have seen the damage you’ve done to the room.

  YOU BEGIN TO MISS even the annoying things about her. Especially the annoying things. A proper road trip should be fraught with underlying tension and frayed nerves, sustained frictive stretches punctuated by occasional cathartic stops at memorable landmarks and delirious nights along the roadside. Without the tension, the frivolity of vacation seems less justified. So you find yourself wishing she were sitting in bed next to you, clipping her toenails and scattering the shards in the sheets, leaving them where they will prick your legs. You find yourself wishing she were here to wake you up in the middle of the night in order to say something like, “Did you know you were snoring?”

  You miss her awful taste in music—she liked the She Loves You Beatles but hated the Rubber Soul Beatles, considered reality TV singers real artists on par with Dylan and Ray Charles. You miss her tendency to mispronounce common words like nuclear and library. You miss the fact that she was pathologically incapable of finishing packaged foods, she always left the last chip or the last cracker or last whatever in case you wanted it, which meant your cupboard overflowed with cereal boxes containing one cornflake, year-old packages of stale graham crackers (you even miss the ant infestations, and the subsequent complaining to the exterminator about your wife in that socially acceptable way married men do). You miss the fact that she was so uncomfortable blowing her nose in public—it was the honking noise she hated—that she would rather walk sniffling from one end of the mall to the other with mucus pooling up in her philtrum. You miss making dinner reservations for Friday night and then having them scrapped when she fell asleep on the couch at eight p.m., her head pressed against your chest, trapping you into watching TV quietly for several hours until she woke up and slogged upstairs. You miss the nagging (and you hate calling it nagging because it makes you feel too much like a stereotypical put-upon sitcom husband, but that’s what it was, it was nagging) about your career prospects and your inadequate levels of motivation. You miss the arguments, from the monumental (i.e., here’s why we need to stop spending time with your awful brothers) to the minuscule (i.e., how hard is it to close a drawer when you’re done with it?). It’s the arguments that breathed life into the relationship. It’s in the arguments that you ultimately felt the love. It’s the passion inculcated by such dramas that makes you wish you could just one more time hear her say, “Of course it’s pronounced liberry,” a smirk lurking beneath her defensive façade, letting you know that soon you can smile and she can smile and you can kiss her and she can kiss you and everything will be fine.

  WHAT YOU MISS MOST is her eyes. Seeing them across the dinner table when you look up from your plate, the eyes of your wife like polished jade, watching over you.

  WHAT YOU MISS MOST, actually, is the way she walked, the comically proper posture, as if she were always carrying a stack of books on her head. The rigidity of the spine, the shoulders thrown backward, chest thrust forward. Knowing you were the only one who could fold her into your arms, make her relax.

  OR MAYBE THE THING you miss most is the thing everyone misses most about her, which is her generosity. Volunteering at blood drives and at walks to benefit children with heart disease, while you stayed home playing video games. Cold-calling people to raise funds for women’s shelters in the city. Maintaining a meticulous record of birthdays and anniversaries for every one of your acquaintances, sending cards and gifts, however nominal. Giving money to beggars even when it was obvious they just wanted booze, saying, “Who am I to keep him from getting drunk?” or, “What if he’s had a really bad day?” finding someone’s digital camera and then spending the next two days sleuthing through the pictures for clues to find her and return it. Sneaking out of bed on Sundays to make you breakfast. Stopping by work during your lunch break to bring you a bottle of lemonade you’d left at home.

  IT COULD BE HER legs you miss most. The way they gleamed. Calves taut like guitar strings, muscled like she was always wearing high heels. The way they felt when they were wrapped around your waist pulling you into her.

  YOU MISS THE MOLE on the back of her neck, a tiny dot almost indiscernible from a distance. The odd pale patch of skin between her shoulder blades, a splotch like bleach spilled on a T-shirt. The scar from her appendectomy, stretched like an uneasy pink smile above her hip. The way her knees bent at perfect forty-five-degree angles when she was painting the wood trim in your new home. The way she laid the next day’s clothes out on the dresser every night before bed. The single incisor that flashed between her lips when she grinned, a detail you never mentioned to her because you knew it would only make her more self-conscious about being photographed. The inward curve of her toes, as if they’d been bound together when she was a child. The way she always missed the same spot on the top of her left knee when she shaved.

  WHAT YOU MISS MOST, really, is being able to say anything you wanted to her and getting a response. Being able to tell her how afraid you are and having her validate your fears, having her tell you she’s scared too, mutually reassuring each other whether you believed yourselves or not. Having someone to affirm your rightness even when you’re obviously not right, someone who knows the correct time and manner to tell you you’re wrong. Having someone off of whom you can bounce your most ludicrous dreams, someone who knows to pretend they’re attainable.

  You talk to her still. You talk and talk, more than you ever did, but she never says anything, which makes it all as empty and useless as prayer.

