Unremarried Widow (16 page)

I did make one concession: I moved out of my mother's house. I felt like I needed to be tough there, the way she had acted after my father died, and my grief seemed like evidence of some weakness I carried in me. It was too much to make it through the teeth-gritting days without
weeping. I couldn't make it through the after-work hours too. I needed a place to be alone, to let my grief spool out, to unstopper myself, so I rented a house in the east part of town, a run-down neighborhood that felt reassuringly familiar. The house was yellow with purple trim, and it had laminate floors, a large backyard, and neighbors who didn't know me. There I could let myself disappear day by day until one day, if I was lucky, I would disappear into nothing.

Soon after I returned to
work, the farm manager came to my office but didn't step in. He knocked gently on the open door, took off his hat, and worked the brim between his fingers. I looked up from my desk at his ruddy face and rough hands.

“I haven't seen you since—” he said.

He looked at the empty space between us for a time, and when he raised his eyes to mine, it was my turn to look down. I stared at the metal grommets on his work boots and the potting soil caked to the toes.

“I just wanted to acknowledge it,” he said, looking at the top of my head because I could not meet his eyes. “I wanted to acknowledge your husband's death.”

I stared at the frayed cuffs of his jeans and looked briefly into his face. I wanted to thank him but I could not speak. He nodded once, a quick jerk of the chin, and then stepped out of the doorway and was gone. I sat at my desk until I could stand to shut the office door.

People kept giving me space, all of us hoping my grief had a half-life, but I didn't need space. I needed people to say Miles's name out loud. I needed them not to flinch when I said it. I needed them to ask about him. Weren't they curious about the color of his eyes? I needed them to acknowledge not just that he had died but that he had lived.
That he had lived and loved me and for a space of time we were whole.

But I am lying. Even now I struggle to tell the truth of what I needed.

I needed Miles.

I looked at my scattered desk—the highlighters, paper clips, pens, loose change and business card holders, a mug half-filled with tea—and I swept it all aside so that I might lay my head down and weep for the things I needed and could not have.

I mostly cried like that,
behind closed doors. To anyone who asked—anyone who remarked on my strength or bravery or the fact that they couldn't tell anything had happened—I liked to say I only grieved on Tuesdays. That was when the local hospice held its grief group meeting, where I made my way to sit with other mourners in perpetual shiva. We were mostly women and I was the youngest by two decades. The other widows had lost their husbands to cancer or stroke or heart attacks—old men's diseases. Some died from suicide or vehicle crashes. We were unalike in most ways and alike in the only one that mattered.

On my first night with the group I hesitated on the sidewalk for a long while before opening the door and crossing the threshold. On the back counter, coffee brewed beside a scattering of pink sugar packets, and a stack of name tags sat beside a red Magic Marker. I looked around the room. Chairs shouldered against one another in a circle, and someone had placed boxes of tissue on the outskirts of the ring; I imagined they would become a commodity as the night wore on. I stuck my name to my chest and reluctantly took a seat in a spot with a good view of the door; that way I wouldn't have to cut through the center of the circle if I decided midway through that the grief group was not for me. The chairs slowly filled, and not long after I sat down the counselor, Richard, opened the meeting.

“How's everyone feeling this week?” he said.

A woman with a black dome of hair and gold-rimmed glasses twisted a bracelet on her wrist. Her lacquered nails glinted in the hard light. I read her name tag.
Bea.
Across the circle, a small woman with dark hair and a delicate frame clutched a tissue.
Linda.
They each spoke about loneliness, which stemmed from aloneness, about sitting down to dinner at a table set for one. I kept my arms crossed over my chest and my eyes fixed on a spot in the carpet just in front of my feet. I refused to look at anyone, just soaked up the sadness in the room. I let their grief draw close to mine until, near the end of the session, Richard turned to me.

“Would you like to say anything?” he asked.

I had my eyes fixed on the ground and I felt more than saw the circle's attention as everyone waited to hear what I would say. I knew—as they knew—that I did not belong there. What had claimed their husbands could not have been what had claimed mine. I opened my mouth but the words caught in my throat.

