Widowish: A Memoir(39)

“Your phone,” Sophie said.

“Oh, maybe it’s that Allison,” I said looking at the clock. “It’s late.”

“It’s Marcos!” she said.

“What?” My stomach jumped the slightest bit. My hands were full so I asked her, “What does it say?”

“Hi, it’s Marcos. This is my number. Please let me know a good time to come by. I’m happy to help. Smiles.” Sophie looked up at me. “Smiles?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“What is he helping with?” It took me a minute to answer as my mind wandered. Why was Marcos texting me? He must have had my number from when he taught Sophie.

“Mom!” Sophie said.

“You know how everyone is always asking to help us? I told him about the guitars and stuff. He’s going to help me sort out what to do with all of it,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Cool.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

Sophie let me kiss the top of her head. I drained the pasta. I added the sauce. Got the parmesan cheese. I put down two bowls. Two forks. Two napkins.

Sophie got us both some water. Although I may have had wine.

I sat down at the counter.

“Come eat, Smoosh.”

Sophie sat next to me.

We had a counter in the kitchen that the three of us usually sat at and had all of our meals on. It was large but we only had two barstools for it. One of us always sat on a smaller stool or stood. We hadn’t had to pull over the small stool since Joel died. I thought that with every meal.

So Sophie and I sat in the kitchen, eating pasta late on a Friday night. The dogs were in their beds. The house was quiet.

I picked up my phone to look at Marcos’s text. Just seeing his name made me smile a little. I asked for help and here he was, offering it.

Smiles, he wrote. Was that the point?

If so, it was working.





FOURTEEN

Easy

Are you going to start crying again?” Allison asked as I sipped my cappuccino. I nodded yes as I reached for my napkin to dab my eyes.

“I get it,” she said, and then took a bite of her omelet.

This was our first meeting. The Meeting of The Widows. We had made a plan via text and here we were, a month after she first reached out and left me a message. Allison and I recognized each other from the neighborhood and hugged upon saying hello.

“I have a feeling that our husbands are also meeting for the first time. Like they’re with us. Or at least watching us.”

“You think so?” Allison said.

I liked this Allison Frank. She had an easy smile and warm brown eyes and never stopped talking. She told me about Brad, her husband who had died unexpectedly three years ago. It looked like he dropped dead of a heart attack, but an autopsy revealed it was amyloidosis—a disorder where abnormal proteins in your blood can cause life-threatening organ failure. Brad sounded like someone with a great sense of humor. I’m sure Joel and I would have loved him. She told me about her twin teenage daughters, whom I couldn’t wait to introduce to Sophie. She told me about her connection to our temple and rabbi. She named some other youngish widows and widowers in the neighborhood. But she also told me about the kind of music she liked and what books and movies she recently enjoyed. She told me about her recent travels and where she grew up in Florida, which, coincidentally, is where my grandmother used to live. She told me about cousins of hers who had come to town, and all of the places she took them. She knew a lot about a lot of things. She was a little rough around the edges, extremely down-to-earth, and I felt that even if we didn’t have widowhood and “only” parenting in common, we would be friends.

She seemed to have a full life. She had a lot of friends and always had plans. She had figured out how to make a life without her husband.

“I’m open to meeting someone; it just hasn’t happened yet.”

“I still feel married to Joel,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But I doubt he wants you to be alone.”

I nodded. Tears started to flow again.

“I don’t know how to be with someone who’s not him,” I admitted.

“You’ll have to figure that out, I guess,” she said.

“So listen,” she said as we were about to leave. “When Brad died, another young widow reached out to me, and it helped. Which is why I reached out to you. So now maybe if you hear of someone whose spouse dies, you’ll reach out to them. It’s like a little widow hotline.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready for that,” I said. “It took me weeks just to call you back.”

“Well, maybe one day you’ll feel differently. Or we’ll do it together.”

“Like a widow club or something?” I said, shaking my head. “It’s so sad, it’s funny.”

I pictured a bat signal in the sky, only it was a sad face emoji, or a skull and crossbones, that would let us know that someone had died and left someone else behind.

“Widows to the rescue!” I said.

“Well,” Allison said, smiling, “it’s really hard in the beginning. It’s nice to talk to someone who has been there.”

Friends who had encouraged me to return Allison’s call were right. It did help sitting down and talking with another youngish widow. I liked hearing about her daughters, and I liked hearing about her openness to dating. It had crossed my mind, too, but then as soon as I’d have the thought, Joel would pop into my mind, and I simply couldn’t imagine it.