The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating Read Online Free PDF

from his death. Still, that was no reason to be fleeced. He would have appreciated her pragmatism.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “The cheapest coffin. Is there something on sale?”
    “It’s a casket, Mrs. Byrne. And we don’t typically run sales, no.” Carter was flustered.
    “Then I’d like the cheapest casket.” They were burning it, after all.
    “We have this.” Carter took a single-sheet flyer out of his binder. The picture was of a light brown box. It looked like cardboard.
    “Well,” she reconsidered, “maybe the second cheapest.”
    As he replaced the flyer and opened the binder to another page, she followed his squared-off fingers to the girth of his wrist, the rakish charm of his platinum watch. Farther up, she could see a muscular definition in his chest and arms that was not well hidden beneath his suit. He had very defined elbows, too, like Charlie’s. Claire could see it in the way he carried them; they refused to be overlooked. The first sex she’d had with Charlie, his left elbow had lodged in her rib for the entire twenty minutes. So as not to dwell on it, Claire had made herself count. First in French to soixante-dix , and then in Italian, backward from ottanta , and in this way she’d gotten through. Now here were Charlie’s dead elbows, resurrected in Carter’s suit.
    “Mrs. Byrne? Are you all right?”
    “Yes.” Claire realized she’d been moving her lips, she’d been counting. She wondered how funeral directors were taught to handle an inappropriate advance. “Yes,” she said. “How long have you been doing this?”
    “This?” Carter asked.
    “This,” Claire said, gesturing across the room. “Arranging dead people.”
    He stood perfectly straight. No slouch, no swagger—grief was serious work.
    “I’ve been working in the end-of-life industry for six years.”
    “I never see women in a funeral home. Are there women?” she said.
    Carter stiffened, if that were possible.
    “The conferences must be dull,” Claire added.
    He took a somber look at her. Claire looked somberly back. He cleared his throat. “I know this is hard,” he said “Would you like to sit down?”
    There was a small, green-patterned sofa behind them, a pattern remarkably similar, Claire thought, to Margaret Grabel’s kitchen floor. It was positioned in front of a low table. A Bible—King James—rested on the tabletop. Carter motioned her toward the furniture with his whole arm, a gentle but solid suggestion: There. Or how about over there. No question marks. It reassured her. That was something she had liked about her marriage, the assurance. Everything was always taken care of.
    Charlie had screwed around from the beginning; he considered it research. Though he was discreet, for her benefit—he didn’t bring his work home, for instance—it was hardly a secret. And after a time, it hardly mattered. Claire felt loyalty and fondness for her husband, but she wouldn’t exactly call it love. Whatever she once might have felt for him had dulled. She had made a botched adulterous attempt of her own some time back, with one of the waiters from Zinc, their neighborhood restaurant. Armando. God, if Charlie had known. Armando was a kid, just twenty-four, and a painter—Italian, of course. Although sex hadn’t technically occurred, she counted it because she’d planned for it to. She’d had the intention of sex.
    She wanted Armando in her story. She wanted her lipstick smeared, her hair disarrayed, her countenance wanton in the middle of afternoons. She wanted to feel passion. So she’d gone to his apartment-slash-studio one day, because he’d asked. But when Armando set down his brush on the stained and spattered easel—the colors of women who’d posed here before, Claire thought—she saw him moving in. She stayed for one fumbled kiss, then apologized, politely, and left.
    Her husband, throughout both his career and their marriage, had insisted that there could be love or sex between people, but never