The Young Widower's Handbook

by Tom McAllister

  • What she actually did at work, besides Boring Bank Stuff

  • Why sometimes she seemed so lonely, even when you were with her

  • What she thought about as she was dying

  The Guided Tours never disappeared completely, but at some point you progressed from the urgent and performative early-relationship conversations and shifted into the comfortable chatter that is crucial to the maintenance of a long-term relationship. The ability to talk about nothing for hours. To accurately predict the other’s reactions. The casual banter of sparrows chattering away on a tree branch.

  THERE ARE STILL THINGS you’ve never told her, either because she wouldn’t let you tell her or because you were embarrassed and afraid to scare her off. Which is why she will never know, for example, that, for reasons you cannot explain, you hated watching her tweeze her eyebrows. You try revealing your secrets to the urn, hoping the information can be conveyed through the ashes to her spirit, if such a thing exists, and so you want her to know that when you’d only been dating for a few weeks, you got busted for possession and had to perform two hundred hours of community service back in Hartford. At the time, you said you were stuck at home for a few weeks because Jack was swamped at work and needed your help around the office. You tell her about the mandatory counseling sessions in high school because you’d written on a mental health questionnaire that you sometimes had suicidal thoughts, even though that wasn’t strictly true, you were exaggerating to seem deeper and more profound. She never knew, but maybe knows now, that you sometimes resented her for not playing Trivial Pursuit with you just because it made her feel stupid when she didn’t know the answers. You confess that last night you lost her and possibly had sex with some girl who was on the verge of getting married. You tell her the one thing you’re sure she never knew, although you’ve said it before: that she was infinitely more beautiful and charming and intelligent than she thought she was, and that no matter how many times you said it—not enough times, you owe her another hundred years’ worth of adoration—it never became routine or perfunctory for you, you always meant it as deeply as one can mean something, you just wanted her to believe.

  TWELVE

  Between the emotionally fraught night at Stan and Edna’s in Chicago and nearly losing Kait in St. Louis, the last two stops have been too stressful, and so after recovering his wife, Hunter leaves town earlier than anticipated. He changes his tickets and ends up in Seward, Nebraska, with an afternoon to kill before he can get to Lincoln. His phone tells him that the most unique site in town is the world’s largest time capsule. The capsule is marked by a white pyramid large enough to contain a car. It was planted here on the front lawn of a furniture store in Seward, because the owner of the store wanted his grandchildren to learn his life story by having physical access to his artifacts. A couple circles the pyramid, peering at the walls as if trying to see through them. Hunter and Kait do the same. The other man knocks on the walls, says, “These are nice walls.” His companion does not listen, is busy taking photos of the pyramid from every angle, photos of the store’s exterior, of the plaque commemorating the capsule, of the winged bomb inexplicably placed on the lawn. Buried beneath them is an oversized crypt filled with thousands of relics from the life of a man who died a decade ago. A lifetime of carefully chosen possessions buried for future reference. Kait left everything behind, but she left nothing. It’s all there in the house, her dresses and pants, her shoes and makeup, her movies and board games, her low-fat yogurt and skim milk, her loose hairs and skin cells. They weren’t chosen, but rather were left haphazardly, scattered throughout his life, as if she couldn’t wait to escape, and it’s not her fault, but also how is it fair that Hunter now has to pick through all of her relics and curate them in some meaningful way? Does a house automatically become a time capsule the moment it is abandoned, or does it need to be consecrated first? The woman asks Hunter to take a picture of her and her husband. They pose in front of the pyramid, smiling. She asks him to take another, just in case.

  Kait took thousands of pictures with her digital camera, printed and organized them into albums, stacked the albums chronologically on shelves in their living room in case visitors wanted to page through every moment of their lives. He’d always felt too self-conscious about how and when he was supposed to smile when posing for pictures, so too often he looked like a fool with curled lips and bared teeth, and anyway he worried that taking too many pictures made people forget to appreciate their lives in the moment. “You’ll be glad we have these albums when we’re old,” she said.

