The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  • Things to look forward to now that everything you had previously looked forward to is invalidated by the absence of your wife, whose presence was integral to those things being things you wanted to do, rather than things you felt like you had to do;

  • Reasons to go home and get a job and rejoin the workforce and become a so-called productive member of society and contribute to the local economy and punch the clock every morning at eight and every evening at four and take off every third Friday so you can go to the movies by yourself and then return to your empty home to heat up a frozen meal in a package labeled FAMILY SIZE because it’s easier to have leftovers for a couple days than it is to heat something new every day;

  • Reasons not to start drinking heavily—slowly corroding your insides first with plastic-bottle gin and becoming one of those faded men who walk into a liquor store at noon and count out a handful of nickels on the counter in exchange for one can of malt liquor and eventually don’t even die but just disappear;

  • Names of people who have worse lives than you and have faced more difficult situations and greater trauma without any safety net, people who you know are abundant, even if sometimes you want to feel like you are the only one;

  • Reasons to trust other people, who you have never trusted in the first place and who now you suspect of all kinds of treachery, because the world has revealed itself to you to be truly sinister, has confirmed a lifetime of cynicism and convinced you there is no reason beyond unreason;

  • Possible names for still-undiscovered planets and their respective moons, organized in order from most habitable by humans to least habitable;

  • Pros and cons of leaping off a bridge, of throwing yourself in front of a moving train, of firing a gun into a crowd until a police sniper takes you out, of self-immolation, of overdosing on Tylenol, of cutting yourself and watching the blood swirl cloudy in the bathtub, of renting a boat and sailing into the heart of a mid-ocean storm, of leaping over the rail into the lion’s den at the zoo, of hiring a hitman to take you out at an unspecified time so you don’t know when it’s coming or how it’s coming, just that it is coming;

  • Characteristics of the man you want to become, the man Kait knew you could be and you think you can be if you just figure some things out;

  • Reasons to believe—in yourself, in a god, in redemption, in waking up in the morning and feeling better, in the possibility of getting back to normal;

  • Things to look forward to in the future.

  TEN

  The next afternoon, he is on a bus headed south to St. Louis. Since leaving home, he and Kait have found nothing exciting to do, have made no friends or learned anything useful. The fantasy of traveling did not look like this. In the fantasy, it looked like luxury hotels with hot tubs and decadent feasts and romantic strolls in the countryside and rolling hills with castles looming in the distance. It did not include a rattling bus and morbid gray skies. It did not account for the possibility that tourism could be more limiting than staying at home, or that even after spending nearly three weeks on the road, after visiting famous landmarks, both natural and manmade, one can feel like they’ve still seen nothing worth seeing. Remarkable backdrops don’t lend gravity to one’s life, he thinks, don’t magically transform the meanings of things; they’re just backgrounds. Bad conversations are still bad conversations. Spinach is still spinach. West is west. Moving from place to place doesn’t change that.

  How many nights had he and Kait spent together planning, traveler’s handbooks spread out on the coffee table, Kait listing tips on a legal pad while Hunter dog-eared important pages? How many weekends had been dedicated to swapping stories about things that would happen, someday? Together, they invented scenarios in which they met helpful Chilean strangers, spent the nights in their homes eating native food and conversing with the locals, immersing themselves fully in the culture and returning with a thousand pictures and a new appreciation for the depth and breadth of human experience. They imagined six-week trips through Australia, and she laughed at his dumb jokes about boomerangs and kangaroos and Crocodile Dundee. They developed emergency plans in case they encountered a tiger in India or a chupacabra in Mexico. Over countless hours and days of strategizing, they’d visualized themselves as travelers in almost every country they could name, and one night while she lay on the couch with her legs draped over his lap, she said, “I really don’t care where we go, as long as you’re with me.”

  “What do you think about North Korea?”

  “I hear it’s lovely in the fall,” she said.

  “Maybe Siberia after that?”

  “If it was good enough for Genghis Khan, it’s good enough for me.”

  “South Pole?”