  SIX

  What is there to see in the middle of America? There is nothing and there is everything. Unless one knows where to find the action, the world seems barren. The attractions are hidden here, and Hunter has wasted full days without seeing anything noteworthy. He has no guidebooks, and although he vaguely recalls the names and identities of some mid-American landmarks, he has no concept of where they are or what they represent.

  He is taking I-76 west through PA, will eventually connect with I-80, headed in an impossibly straight line alongside impossibly dull scenery. The primary goal is to leave Pennsylvania and to decide later if he ever wants to come back. The only definite stop he has in mind is Chicago—Kait went to college at DePaul, and Hunter thinks he might find some answers there, even though he’s not sure what questions he wants to ask.

  At first, when he passes a field full of cows, it is a little bit interesting, in that he rarely sees cows in his daily life. But by the fifteenth dairy farm, there is no reason to look anymore, because they are all essentially the same.

  Mostly, he sees power lines, wood fences, and endless rows of crops. He sees convoys of freight trucks barreling past him, a runaway herd of rumbl
ing monsters rattling his hatchback. After sunset, the trucks are illuminated by colored Christmas lights, a surprisingly festive way to remain visible. The rural highway at nighttime is as lonely and foreboding as the deep sea. He drives for miles without anything changing in front of him; he feels sometimes as if he is driving into a black hole.

  Hunter thinks about the pioneers, how helpless they must have felt on the frontier, taking whole days to move twenty miles, which he covers in twenty minutes, staring at vast stretches of uninterrupted land with absolutely no reason to believe. How could they have had faith that there even was another ocean? What did it take to convince them that the journey was worthwhile, despite their family members succumbing to dysentery, the persistent threats of wild animals and native tribes? In such bleak circumstances, what gives someone hope? And why is it that with all the many advantages he has over them—a motor, paved roads, a smartphone and a radio, easy access to penicillin if necessary, empirical evidence that something exists on the other side—he still feels underprepared and ill-equipped? Maybe, he says to Kait, humans weren’t meant for this kind of travel, not even with the benefit of modern technology. Maybe there is no reason to keep going at all, he says. But he drives past the next series of exits, resists the temptation to pull over and turn back toward home. He imagines Kait asking where they’re going, and all he can say for sure is that he’s staying in motion because what else is there to do?

  THE FIRST THING HE ever said to Kait, standing on his friend Joel’s South Philly rooftop, was, “How do you know Joel?” She sipped from her plastic cup and said she didn’t know Joel, she didn’t know anyone at the party, but her co-worker had made her come and then her co-worker had ditched her the moment she ran into an ex.

  “Do you think it’s bad I took a whole bottle of wine from downstairs?” Kait said, dumping the remainder of the bottle into her cup.

  He’d seen her the moment he walked stoned and weightless up to the rooftop, her arms crossed over her chest, jagged skyline behind her like an EKG reading of a racing heart. She chain-smoked then; between the cigarettes and the wine, her hands were always full, always in motion, and one or the other was pressed against her lips. She looked simultaneously vulnerable and unapproachable.

  She offered Hunter a sip of wine, which he took, because he didn’t want to seem standoffish. “That’s good wine,” he said, his own cup filled with lemonade.

  “No it’s not.” She sipped it anyway. “I’m sorry I’m smoking, I don’t know why I’m smoking,” she said, but she did not stop smoking. “Who do you know here?”

  Joel was one of his college roommates. He started to tell her about the day he and Joel had moved in together, but felt her getting bored when she became fixated on swirling the wine in her cup, and so he shifted gears. “Truth is, I kind of hate parties. But I haven’t seen these guys in a while.”

  “Parties are the worst,” she said. “I’ve been up since five o’clock. I just want to go to bed.”

  He knew a different kind of guy would seize on that last comment, say something like I’ve got a really comfortable bed if you want to try it out, but he was not that kind of guy. So instead he asked her what she’d rather be doing right now if she could be doing anything in the world. Which is when she told him she’d love to go backpacking through Europe someday, and he shrugged, said, “It’s kinda cool, but it’s not that great.” By which he meant he’d heard somewhere that it wasn’t great, had read comments on an online message board about how the hostels are dirty and unsafe, had watched most of a documentary about a college kid who was abducted by Albanians while backpacking. What she said was, “Oh my god, you’ve done that? I would LOVE to do that,” and so he said, “Sure, I travel all the time,” because what else could he say in that situation? The smoky scent of dozens of charcoal grills was overtaking the neighborhood, and the waxing moon glowed on them like a spotlight, and she was glistening in the summer heat, sweat beaded on her collarbones and dripping down into the valley between her breasts, so he had no choice but to say whatever she wanted to hear. Besides, the secret of seeming smart, he had learned from Jack, is not in studying any particular subject intensely, but in knowing just a little bit about as many subjects as possible, so one can fake expertise and let others carry the conversation, after which they will tell their friends Hunter is a really smart guy, and the friends will nod because, yes, they think so too. Not that Jack had consciously taught him any of this. In fact, Jack might not understand it himself, because not only is Jack’s office lined with dense reference books but he seems to have actually read them cover to cover. Having watched his father conduct conference calls from home, or eavesdropping on him at company luncheons, Hunter knows everyone considers Jack a sharp guy, really sharp, but he never says anything of substance; he just has a natural ability to make people outside his family feel comfortable while speaking. What Jack is is a mirror for others’ intelligence. The difference between himself and Jack, Hunter has always thought, is that Jack does not know he’s fooling people, whereas Hunter knows exactly what he’s doing, which is embracing our new cyber culture (Hunter recently picked this phrase up from a New Yorker article, and has been trying to weave it into daily conversation) in which it is much less important to have interests and expertise than it is to have opinions and know trivia answers.

