The Good Widow

“You can be so naive, Jacks,” my mom said, like she felt sorry for me.

Back then, her skepticism made me angry. It even drove an invisible wedge between us that we never acknowledged. But when the police told me James had been in Maui, the first person I thought of was my mom. And how she was right. I had been naive. But not anymore. Now I finally know the man I married. Or I’m getting to know him, anyway.

“It’s complicated why I don’t want to talk to my mom,” I finally say to Nick. “Have you ever had a Blue Hawaiian drink?” I ask, and point to one on the table next to us, trying to change the subject.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?” he says.

“The Blue Hawaiian?” I ask, and smile. Then I snort. Again. The floodgates have been opened.

“No, silly.” He laughs, and his eyes soften. “Tell me about your mom.”

I start to explain that I’d rather not, but there’s something about how he’s looking at me. Those eyes again. He wants to know. Not just to pass time. He wants to understand more about me. About what makes me tick. And he doesn’t mind if I snort while telling him. I blurt out everything—our quick engagement, my mom’s obsession with normalcy, my fear that she was right. That I’m not sure I can ever trust my gut again. How much that scares me. “I can’t believe I just told you all that,” I say when I finish.

“I’m glad you did.”

“Me too. I feel better.” I think about how easy it is to talk to Nick, how I never feel judged by him. James had an arrogance about him. It was subtle. But I picked up on it a lot. Like how he sounded so condescending when he’d say something like, Oh, is that what you decided to do, like he was thinking he would have made a better choice—the right choice. During one of our particularly bad fights, I told him he had a superiority complex. He laughed and told me I was delusional.

Nick and I listen to the band, eat our food, and sip our cocktails, a comfortable silence between us. “Let’s get a drink at the bar,” Nick suggests when we’ve finished our dinner.

“I’m going to buy their CD first.” I start for the stage.

“That’s those Blue Hawaiians talking,” he calls after me. “You’ll never listen to it.”

“Maybe not.” I think of the CD James and Dylan purchased for their road to Hana drive as I hand the singer a ten-dollar bill. Then again, maybe I will listen to it.

Nick orders two POGs, this time with vodka, and I think about our day. We drove to Lahaina and had giant cinnamon rolls at Longhi’s. We shopped for silly souvenirs, and we got ice cream cones while walking around Whalers Village. We mused at the number of pay phones we’d spotted around the island. We even took a selfie with one, laughing about how we were old enough to remember them. For several hours, I pretended to be a real tourist on vacation, forcing any thoughts of why I was actually here from my mind.

“Hello? You’re awfully quiet over there.”

“I think I’m drunk.”

“That means we’re doing our job right,” the bartender says as he sets our drinks down, the skin around his green eyes crinkling, his stubble-covered chin reminding me of James’s. I look away, and Nick clinks his glass against mine.

“To finding out more about Dylan and James.”

“Did you just say Dylan and James?”

“Yes,” we say in unison.

“That’s weird. Because I met a Dylan and James a couple months ago. I’m sure they aren’t the same people, but Dylan is just one of those names that stands out to me because I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan.”

“Was she in her twenties? Blonde? Big blue eyes?”

The bartender nods. “And he was a good-looking guy. Dark hair, in sales?”

We nod.

“How is she?” the bartender asks with what seems to be a genuine concern.

I keep quiet because obviously I can’t say dead. And I realize the news of their accident must not have caught the attention of many people. That saddens me for a moment. I wonder what the first bartender we talked to saw in the paper. A paragraph? A couple of sentences? A few words? Was that all they got? All they deserved?

“Why do you ask?” Nick says.

Nick told me that we should always deflect when asked a question we can’t answer, but I’m not quick enough on my feet to do that.

“She was feeling pretty sick when she was here. Did she find out yet?” Our matching blank stares must trigger something with the bartender. “Oh, shit. You didn’t know?”

My head gets heavy, and I instinctively grip the edge of my stool for support, hoping that I’ve misunderstood him.

I watch a waitress deliver a hamburger with bright-orange melted cheese slipping out of the bun to a man sitting across the bar; I feel the vibration of a buzzer, then see its lights shining bright red as a young couple giddily jumps up to claim their table. Then two women laugh and proclaim their luck as they slide into the stools that were just abandoned.

“What are you saying? Did she tell you she was—” Nick stops, and out of the corner of my eye, I see his shoulders slump.

Please, God, don’t let the bartender say the word.

I can’t look at Nick. I’m afraid he’ll confirm my fears.

The bartender leans in, oblivious. “Pregnant,” he says easily, oblivious to the impact of his words.

Nick’s head moves slowly up and down, and my insides are twisting so tight I can barely breathe.

“You didn’t hear this from me, okay? But when her husband got up to use the bathroom, she told me the smell of the shrimp he ordered was making her sick. So of course, I asked what was up with that. Like were they bad? Because we make an amazing shrimp cocktail here!” He waves his arm covered in hemp bracelets behind him, where the kitchen presumably is.

I nod to encourage him to keep going, because I have to hear every word of what he has to say. If I don’t, I know I’ll talk myself out of believing it. And as much as it hurts—as in, feels like someone is punching me in the stomach over and over again—these are things I need to hear. I came here for the truth, no matter how much it might tear me apart.

“She tells me she’d been feeling sick to her stomach and had already made up enough excuses for why she’d been so nauseated. I remember thinking that was weird. That she couldn’t tell her husband what was up, but I didn’t say that. You know, a bartender’s job is to listen. So I quickly pulled the shrimp cocktail away, offering to replace it with something else. Her big eyes filled with tears when I did that, which totally tripped me out. I was like, what is going on with this chick? Then she asked me where the nearest drugstore was, and I was like, whoa, now I know.”

“You think she wanted to get some Tums?” I ask, although I’m quite sure that’s not what Dylan wanted.

“Nah, dude. You can buy those next door at the gift shop. Which is what I told her. That’s when she told me she was worried she might be pregnant. But then her dude came back, and she acted like nothing had happened. It was a trip.”

“My God,” Nick says.

I watch the man across the bar eat a bite of his cheeseburger, lick his fingertips, and take a long drink of his beer. I hear the bleached-blonde woman with the worn face snarkily remark from the stool beside me that there are cuter men at Duke’s. I look up, and our bartender has moved on to take someone’s order. As if he hasn’t just wrecked me.

But really, how could he know that I couldn’t give my husband a child, so he found someone who could? That the wound inside of me has never had a chance to heal because it has been ripped open again and again with each negative pregnancy test, with every fight between James and me, and now with the words, she might be pregnant? On the outside, I give nothing away. But inside I scream and I cry and I pound my fists. Like the baby I could never give him.

The bartender walks back over to us and picks up right where he left off. “So crazy, right? But we hear it all, man,” he says, then turns to make a drink, still having no idea of the bomb he’s just dropped on us.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


JACKS—AFTER

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