  “We could see penguins!” she said. She sat up, leaned in close to whisper like a coconspirator: “Maybe we could steal one and take it home with us.”

  “We’d have to buy so much fish then. The house would stink.”

  “Maybe we could train it to eat chicken fingers?”

  That conversation led to the creation of one of Hunter’s favorite running gags: any time he saw chicken fingers on a restaurant’s menu, he would say something like, “This must be a big penguin hangout.” Even on the hundredth repetition of the joke, she still laughed, sometimes smiled in anticipation of it when she scanned the menu.

  Before arriving in St. Louis, he receives a terse e-mail from Jack: “Got a bill from Illinois State Police for hauling your car. Fun time’s over. Tell me where you are and I’ll come get you.” Jack will eventually find him, will obsess over Hunter’s whereabouts until he can track him down, which, briefly, makes Hunter feel like an international spy on the run. He is tempted by the opportunity to cut the trip short, to have an excuse to give up before he even reaches his destination. But—fun time? If that’s what Jack thinks this is, if that’s what Jack thinks Hunter is doing, then there is no reason to even talk to him.

  Upon arrival in St. Louis, Hunter hails a cab, tells the driver to take him somewhere fun. If other people think he’s out here goofing off, then he might as well have some actual fun.

  They end up at a sports bar called ThrowDowns. He doesn’t like bars, has never enjoyed drinking, and only had the occasional glass of wine for Kait’s sake, because she worried about the implications of having a drink by herself, feared it was step one on the inevitable road to alcoholism, to turning into her father. Most of his nights at bars have consisted of nursing a soda while dodging stumbling coeds and waiting to drive his drunken friends home.

  Inside the bar, there are forty-seven TVs lining the walls, half of them tuned to the Golf Channel, which strikes Hunter as the most boring network possible, but he’s not particularly interested in sports. He played baseball growing up, was a pretty good second baseman through eighth grade, thanks in part to the evenings Willow spent with him in the backyard teaching him the nuances of the game. By high school, he’d lost interest and started skipping practices, got kicked off the team for insubordination. He isn’t an antisports zealot, like some of his Chomskyan college professors were, has faked fandom before, has gotten caught up in the local teams’ various playoff runs because it’s almost impossible not to be swept up in the frenzy. He once tried explaining his disinterest in sports to Brutus and Max and Billy and Uncle Bobby when he and Kait were forced to host a Sunday football party. He and Kait had spent the morning scrambling to clean the house while cooking sloppy joes and slicing blocks of cheddar and otherwise devising ways to clog everyone’s arteries, and once her family arrived, all wearing their Sunday uniforms, Brutus hurled a football at Hunter hard enough that Hunter caught it out of self-defense, and Brutus said, “Where the hell’s your jersey at?” Hunter said he didn’t have one and Brutus interrupted: “Don’t worry, we brought a spare,” and tossed a green Philadelphia Eagles jersey toward him. “Gotta wear one. House rules.”

  Once the game started, everyone hunkered into their positions and gathered their beer and chips and cheese
and focused intently on the TV, conversing only sometimes during commercials, and Hunter sat silently in the corner of his own living room. At halftime, Uncle Bobby invited Hunter into the backyard to have a catch, but Hunter said he wanted to stay inside and work on the fondue, a pronouncement that incited approximately fifteen minutes worth of limp-wristed mincing and gay jokes, the only remedies to which would have been Hunter chugging a beer or punching somebody.

  Focused on melting gruyere and swiss over low heat, he missed the first five minutes of the second half. When he returned to the living room, Brutus’s girlfriend occupied his seat. Because the Eagles had started playing well while he was absent, he learned that he was banned from the living room. “House rules,” Billy said, apparently unaware of whose house he was in. Kait shrugged, said, “He’s right,” and so Hunter retreated to the kitchen, where he listened to their violent reactions to the game, tried to determine whether he even wanted to be invited back into the room.

