The Young Widower's Handbook Read online

  The YOUNG

  WIDOWER’S

  HANDBOOK

  a novel

  TOM McALLISTER

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2017

  For LauraBeth, as always

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT ALGONQUIN

  ONE

  You don’t fall in love at first sight, or first kiss even, but many months later, at that indelible moment when you awake in her bed before sunrise, her breath hot on your back, arm draped across your ribs, the contours of her hips flowing into you, and you feel like you’re two interlocking puzzle pieces, built specifically to fit together with each other and no one else. The room is soundless and still, and you’re afraid to move because you don’t want to disturb her, so you stay there, unblinking, unbreathing, for nearly an hour, until she finally shifts and grazes your shoulder with her lips, a kiss soft like the caress of a ghost.

  When she wakes up you want to tell her you love her, but you don’t say anything because you’re terrified she doesn’t feel the same way, and so you wait another month, all the while seeking the perfect way to make the grand announcement. Should you give her the same generic greeting cards that thousands of less deserving women will receive from men less devoted than you? A singing telegram? Skywriting? You’re nearly drowning in love, unable to see her without feeling your heart quivering, and at night you cry in the shower while envisioning her inevitable rejection of you, because you’re too awkward or too ugly or too boring for her to want you in the same way you want her. Still red-faced and puffy-eyed, you exit the bathroom with a towel wrapped around your suddenly embarrassing body, and she reads the angst in your expression, asks what’s wrong. In your brain, the response sounds like this: I love you and I don’t ever want to lose you. But somewhere between brain and mouth, the words mutate into this: “I want to spy on you,” which you immediately acknowledge as being creepy, and she tells you, yes, it really is creepy, and you try to explain that you are not actually a creepy person. “What I mean is, I want to watch you,” you say, and she says that’s not much better. And, understanding that she has vaguely defined anxieties about invasion of privacy, understanding she’s a more fearful person than she wants people to know, you tell her it’s like this: you totally and completely trust her, and don’t want to spy on her in that way, but rather you want to watch her because you love her so deeply and want to know everything possible about her, even the parts of her she feels compelled to hide from you; all you want is to be entrenched in the knowledge of her and to wrap yourself inside of her being. And she says, “Yeah, that’s still creepy.” At which point you think perhaps the only rational solution is to dive headfirst through her bedroom window and disappear forever, but then she adds: “I love you too.”

  You don’t fall in love with breasts or legs or a smile—although you notice them too, can’t help noticing them the first time you see her, wearing denim shorts and a white tank top on the roof of a college friend’s apartment during a midsummer party—but you fall in love with something intangible, the hollowness like devastating hunger when she’s gone, the sense of safety she engenders, as if her presence alone will protect you from the terrors of the real world. Still, you’re groping at each other during every private moment, and you know for her it’s not because of an intense physical attraction but because she loves something fundamental about your being. All the famous people she thinks are attractive look distinctly unlike you; they’re powerful and tall and have permanent five o’clock shadows and tan faces and smiles made for billboards. On good days, you think you look a bit like a paler, less fit Paul Newman—it’s the eyes, the hairline, the nose—so you make her watch The Hustler and Hud and The Sting, but she doesn’t see the resemblance and she says he’s not all that special anyway. “I like you much better than him,” she says in such a way that you actually almost believe her. She does not quite look like the famous people you think are attractive, either, although you tell her she looks better than them, and you go out of your way to denigrate the appearances of celebrities who intimidate her, because the truth is, she is actually the most beautiful woman who will ever pay any attention to you and you want her to understand that she doesn’t need to compete with movie people, because in your world movie people don’t really exist.

  You don’t fall in love, like some people do, with the idea of being in love, but rather with her, specifically, and only her. Throughout high school and college, you were an extra in the movies of other people’s lives, never better than the fourth most charismatic person in any group; your role was to be the designated driver and to occasionally deliver a sarcastic one-liner that your friends could later repeat and claim as their own. And yet when you speak, she listens. You begin telling her things you never thought you’d tell anyone, things none of your friends know and probably never cared to know—how, when you were very young, you used to hide inside household appliances, then laughed while hearing the panic in your parents’ voices, although that all stopped when your father caught on to your game and ran the dishwasher with you inside, that’s where that blotchy scar on your forearm comes from; how your grandmother bought you a telescope for your birthday, but you only used it to watch the neighbor girls, twins a few years older than you, spying on them for a solid three years until the day they both left for college; how you used to chew on your toenails when bored, bending your leg right up to your mouth and gnawing; how you once shoplifted seventy dollars worth of beef jerky from a convenience store and then fed the jerky one stick at a time to a neighbor’s dog just to pass the time. The words spill out in torrents, begging to be heard by someone, and every time you think you’re out of secrets, you find more and more and more and continually unload them, and even though you think you’re talking too much, she asks follow-up questions, laughs when she’s supposed to laugh, and says things like that’s interesting and you should be more confident, and you find yourself, over time, slouching less, enunciating more clearly, projecting your voice, charming her friends and co-workers at dinner parties and in bowling alleys during company events. She thinks you’re funny and you think she’s clever and you retreat into conversation with her any time the rest of the world becomes too unwieldy. So you gradually discard your friends, sometimes making requisite appearances at grungy bars to check in with them and rehash embarrassing high school stories while asking questions like what have you guys been up to? so frequently that they begin calling you Sparky, short for SparkNotes, because you’re always seeking summaries and main ideas and character sketches rather than doing the real work of knowing them as people. They all say, “Where the hell you been at?” even though they already know the answer.