  Once the other couple is gone, on the run toward the next tourist attraction, Hunter places Kait on the ground next to the capsule, kneels, and snaps a picture of his wife in front of the pyramid. Uploads it. Caption: Two boxes full of memories.

  LATER, WANDERING THROUGH THE center of Lincoln, Nebraska, he spots a TrustUs Bank, hulking on the corner of Ninth & H. The familiar sign—green and white palette, a font that can only be described as leafy—swings in the breeze as if waving him in. He enters, shielding his eyes against the sun glinting off the windows. Kait told him once why banks are so insistent upon huge windows, although he doesn’t quite remember now; something about transparency and community. There’s some kind of science behind the leafy font too, something about associations with security and tradition. The inside of the Lincoln TrustUs smells identical to the inside of the Center City Philadelphia TrustUs—like a dying pine tree, like Christmas five days later. The carpet in both places is exactly the same, a placid, foamy green that looks like it belongs in the Seward time capsule. The layout, T-shaped, is identical to Kait’s branch. The employees here wear the same uniform Kait wore, speak with the same inflection Kait had. The women walk the same way Kait did, that hurried but controlled power strut. These are not Nebraska people, Hunter thinks. They’re Bank People, a totally different species whose primary instinct is to look you in the eyes and smile as a greeting, to exchange money for money, to wear dark suits, to leave work at three o’clock and go to happy hour at the tapas bar before heading home.

  Four tellers await customers along the horizontal line of the T. A row of chairs is arranged along the vertical. Hunter sits in the chair farthest from the tellers and places Kait on the seat next to him, closes his eyes, and inhales deeply. When she came home from work, she smelled like this, the same way a cook at a pizza joint comes home smelling like heat and garlic and onions. What she smelled like, he used to tell her, was expensive. He inhales again, wishes he could pack the odor in his cheeks like a chipmunk and save it for winter. It’s afternoon, lunch hour, and a steady line of customers processes from door to teller and back out into the world, where they will fade from Hunter’s life forever. Most of them don’t look at him, and when they do, they don’t really see him, have no idea of his history, probably are assuming that container in the chair next to him is headed for a safe deposit box. Nobody else sits, because these seats are largely ornamental; why would anyone just sit down inside a bank? There’s scientific research, probably, that says seeing chairs makes people feel comfortable or something, as in well, as long as these people have six symmetrically arranged chairs, then I can surely trust them with my life savings. Kait rarely sat at work, ordered the most uncomfortable chair possible for her office, so she wouldn’t be tempted to get lazy. Took the stairs instead of the elevator wherever she went, always found a reason to be on the run. When she came home, she would flop on the couch, lay her feet on his lap, and he would remove her shoes, gently rub her heels while she complained about her boss’s terrible communication skills. Sometimes he sneaked a hand above the knee, and sometimes she let him creep higher until his hand was up her skirt and she was grinding against him, but more often, she fell asleep, forearm crossed over her eyes because she was battling another migraine. He would slip out from beneath her legs and set a glass of water and a bottle of Excedrin by her side, then cook dinner for her while she napped.

  A security guard lays a hand o
n his shoulder and says, “You can’t stay here.”

  “I’ve been walking all day,” Hunter says.

  “We’ve all got problems,” the guard says. “This isn’t a halfway house.”

  “I’ve only been here a few minutes.” Hunter looks up at the clock on the wall, realizes that, no, he’s actually been here for over an hour—since Kait’s death time seems to move both too fast and too slow.

  “If you don’t have business here, you’ve got to go.”

  “I’m a customer. Have a lot of money in here,” he says, digging through the scraps in his pocket for a deposit slip. “My wife used to work here,” Hunter says, tapping the cube. “Well, not here. But, like, here. For this bank.” He doesn’t know what he wants from this conversation, except that he’d like this guard to know Kait existed, to know she was important to someone, and so was he, once.

  The guard hooks his hand around Hunter’s elbow, lifts him to his feet. “Fine, but she’s not here now.”