  After the game, Brutus cornered him in the kitchen and said, “You’re not real big on football, huh?” and Hunter explained that Jack had never cared about football; Sundays growing up meant yard work and gutter cleaning and other chores that kept him from ever watching or investing in the games, and he came from a place that had no major pro or college football teams so he’d never formed an allegiance to anyone. Brutus shoved the football into Hunter’s gut, knocking the wind out of him, and said, “You better learn to love football if you’re going to be one of us.”

  That night, lying in bed next to Kait, he said, “Hopefully they won’t make us do that again.”

  Her back turned to him, she said, “You know, sometimes I wish you could be more of a man.”

  “Oh, I’m all man, baby,” he said, curling up against her from behind, cupping a hand over her breast.

  “I mean, I know you’re different. It’s just, maybe it wouldn’t kill you to meet them halfway now and then.”

  HE STEPS TO THE bar and orders two glasses of Chardonnay, sets one in front of Kait and takes a photo of the cube and the glass. Caption: She’s a cheap date! Receives near-immediate feedback, more thumbs being upped, others saying, “Wish I was on vacation! LOL!” The people who write LOL most often are the ones least aware of what a joke actually is, who seem to think the acronym qualifies as punctuation, but at least it’s positive feedback, as opposed to the growing number of folks who feel compelled to respond to his digital postcards with pitying comments such as “Please feel better. We all love you!” or, lately, with actual outrage, as in this just-posted comment from Billy Dixon: “This ain’t funny, bro. A real man wud come home and deal with his problems!” He places the phone facedown on the bar, takes a sip of his chardonnay; it tastes like well-water two days old. He pushes it away, summons the bartender. Says, “Give me the manliest drink you’ve got,” and so the bartender offers him a double Old Granddad, neat. Hunter drank straight liquor once, in college, tequila from a plastic gallon bottle, passing it around a crowded dorm room. The tequila was warm and nobody seemed to like it, so they all stared grimly down the barrel of the bottle, imbibing so that they could, at some point later in the night, feel drunk, because that’s what they were supposed to do in college, get drunk and accumulate hundreds of nearly identical anecdotes of drunken escapades to share with one another when they became responsible adults. Hunter had joined the chase, and pretended not to be disgusted by the taste, barely suppressed his gagging, didn’t tell anyone he was worried about drinking something that burned so much inside his chest, and at some point he probably did feel drunk, and probably danced and laughed and shouted with everyone else, but all he remembers is the aftermath, when he awoke facedown in his own vomit, bits of tequila-glazed chicken fingers encircling his mouth, and he felt sure that he had died overnight. In fact, he soon began wishing he’d died overnight, because then he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the day on the floor of a communal bathroom, vomiting and experiencing muscle pains in his shoulders and back and generally feeling like he’d been thrown from an airplane without a chute. He’d been smoking pot since he was fifteen, soon after discovering classic rock and Jim Morrison’s poetry, and preferred everything about being high to being drunk, which was all around more painful and aggressive and sloppy and didn’t even offer the possibility of profound thought or self-discovery. By the time he’d met Kait, he felt like he’d exhausted the possibilities of expanding his mind via marijuana, although they had smoked a few joints together over the years, usually at the end of particularly stressful work weeks when nothing else could help her relax. His college friends thought his first hangover was hysterically funny; there is no less empathetic audience in the world than a group of teenage boys. They told him he just had to get used to it, and the next time he’d feel better. Two nights later, they passed him a new bottle of tequila and he retched at the sight of it, pushed it away, tucked himself under the comforter on his bunk bed while they all talked about getting wasted and how awesome it would be to be wasted when they finally did get wasted and how wasted they’d been on previous nights in comparison to their current levels of wastedness, and eventually they were wasted, at which point he slipped out of the room and spent the remainder of the night watching TV in a student lounge, passing time until he could hear tomorrow’s stories about the new frontiers of wastedness his friends had explored.

  He swirls his Old Granddad, occasionally lifting it to his lips and pretending to sip, splashing it back down when the odor becomes too aggressive.