Finally I managed, “My husband was killed in Iraq.”

A woman across the circle covered her mouth with her hand. Someone took in a sharp breath.

“How did it happen?” someone asked.

“A helicopter crash,” I said.

I raised my eyes to the people gathered around the circle and they looked back at me with such gentleness and compassion that I lowered my head to my hands and cried with relief.

The literature on mourning agrees
that grief can be exhausting. Here's what's exhausting: holding yourself steady. I had to steady myself the way a person steadies a broken arm, to keep from knocking into the
hurt. And still, despite my best efforts, I often bumped against the pain.

In my office one afternoon I looked up from the newsletter I had been editing to see Holly, the receptionist, standing in my doorway.

“Want to go to the deli for lunch?” she said.

“I don't know.” I looked at the pile of work on my desk. “I brought a sandwich.”

“Come on,” Holly said. “It's Friday.”

I flicked my eyes to the half-finished letter on my computer, to the square of blue sky through the window beside my desk, to Holly with one hand on her hip.

She smiled. “I'll drive.”

I pushed back my chair. “I didn't want to eat that sandwich anyway.”

The deli was a tiny sweaty place that served homemade iced tea and fried bologna. Steam from the griddle hazed the dining room, and I had to use a pile of napkins to soak up the grease from my lunch. Holly and I talked office gossip and eyed the boys with the big pickups out front. When we were done eating, Holly waited outside while I paid the check. The wife of the couple who had bought the deli a few years back worked the register. She was young and pretty, with a big open smile. She knew most of us from the farm, by face if not by name, and she chatted with me as I handed her my credit card.

“What's this symbol here?” She tapped the front of the card with her finger. “I see a lot of different types but I've never seen this one.”

The card came from my bank, a bank for military service members and their families.

“It's for the Army,” I said.

The woman ran the card through the machine and handed it across the counter.

“Are you in the military?”

“No,” I said, and because it needed an explanation—because she
was waiting for an answer with her smiling face—I said, “My husband was.”

The receipt made a clicking sound as it ticked out of the machine and the woman tore off the paper and handed it to me with a pen.

“Did he have to go overseas?” she said.

I hurriedly signed the receipt. She may not have known where the conversation was headed, but I did. I knew where we would both end up.

“He did,” I said without meeting her eyes. “He went to Iraq.”

She handed me a copy of the receipt and I stared at the toothpick jar on the counter and the pennies in a Styrofoam cup by the register.

“When did he get home?”

I stood stiffly, conscious of the people in line behind me. What could I say? There was only the truth.

“He didn't come home.”

There was a moment, a shared few seconds, when the woman and I looked at each other and I watched my meaning shadow her face. I felt my cheeks flush and the tip of my nose go red like it does when I'm about to cry and the sadness that flowed like blood beneath my skin threatened to spill out.

“I'm sorry,” the woman said.

I ducked my head and turned to the door before I could bleed all over her floor.

“Me too.”

But I didn't always tell
the truth.

In the front yard of a foreclosed home, I watched people crawl over the property, all of us looking for a deal. What had we learned from the market collapse? Not a damned thing. A man with a two-day beard and dirty clothes peered through the dusty windows.

“You an investor?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said, and it was hard not to laugh at the absurdity of it.

Not that it mattered. He called himself an investor too.

“What's your husband do?”

Did I hesitate? Would it sound better if I said I did, that the lie didn't slip from my mouth like a fish through water?

“He's a teacher,” I said, “and he coaches football.”

The man nodded and wiped his dusty hands on his jeans. He jumped down from the porch and moved off through the ferns and left me standing there with the lie hot on my tongue, feeling so right I wanted it to stay there forever.

I went back to the
hospice group every week. The conversation would pass around the circle, each woman offering up some bit of truth she'd been saving all week, and I found that I started doing that: putting away a morsel to share. I would chance on some memory of Miles and I'd sculpt my story throughout the week, knowing it would be the one time I'd let myself speak about him.

“Tonight I'd like to talk about needs,” Richard said one evening.

