Free How to Talk to a Widower by Jonathan Tropper Page A

offense.”
    “None taken.”
    “I thought maybe I could stay here for a while.”
    “Sure. The guest room’s yours.”
    The fridge vibrates gently against our spines as we sit on my kitchen floor, talking quietly while twilight falls like a curtain over the windows. I can hear the sounds of kids in front yards, urgently attending to childhood affairs, shouting and laughing, young and untouched and thinking they’ll always be that way. When we were kids, whenever I was sad, Claire would put on this white chef’s hat and concoct ridiculous ice cream sundaes that we would then force ourselves to finish. Banana splits with chocolate syrup, Jell-O and gummy bears, hot fudge sundaes floating in root beer, quadruple-scoop ice cream cones with marshmallow fluff between each scoop. Half the fun was watching her dart madly around the kitchen, randomly selecting ingredients as she narrated the process in her best Julia Child voice.
    “Remember the funny sundaes?” I say.
    Claire rests her head on my shoulder, turning her face into my neck, and quietly starts to cry.

10

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    How to Talk to a Widower
By Doug Parker

    B ecause of this newfound tendency I’ve developed of unleashing rapid-fire bursts of raw, unadulterated pain—my emotional Tourette’s—and because I can’t stand to be the object of anyone’s pity other than my own, I pretty much stay home these days.
    The only downside to this system is that the house is a minefield and I never know when I’m going to step on a latent memory of Hailey and get my legs blown off. Even after all this time, she’s still everywhere. On her night table still rests the last book she was reading, some chick lit thing with a lipstick pink cover about overweight, smart-assed women and the men who cheat on them, and when I pick it up, I see that she doodled on the last page she read, a bug-eyed cartoon man with a handlebar mustache and evil eyebrows, and it makes me smile, but even as I do, I can feel the tears start to come.
    I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she’s gone. And so am I.
    Or in the bathroom, her red bra still hangs on the doorknob. She’d no doubt meant to toss it in the hamper but never got around to it. That’s something I taught her, to let simple household tasks percolate for a little bit, to do no chore before its time.
    I move through our bedroom like a ghost, careful not to disturb the haphazard evidence of her existence; the book, the bra, the hairbrush still filled with knots of her blond hair, her perfume and cosmetics scattered across the sink top, the water ring from a sweating glass of water she’d put down on her dresser, the silk blouse laid out across the chair next to her bed that she’d decided at the last minute not to pack for her trip, the frayed stuffed elephant named Bazooka that she kept wedged between her pillow and the headboard ever since she was a little girl. For a while after she died, I didn’t even change the sheets because they still smelled of her. Then they stopped smelling of her and, after a few more weeks, they just smelled like ass. And that’s as good a metaphor for grief as any of the thousands of others that occur to me on a daily basis. You cling desperately to every single memory, and in doing so the memories themselves grow stale and turn, like the sheets on my bed.
    Still, it hurt when I changed the linens, was just one more way of moving Hailey into the past tense, one more step across the inevitable divide, and I can’t bring myself to straighten up, because every little thing I remove or clean up is one more trace of her that I will immutably erase. I want to put up stanchions and red velvet ropes, like they do in historical mansions to keep the tourists from screwing with the past, because, given the chance, that’s what we’d all do.
    Like on my seventh-grade class trip to Philadelphia, on a dare, I scooted quietly up some roped-off stairs in Benjamin Franklin’s house. I figured I would cement my