  You live with your parents and she lives with her mother, both of you sleeping in your respective childhood bedrooms; post-college, it made the most sense to stay at home and save up to buy a house, rather than renting, and, except for the yawning distance between your home in Hartford, Connecticut, and hers in Philadelphia, this arrangement has been working out fine, even if some nights you don’t feel like reciting the details of the day to your mother over dinner or explaining to her why your En
glish degree hasn’t helped you land a job, and the place is starting to suffocate you now that you’ve met this girl, and your shared love makes the possibilities of the universe seem truly limitless—in contrast to the realities of your current circumstances, which are in every way limiting. You tell your mother you’re probably going to start looking for a place of your own soon, it’s time for this bird to fly. She tells you to stop trying to sound poetic because you’re not.

  Your mother calls your bedroom the Shrine, and you tell her to get off your back, it’s just some pictures and a few cards, no big deal. Your father says, “You’re really into this girl, huh?” and you try to play it cool by shrugging and saying, “Yeah, she’s pretty alright, don’t you like her too?” And he says she seems nice enough, although she’s not around much and he’s beginning to wonder why you’re hiding her. Your father adds, “I know how it feels to have your first girlfriend.” You say she’s not your first, there have been plenty of others, you just haven’t brought them home; this is only about a quarter-truth, in that you have never brought another girl home, and you’ve spoken to many other girls in your life, and in college engaged in oral sex on five nonconsecutive occasions, and anyway, there have been girlfriends here and there, but never anyone serious, just people you took to the movies or accompanied to parties. But you don’t say all of this to your father, because you’re eyeing your laptop screen and scrolling through updates on the statuses of your friends’ lives. Your father stands over you for a few minutes, breathing heavily due to his hypertension and his shallow lungs, and eventually he leaves. You send her a text message asking if you can visit this weekend, and she says sure! With an exclamation point, she says it.

  You don’t fall in love with her because she’s like your mother, or because she’s the kind of woman you’re supposed to marry, but because there is no other choice but to fall in love. She says she feels safe with you, that when you’re together she believes the world is a good and fair place; because you respect her and you make her laugh and you try harder at impressing her than you’ve ever tried at anything. You max out your credit card taking her on a Caribbean cruise to celebrate your nine-month anniversary, even though you know anniversaries, by definition, do not occur monthly, but as long as she commemorates monthly anniversaries, then you will too. Your father claims that a cruise is the ultimate test of a relationship; if you can deal with being stuck together at sea for a full week, then your love will last. Neighbors and friends seem overeager to share with you their own love tests, all oddly specific and perhaps too revealing of their past failures. Your mother says the ultimate test is taking a road trip, which you also do, heading north from Hartford to Maine, and you return with three hundred photos and the trunk dragging under the weight of several cases of maple syrup. A co-worker at the rental car agency tells you the ultimate test is looking through childhood photo albums and still liking each other, and so you arrange an album-viewing night, the pictures only deepening your appreciation of her because even in her least flattering moments she still looks like exactly the person you love. Your elderly neighbor says the real test is living together, and after a year of dating, you tell her you want to buy a house with her.

  She says, “I’m not moving anywhere until I get a ring,” and you say modern marriage is just an expensive scam perpetrated by mendacious vendors, all of whom are expecting handouts in exchange for validating your love via the ornate decoration of pastries or the prompt delivery of calla lilies. You tell her the marriage industry preys on the naïve dreams of girls who have been raised under the delusion that they are all princesses destined for royal weddings, and that a failure to stage the most elaborate party possible will result in the failure of a marriage and therefore the manifestation of a woman’s eternal unhappiness, because they, the vendors and the wholesalers of love, want women to believe they can’t be happy or self-actualized if they’re unmarried. She says she doesn’t care about all that, she wants to be married—married to you, specifically—and would you stop dragging your feet already, you’re twenty-four and it’s time to start growing up, and although she’s right, you’re still not thrilled about the idea of spending thirty thousand dollars you don’t have on a lavish party that you yourself won’t get to enjoy because you’ll be too busy attending to everyone else’s needs to even eat your own cake. But a few weeks later, there’s the proposal—down on your knee in Rittenhouse Square in Philly, a trite and unimaginative proposal, probably there have been fifteen thousand proposals made in the same spot, and you apologize later for the triteness of the proposal, but you truly couldn’t think of any other proposal that wasn’t prohibitively expensive, and still now, there’s the regret for not doing it right, and not giving her the sweet and memorable proposal story to tell all of her marriage-obsessed friends when they ask her to re-create the moment for them.