  “Do you know her? Her name’s Kaitlyn.” He and the guard are walking toward the door. “But everyone calls her Kait. And my last name is Cady, so she’s Kait Cady.” The guard pushes open the door, guides Hunter out with a hand on his lower back. “See? It’s funny, is why I’m telling you.”

  “Funny.”

  “Like a double name.”

  “A double name.” People used to think the double name thing was funny. They thought it was cute. The guard stands between him and the door. Crosses his arms.

  “Where the hell am I supposed to go now?” The creak of the sign overhead sounds like laughter.

  IN THE FACE OF another bus-schedule-imposed delay, Hunter decides to spend a day at a southeastern Nebraska nature preserve, because he’s been told it is remarkable and also because the pamphlet promises “endless serenity.” Standing at the foot of a hiking trail, he recites a passage from the Internet to Kait about the history of the preserve, when Lewis and Clark walked through here, when it became officially protected land, how many visitors per year it welcomes. He tells her how many species of birds thrive here. Reads the safety warnings about uneven trails and the unpredictability of wildlife, and details their different hiking options. On their honeymoon, he collected all of the tourism pamphlets from the front desk and sat next to her on the bed reading them aloud. She was tired from the drive and lay down with her arm draped over her eyes, giving perfunctory responses, nonverbal grunts and nods. By the fourth pamphlet, he paused. “I’m sorry, do you want me to stop? I should stop.”

  “No,” she said, eyes still covered. “I’m just tired.”

  “I didn’t mean to be annoying. It’s just . . . I’m excited. You know?”

  With her free hand, she reached out blindly groping for his. “I think it’s cute.”

  “You should take a nap. I’ll read you more later,” he said. And almost as soon as he finished his sentence she had fallen asleep.

  When she woke up a half hour later, she sat up and handed him the pamphlets. “Okay, lay it on me, Mr. Tour Guide,” she said.

  “I don’t want to bore you,” he said.

  But she insisted. She told him about a friend whose husband brought an Xbox with him on their Hawaiian honeymoon. He’d spent most of the week playing video games and barely talking to his new wife. Kait’s friend went to the beach by herself in the morning and had lunch alone and when she got back to the room, her husband was half-drunk on room-service daiquiris and still playing games. “So, what, I’m going to complain that my husband wants to talk to me? That he’s excited to be with me?”

  Squirrels skitter through the treetops. Groups of hikers pass him, cameras dangling around their necks. The website freezes; he shakes the phone, but nothing changes. He restarts, waits until he can access the site again and begin reciting more facts. The forest chitters and squawks and woodpecks and digs and scrambles. He takes a few steps into the woods, clouds of bugs hovering in front of him, waiting to devour him. He tells Kait there may be bears in the woods somewhere; wouldn’t it be cool to get a picture of a bear peeking its head out of a cave?

  Some mornings, he told her he was going to get up early to make minor repairs around the house, or read a book, and he tried to do those things until he had to look online for something like tips on how to use a power drill or the definition of an obscure word, and soon enough he would be sucked for five hours into an Internet black hole. When she would ask later about his progress with the repairs, he would tell her the job was harder than he’d expected, it would have to wait.

  There are four paths to choose from. Most of the hikers are following the one to his left. He allows a small group a few minutes to establish a comfortable distance and then he follows them onto the left path, passes more signs offering dire safety warnings, telling him to act as much like a human as possible in the unlikely event that he does encounter a black bear. Stumbling on an exposed tree root, he fumbles Kait but manages to regain control before she slams into the dirt. The hikers ahead of him have already been swallowed by dense foliage. The forest is filled with eyes watching him. He tries to be as human as possible.