  The place is fairly crowded for a Thursday evening; the patrons are wearing business clothes and they’re charging through the doors as if the only thing that helped them survive the day was the knowledge that eventually they could drink alcohol. Many of them enter solo. They all stare beyond the bar, at the TVs, or into the mirror behind the liquor, watching themselves drink, pressing their glasses to their lips forcefully, and they sometimes check their watches or tap messages into their phones. They swallow hard and their glasses are refilled and they slide more money forward without speaking a word.

  There is a band called the Hungry Hippos setting up in the corner. This is the kind of inoffensive live band Kait liked to see. She would clap and ask him if he wanted to dance, and he would try to hide his anxiety about dancing in public by ironically doing hokey dance moves like the robot or Vanilla Ice’s high-stepping.

  Six months ago, Kait brought him to a bar for what was originally supposed to have been a ladies’ night with some of her college friends. She needed him to go because she couldn’t stand half her friends anymore, and she didn’t want to waste a perfectly good Saturday not seeing him, even though he was the one husband among a group of single ladies. Kait told her friends he had come along to be the designated driver. The girls got drunk and danced on stage while the band played Bon Jovi covers and people spilled beer on Hunter, and Hunter shuffled on the dance floor and tried his best to look like he belonged there. Kait spent the first half of the drive home recapping the night. She said, “That band wasn’t bad, right? They were pretty good even.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said.

  “What, you don’t think they were good?” she said. “They were good. Just admit they were good.” In the backseat, her friend Abby agreed and said the band was really, really good. Like, really good.

  “I guess they were fine,” he said. “It’s just—every time I see one of these bands, I keep thinking about what they really wanted to do. Like, how did they end up here instead of playing in big arenas and going on tour? And are they okay with it now, or do they still wish they could be doing something better?”

  “That’s really deep,” Abby said.

  “No it’s not—he’s just being miserable again,” Kait said. “They’re getting paid to do what they love to do. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Do you think their wives and girlfriends like it? Late nights, constant practice, always acting like their big break is on the way.”

  “Well, at least t
hey’re trying,” Kait said. She stopped talking then, rode in silence for the remainder of the ride.

  A TRIO OF GIRLS bustles toward the bar, crushing into him, barely aware of his presence. They’re wearing identical pink T-shirts that say BACHELORETTE across the chest, and bad bitches bar crawl on the back. Each girl is adorned with a variety of penis-shaped accessories: earrings, flashing necklaces, bracelets, hats. They’re drinking from penis-shaped straws, and every time one takes a sip, they make a sultry face, and the others take a picture. By the end of the night, there will be in existence, and surely uploaded to the Internet, hundreds of photos of these girls with plastic penises in their mouths. They stumble and slur and smell like they’ve all bathed in strawberry daiquiris. One of the girls sits in Kait’s seat and shouts for the bartender’s attention.

  “I was saving that,” Hunter says, and the girl ignores him. “Hey, seat’s saved,” he repeats.

  She says, “I’ll just be a minute, okay.”

  “No, that’s not okay,” he says, “It’s not okay at all. I’m saving that seat for my wife.”

  “We’ve been here a half hour,” she says, waving the penis straw in his face like a dagger, “and this seat’s been empty the whole time.” The bartender arrives, and the girl orders another round of something called Watermelon Throwdowns, which glow like isotopes and arrive in glasses roughly the diameter of salad plates.

  “You don’t believe I’m married?” he says, displaying his wedding ring. The other girls slurp on their drinks, strike sultry poses, cackle.

  “Why should I care?”

  He shoves Kait’s cube toward the girl. Tells her his wife is in there, because she’s dead and he’s carrying her across the country to give her a proper goodbye and maybe spread her ashes in the Pacific Ocean. The line about the ocean, he didn’t expect to say that, but it sounds good enough. It seems like the sort of thing one is supposed to do. The girl eyes the urn, checks his face to see if he’s serious, and then she says, “Oh. My. God. That is the cutest thing ever!” Grabbing his arm, she pulls him off the stool and leads him into the thicket of the Bad Bitches Bar Crawl.