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead and I hunched inside my sweater. Elsewhere in the hospice building, down corridors I never saw, people were dying. Their relatives stood close, not fully understanding that soon they'd be like us. Some of them would make their way to the Tuesday night meetings and we'd fold them in, as I had been folded in.

“What do you need right now?” Richard continued. “Take a moment. Look inside yourself. What is it that your body or your mind or your heart needs?”

There was a pause as we considered. We were all widows that
night—the widowers rarely came for more than two or three sessions. “Looking for dates,” Linda would say.

“How about you, Artis?” I looked up from the piece of carpet I had been examining. “What do you need?”

I considered my response for a moment and then I offered the tidbit I'd been keeping all week.

“There was this time Miles and I went tubing behind John's boat,” I said. “You know, where they pull you?”

My voice was rough and I had to clear my throat. The other women nodded encouragement.

“Miles and I were facing each other in the tube and the boat was pulling us hard. We hit a wave and my head snapped forward and my mouth smashed into the top of Miles's head.”

I twisted a tissue between my hands as I talked, working it back and forth with my fingers.

“I touched my face and there was blood all over my hand. I thought I'd lost my front teeth. I looked at Miles and I could tell from his face that I looked pretty bad. I asked him, I said, ‘Am I okay?' And I think he was scared because there was a lot of blood coming out of my mouth but he said, ‘Yeah, babe. You're okay.' ”

They were listening, the other women, Richard. I kept working the Kleenex between my hands.

“That's what I need,” I said. I looked up into their faces. “I need someone to tell me it's going to be okay. Even if it looks like it won't.”

The sun had set by
the time Jimmy Hyde pulled into my driveway, and when I went to greet him, all I could see was his silhouette in the dark. It was better that way. Easier to negotiate the space between us.

“Let me grab something out of the trunk,” he said.

He stepped around to the back of the Jeep and lugged a rectangular cardboard box out of the rear compartment.

“What's that?” I asked.

“You'll see.”

He walked past me, through the carport and into the backyard.

“Can I get a light out here?”

I flipped the switch to the twin bulbs overhead and he smiled at me in the suddenly bright light. He looked the same as the last time I had seen him at Fort Rucker.

“I bought you a grill,” he said. “Had to run by Walmart to pick it up. That's what took so long getting here.”

“You bought me a grill?”

“You said you wanted me to cook kebabs.”

I laughed. I had. Jimmy, who was also deployed, had been one of the few soldiers to contact me after the notification and the only one to keep messaging me after the others had stopped. I was in the habit of writing Miles, as I was in the habit of loving him, and Jimmy's e-mails slid easily into the space created by Miles's absence. But now I wondered what I implied in those messages. Did I suggest that if Jimmy came for a visit, there might be more than friendship between us? Did I hint at romantic possibilities? Did I flirt? I must have. Because a subtext beat beneath our every action, a thrumming reminder of a promise I seemed to have made. I'd like to tell you I didn't know what I was doing, that I was somehow innocent in all this. But I was not. God help me, I wanted Jimmy there—and not just for dinner. I wanted his hot breath in my ear. I wanted his rough hands on me. I wanted to close my eyes and let myself imagine this was another R & R, another long-anticipated return.

I watched Jimmy assemble the grill from the back step of the porch. We were almost the same age and nearly the same height. He was a little older, a little taller, built slim but broad through the shoulders, self-assured and cocky in a way I am not. I disappeared into the house
to put on a pot of yellow rice, the kind you buy at the grocery store in gold foil packets, and I stood at the stove and stirred while the sound of tinkering floated in through the open kitchen door. After a time I covered the pot with a metal lid and stepped outside to check Jimmy's progress. The grill stood upright—finished. I handed Jimmy a box of matches and he laid one to the pyramid of charcoal briquettes he had stacked. The flame caught and crept upward, spreading from black square to black square, until the entire pile glowed. I carried out a tray of skewered beef and he arranged the kebabs on the grill. While Jimmy cooked, I went back into the house to the bathroom off my room. I looked at my face in the mirror. My nose was red from the cold and my eyes seemed smaller somehow. My face looked all wrong; I had become unrecognizable to myself.