Ana laughs. “I’ve never actually seen one in person,” she replies.
I step out of the door and into the hallway. When I do, I slip on the heel of my shoe and my ankle gives in. I fall flat on my ass. There is a moment when Ana stares at me not knowing what to do. She doesn’t know if I’m going to laugh or cry. I think she’s petrified that I will cry because this is certainly something to cry about, but I don’t want to cry right now. As I look back at her, I can feel the laugh starting in my belly. I can feel it ripple through my body and then, here it is. It overtakes me.
“Oh God,” I say through tears and sharp breaths. “Oh!”
Ana starts laughing loudly now too. “BAHHAHAHHHAHAHA!” she cackles. She throws herself on the floor next to me. “I don’t know why,” she says and breathes in sharply. “I don’t know why that was so funny.”
“Oh, but it was,” I say as I laugh with her. I think if she wasn’t here, I would have been able to stop laughing sooner, but hearing her laugh makes me laugh. My laugh grows wild and unpredictable. It grows loud and free. She is wiping her eyes and gaining her composure, but as she looks me in the eye she loses it again. When I finally get ahold of myself, I’m light-headed.
“Oooh,” I say, trying to cool down. It feels so good. I can feel it in my abdomen and my back. Then I get a glimpse of myself in the mirror again and I remember why I’m here. Why I’m in the middle of the floor on a Friday afternoon dressed in black. Ben is gone. And I hate myself for laughing. I hate myself for forgetting, even for ten seconds, the man I have lost.
Ana can tell the mood has shifted; the vacation from our misery has ended and I, once again, need to be maintained. She gets up off the floor first, dusting her ass off, and gives me a hand. I rise awkwardly, flashing my underwear at her while trying to stand up like a lady. No, like a lady isn’t enough. Like a widow. Widows require even more poise. Widows don’t accidentally flash their underwear at anyone.
It doesn’t get much shittier than this.
It’s hot in the morning when Ana and I leave Los Angeles. It feels even hotter in Orange County. It feels stickier, sweatier, more terrible in every way. Southern California is always warmer than the rest of the country, and it’s supposed to be less humid. But on this June morning, it’s hot as hell and I’m dressed in all black.
We weren’t late arriving here, but we weren’t early. We weren’t the type of early that you imagine the wife of the deceased to be. Susan stares at me as I make my way graveside. She was probably a full forty-five minutes early. What I want to tell her is that we aren’t early because I almost didn’t come, because I refused to get into the car. Because I threw myself on my own front lawn and told Ana that I honestly believed that if I went to his funeral, Ben would never come back. I told her, black mascara running down my face, that I wanted to stay there and wait. “I can’t give up on him,” I said to her, as if attending his funeral would be a betrayal and not a commemoration.
The only reason we were on time is that Ana picked me up off the ground, looked me in the eyes, and said to me, “He’s never coming back. Whether you go or you don’t go. So get in the car, because this is the last thing you can do with him.”