  All of which served him well that night on the rooftop with that glistening girl, as he talked about the landmarks he’d visited, passed authoritative judgment on various cities (Brussels was luminous and Amsterdam was effervescent, but Majorca was too pedestrian), described the shimmering canals in Venice. He told her the women were beautiful over there, and she said, “Guess I wouldn’t fit in,” and to his credit he actually said the right thing here, which has never been his strength, usually he thinks of the perfect thing to say an hour too late, when he’s by himself and rehashing the conversations he should have had. What he said then was this: “You would put all of them to shame.”

  It is rare that one can browse through one’s personal history and pinpoint an individual moment that can change everything about one’s life—it’s a fantasy perpetuated by video games and bad films that our lives are littered with such moments, when in reality most of our circumstances have been triggered by a series of moments, a chain of decisions—but Hunter has always considered that response to have been the foundation of their entire relationship. Had he said something stupid like yeah, but tourists aren’t supposed to fit in anyway or seriously, those women over there are uh-MAY-zing, it’s likely that conversation would have ended, and when he tracked down Joel the next day and demanded the glistening girl’s e-mail address, the girl never would have responded to his e-mail asking her to go out for lunch, and she would have started dating someone else, would currently be married, not dead, the mother of two children and the owner of a passport heavy with stamps. Hunter wonders if it’s selfish of him to think he prefers the current timeline still. Would she have preferred this way too, if she had known how it would work out?

  She found out later that he’d lied to her about backpacking, because he had no pictures, no passport, no specific details. He confessed that he was just trying to impress her, and by then they were so deep into their relationship that she thought it was cute. Just Hunter being Hunter, another game they could play, in which she named a foreign city and asked him to tell her all about it, the people he’d met, the sights he’d seen, the cuisine he’d sampled.

  But everyone else, they still think he’s seen the world. His co-workers used to solicit vacation advice from him. Her family considers him a real globe-trotter, not that it matters much to them. (Max once asked, “What’s the point in going other places when you’ve already got good places here?”) Even Jack and Willow, who know he’s never visited Europe, think he has traveled throughout the southeastern U.S. But he’s never been anywhere. Or at least not anywhere worth documenting. As he drives into Ohio, it is the farthest he’s ever been. He pushes forward in the blind hope
that, sooner than later, he will find himself in the place where he has always belonged, and that when he arrives he’ll have the good sense to recognize it.

  IN SANDUSKY, OHIO, HUNTER finds himself unable to resist the allure of a billboard hyping Cedar Point, the world’s largest amusement park. He owes it to Kait to stop here, because she loved roller coasters more than anyone he’d ever known, forced him to go to carnivals and ride the coasters despite his insistence that it is actually insane behavior to put oneself on a rickety carnival ride for the express purpose of cheating death. He pays admission and carries Kait to a frontier-themed coaster, chosen because it is advertised as family friendly; the more daring coasters with their huge, gravity-defying loops could cause him to drop Kait, and a fall from that height would be sure to crack her in half, allow her to escape from him again, this time forever.

  The coaster is modeled after a freight train and is filled primarily by fathers and their young sons. It whistles and rolls them through a series of gentle hills and mild slopes before whipping them around a tight turn and then chugging up a twenty-foot incline in anticipation of the big finish. During the final descent, he raises Kait above his head, and he screams along with everyone else.

  After disembarking, he passes a table offering souvenir photos snapped of each passenger during the ride. He buys three copies of his, and in the morning, he mails them to Sherry, Brutus, and his parents, a note scrawled on the back of each: Headed west with Kait. Tried to make her wear her seatbelt, but couldn’t convince her. She’s always been stubborn! Having a blast. XOXO. As soon as the jaws of the mailbox squeal shut and swallow the envelopes, he feels a choleric constriction of his gut, a piercing moment of regret that doubles him over. He wishes his arms were long enough to snake inside and wrap themselves around the envelopes, pull them back out and then destroy them, but they are already out of reach, may as well already be loaded onto trucks and rumbling toward the East Coast, may as well already be in the hands of his concerned parents, his heartbroken in-laws.