  Willow and Jack took him camping once, back when Jack was still trying to reconnect with Hunter. Jack was always working and his intermittent and fumbling attempts at showing affection belied his own discomfort with raising a child. Willow and Jack weren’t planning on children, and as Willow said during her Catholic phase, Hunter was “an unexpected blessing.” Still, he and Jack had gotten along well enough until Hunter went to high school and discovered sarcasm and classic rock and recreational drugs all at roughly the same time, and Jack was utterly incapable of dealing with Hunter’s transition into a surly and self-righteous teenager. But Jack Cady is not a quitter, Jack Cady gets results, and he worked to salvage the relationship. A few weekends per year, then, he would get away from work and try to cram all of his father-son bonding into the space of two to three days, as in the weekend of Hunter’s fifteenth birthday, when, instead of seeing his friends and going to a pool party that would have been populated by bikini-clad girls who were susceptible to peer pressure, Hunter had to go fishing, golfing, and bowling with Jack. He was in college by the time of the camping excursion, wanted to join his friends on a Spring Break trip to some island, but never got a job to raise the money, and when he asked Jack for a loan, Jack told him he had a better idea—they could spend the a long weekend together in the woods. Jack tried to teach Hunter how to start a fire, but Hunter couldn’t get the stupid flint to work, and Jack eventually took it from him, started the fire himself. He tried to teach Hunter how to raise a tent, but gave up after Hunter nearly snapped one of the poles in half. Jack caught some trout in a nearby creek, and began teaching Hunter how to clean a fish, but Hunter intentionally pierced his hand with the knife, made it look like an accident, so that Jack would send him back to the tent. Jack never had the patience to be a mentor, so by the next day he had relinquished any hopes of turning his son into an outdoorsman and instead spent the day working on the camp, improving their shelters, and foraging. Hunter stayed inside the tent, where there were no bugs and he could play video games on the portable system he’d sneaked along in his bag.

  Nature is objectively nice, Hunter knows, and important and all of that. But it’s also dirty and smelly and unpleasant to be in. He prefers his nature in postcard form, shot through a wide-angle lens and broadcast on PBS. Pictures of mountains and woodland creatures are dramatically more comforting than being near actual chattering woodland creatures that carry all sorts of strange diseases and it’s impossible to tell when you’ve offended one of them. The scent of wildflowers like a funeral. The dirt an accumulation of hundreds of years of decomposing organisms. He came here because it seemed like a good place to visit, a tourist attraction with substance. It was a chance to get some fresh air after weeks of breathing recycled oxygen, an opportunity to plunge into the real world. A creature shrieks above him, but he cannot locate the source. According to his map, he ought to be
approaching something called Beacon Bluffs, but all he sees is a stream at the bottom of a craggy downhill slope; close to the edge, he has a vivid vision of himself tripping on a tree root and dropping Kait, watching her tumble the whole way down and get swept away by the current. Stepping back from the precipice, he retreats into the woods behind him. He does not stop until the trail is just a vision in the distance. Over the groundswell of woodsy noise, he hears an anguished moan, muffled but persistent, like the sound of a woman trapped beneath a collapsed building. He follows the moaning, pausing every few seconds to recalibrate his direction. When he steps into a clearing, he finds the source.

  There is a boy alone.

  The boy sits on a log and kicks at the dirt. Above him, a tangle of tree branches hangs like a net. His knee is scraped, shirt muddy, cheeks red with tears. When he sees Hunter approaching, he looks too afraid to run.

  “Do you need help?” Hunter says.

  “Hell no,” the boy says. He looks about ten or eleven, old enough that he’s just learning how to curse. Old enough to want to act tough, but young enough to still be terrified. He hides his face, trying to swallow his tears.

  “How long have you been out here?”

  “I got lost this morning and my dad said if I get lost just to stay where I am and he’ll come find me, but it’s been a long time.”

  “How did you get out here in the first place?”

  “I thought I saw a beaver and I love beavers so I chased it out here but then I looked up and there wasn’t a beaver and I was here by myself and everyone left without me.” He grinds his foot into the dirt.

  The boy’s arms are sunburned, his hair tousled. “Here,” Hunter says, extending his hand to the boy. “Let’s go find your family.”

  The boy takes his hand immediately. “I’m Zack,” he says. His hand is sweaty, and although he has stopped crying, he seems like the slightest noise could set him off again. He sniffles and uses his free hand to dry his eyes with his shirt.