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

disturbed?”
    â€œThat you’re even more fucked up and heartbroken than he is, you just don’t know it.”
    â€œAnd now you do?”
    â€œNow I do.”
    â€œListen, Claire, I know that losing your wife in a plane crash and drinking yourself to sleep every night may seem somewhat glamorous, but just between you and me, it’s really not all it’s cracked up to be.”
    She gives me a shove. “You know what I mean.”
    â€œI’m not sure I do yet. Get to the part where you get knocked up.”
    She laughs softly and leans the back of her head against the fridge. “The irony of the whole thing is that we barely even have sex anymore. It’s nothing less than a miracle that I haven’t cheated on that man, a horny chick like me. It was just this one night, this anomaly, where he had no late meetings, and no calls to make, and there was nothing on TV, and I guess we were both bored, so we had sex. It was that or cleaning out my closet. And it was nothing special, believe me. I mean, I forgot about it as soon as it was over. But then, a few weeks later I was late, so I took a test and imagine my surprise … ”
    â€œYou’re sure the test was right?”
    â€œI took five tests.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œSo I’m sitting there in the bathroom, washing the pee off my hands, and it just hits me that I’m going to be a mother and now this is all I’ll ever be. Mrs. Stephen Ives, just another rich, bored housewife, a sad cliché. And I don’t want to be Laney Potter, screwing other men just to feel alive again for a few hours.”
    â€œThanks for that.”
    â€œNo offense.”
    â€œNone taken.”
    â€œI thought maybe I could stay here for a while.”
    â€œSure. 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.
    â€œRemember 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