  And then the next year whirs past with planning and house buying and congratulations and gifts and party after party after party and the wedding and heartfelt declarations of love for each other on a Pocono mountaintop, where you go for your honeymoon because the wedding and the new home have wiped out your savings, but you’ll have a real honeymoon soon, as long as you’re responsible and you save.

  You promise her someday you’ll be able to afford a make-up honeymoon, you will get rich and embark on a perpetual vacation, and you’ll be like people in the movies, the way your lives will always play out in front of the most remarkable backdrops. You insist you’ll both be very worldly, the type of people who can say, with authority, you don’t want to go to Belize in May, or it’s remarkable how different Irish cuisine is from Scottish or Doha was pleasant but I very much preferred Dubai. She says she doesn’t need all that, but you know that’s not true, and you see the wistful look in her eye when she watches travel programs on cable, the way she relishes nitpicking and insulting the reality TV families who get to experience the things she cannot.

  You open a joint bank account and take out exorbitant life insurance policies, and you buy one car, to share, and a king-size bed because she thrashes in her sleep, and get a new roof installed, and talk about building a fireplace and installing laminate floors in the bedrooms, and start repainting the kitchen, and host potluck dinners and cocktail parties for her friends and family. Nights you spend naming places you’ll visit, the landmarks you will see and the memories you will create, the photo albums you will fill so you can circulate them among envious friends and family and later pass them on to your children and grandchildren. She drafts a spreadsheet with potential dates and costs and locations, and you notify your families not to schedule anything for June 2020, because you’ll be on the Trans-Siberian railroad then, but July that year will be fine. You buy new luggage and new wardrobes. You get passports, international drivers’ licenses, and translation dictionaries. You research the relative strength of foreign currencies. Life becomes an obsession of planning and consolidation. You’re clipping coupons and studying travel restrictions, and she’s working extra hours, and on exhausted miserable nights when she can barely open her eyes because of the migraine that keeps kicking her in the head, you tell her I know you’re unhappy now, but it will all be worth it later, because you’re laying the groundwork for a lifetime of happiness, but none of that matters anymore because she’s dead and she’s dead and she’s dead and she’s dead and she’s dead and she’s never coming back.

  TWO

  On Monday Kaitlyn Cady went for a five-mile run, on Tuesday night she experienced severe stomach pains, by Wednesday morning she was dead, on Thursday she was burned down to ashes and poured into a stainless steel cube, and on Friday she was delivered by a stranger to her husband, Hunter.

  To describe her death as sudden is to reduce it to cliché, to not do justice to the swiftness with which she stopped existing. Suddenness refers to the honking of a car horn, or the dropping of a dish on ceramic tile, or the crack of lightning in a fast-moving summer storm. It does not, should not, refer to people dying,
and yet that’s the word everyone keeps saying to Hunter. They pat him on the shoulder and shake their heads earnestly and say damn, it was so sudden. They blow their noses and they squeeze his hand and they say I can’t believe how sudden it was. They hug him, tears wet against his chest, and they say it’s so sudden; I feel like I was just talking to her yesterday.

  ON THE DRIVE TO the hospital that Tuesday night, he laughed. Made an ill-advised joke about menstrual cramps. Thought it would lighten the mood, make her feel better. She did not laugh, and so he turned up the radio and pretended he’d never said anything.

  IN THE LAST MOMENTS, there were two people in the room besides Hunter and Kait: a tech fiddling with a malfunctioning IV pump, and a young resident palpating Kait’s abdomen, asking if she was pregnant, if she had any food allergies, if she still had her appendix, and so on. While the doctor continued poking at her, Kait reached out to grab Hunter’s hand and squeeze. It wasn’t until this moment—feeling the military force of her grip, the strange coldness of her palms, the palpable fear—that he realized quite how serious this situation was. He gave her his other hand and let her squeeze, wanted her to crush all the tiny bones in his hands so he could absorb the pain for her. The resident said she wanted to talk to the gastroenterologist, but in the meantime they should run some tests. She told Hunter to go out and get something to eat because the tests would probably take a couple hours. And even though he was beginning to worry that this would end in some kind of surgery, Hunter believed her when she said, “We’ll have her back to you soon.” He didn’t once think that this would be their last moment together. He barely thought at all. He leaned down and kissed Kait on the forehead and told her he would be waiting for her when she got back. “I don’t want to go,” she said, still squeezing his hand. A minute later, they were wheeling her away. Hunter followed her into the hall and watched her pass through the double doors and then get swallowed by the elevator and then digested by the building.