The Widower’s Wife
by Jayge Carr
Illustration by John Stevens
Men are fools. Eve probably said it first, within five minutes of meeting Adam. No. Five seconds. Oddly though, it’s the guys who normally never put a foot wrong who drop the deepest into smelly doodoo when they fall.
Could he have? Been that stupefyingly stupid?
I was aaaaalmost sure. He had.
The “he,” my widower, who still had to force himself to look at me, sat eating calmly in his usual place, the head of the family table.
Randy, one of the half orphans, except I couldn’t stop thinking of him as my older son, shoveled food into his mouth with the singleminded devotion of a boy dragged out of Andromeda’s maze just as he was about to find the treasure and rescue the princess, racking up a record score, and was impatient to get back and do so.
Link, the youngest half orphan, munched loudly while staring at the stranger across the table. As I was, more covertly.
The stranger. Could he really be… I just couldn’t believe my supposedly intelligent widower could be that infuriatingly brain dead.
My ex-daughter Lizzie, the middle half orphan, couldn’t decide whom to glare at, the stranger… or me. So far, she was dividing her rancor. Though I, the known evil, was getting the larger share.
I supposed that was only fair, from her point of view After all, I killed her mother and made her father a widower.
Right. Yes. Evil, cruel me. If I had done exactly that, I wouldn’t be paying a higher price.
I only wanted not to die. But maybe death would have been kinder.
Legally dead. Worse, to my family. My officially ex-family.
The stranger kept trying to look at me without looking at me. That was what had triggered my suspicions off in the first place. That knowledge, that… recognition. Yes. Recognition.
I knew he wasn’t a reporter. Court (Harcourt Randolph Winthrop, my widower) would have killed him, or died trying, to protect the sanctity of his home.
Scratch reporter.
Lawyer or law official? Court knew the risks as well as I did. Scratch law anything.
We had been all over the media when it happened. But then the attention mostly died away; fifteen seconds of fame, then oblivion. Yet there was knowledge in the man’s soft brown eyes. Knowledge and recognition. Personal recognition.
I was becoming more and more certain. Court, my beloved, foolish widower, had brought my other widower home to dinner. The two men ate and talked amiably. I mentally checked through the pantry’s contents for rat poison.
I was keeping a weather, i.e., mother’s gimlet eye, on all three children. Waiting for the inevitable. Court, the ultra conservative, had long ago insisted that we eat the old fashioned way, no portables, consoles, etc. brought to at least dinner. The dining room table itself, polished satin pseudo-oak, had no built-ins. No distractions. Leading to trouble.
Link started it. “Hey, Mr. Adamson, did you know your eyes are red?”
They were. Like someone who had wept a long time. Or who rubbed his eyes constantly, perhaps because he wanted to cry and couldn’t.
“Are they?” Without thinking he reached up and confirmed my diagnosis. With a sick smile to Link, he added, “Guess that’s because of my work. I spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen.” A depreciating half grin. “I design computer games.”
Lizzie shot him her patented, I-hate-computer-games glare, but Randy focused on him a la instant. “Jason’s Lair?” His current favorite.
“ ’Fraid not, son.” Harley Adamson struck me as a grown man who didn’t have children around much, a little unsure how to talk to them. Now he favored Randy with a nod. “I do math and English games schools use.”
He couldn’t have lost their interest faster. Even today, with the computerized half-at-home, wide range of private and public education, the dread word “schools” could throw a blight on any group of children.
“I did the Heroes and Villains Concerts math series,” he added, almost apologetically.
Link’s face screwed up. “But I liked that one,” he burst out. He looked ready to cry. “You’re not supposed to like school.”
“Did you learn from it?” Harley Adamson was suddenly professional.
Link stuck out his lower lip. “No. Dint.”
Harley shook his head. “Guess I’ll have to work more on it. Maybe if I have the Villains kidnap a pretty girl to sing for them, that would improve their numbers and make the Heroes lose audience. If they lost enough, their percent’d be lowered, too. Might make it difficult for them to fund the Green Team’s environmental crusade, though.”
“Lower percent and lower gates?” Link looked disgusted. “How can you do that to them!”
“Maybe if they held more concerts, that would make up for the loss?” Harley said, all innocence.
“Dumb.” Link sniffed. “If you lower their 5 percent gate share even a percent, they have to do—” He stopped and calculated, “—25 percent more concerts to make the same take, without taking into account lower gates at each concert.”
“Link, you fool,” Lizzie said with a sneer. “He’s made you help him with the stupid program.”
Harley looked at her. “No,” he said honestly. “But I wanted to see just what he’d learned about fractions and percents.”
Mentally, I rolled eyes skyward. Harley was now zero for three. Link, for making him show himself a liar. Lizzie, because she was looking for a reason and embarrassing Link was better than none. Randy, for admitting he worked on “fake” games.
At which point Harley managed a home run. “I have a program I was working on. I had to… stop, for a while. Maybe one of you would like to play it, and tell me if it’s worth finishing.”
Three pairs of young eyes drilled him like lasers. “Nobody’s ever played it before,” Randy said slowly.
“Nope. I was just about to arrange for testing when I… took leave of absence. But I could use my password and download it here.” A twisted grin. “Long as I don’t ‘work’ on it, that is.” Apologetic. “I’ll have to wipe it when I leave, it’s proprietary to the company I work for. But I could designate somebody who tried it a beta tester. If the playing goes well enough, I could register you as an official beta tester for my games. You’d have to visit the office to test, until the software is finished enough to copyright, but once it is, you could have beta copies to play with. As long as you told me all your reactions, and where the game had glitches.”
“Play new games!” Randy almost wasn’t breathing.
“Help design games.” Link’s eyes were wide.
“Finks,” said Lizzie with a disgusted snort.
“Nobody’s twisting anybody’s arm, Lizzie,” Court said slowly. “If the boys want to play with Mr. Adamson’s new game or games, they may. If not, they won’t. You have the same privilege. But part of democracy is, if one person has a right, all do.”
Lizzie stuck out her lip. “Rights is what grownups have. Kids don’t have rights, except the right to obey orders.”
I opened my mouth, shut it again. One right I had lost, was saying anything more significant than, “Pass the salt, please,” to my grieving daughter.
Harley Adamson looked at Lizzie, and chewed his lip. Then amazed us all. “You don’t like computer games, because most of them are male—boy—oriented.”
My adolesofeminist shrugged. “What do you care how a silly little girl feels.”
Harley smiled. Though he was looking at Lizzie, it was obvious that he was seeing something (someone?) in his mind’s eye. “Foolish boys can say, or believe, that because girls are different, they’re inferior. Or that, what interests a girl couldn’t interest them, or vice versa. Many men think the same way. But some of us strike it lucky. We find out that different is just that, different. Not better, not worse, just different. Or, to put it another way—” Suddenly, he was very solemn, and looking at Lizzie very hard. “I’m a man. And I know that any woman, whatever age, can be better or worse or maybe the same as me, in any of thousands of traits or skills or talents you can name. Even if you could measure every one of them, and weigh them, heavens only knows how, and average them out, you still couldn’t say, She’s better, or worse, or the same, as me. I’m still me. You’re still you. I’m a man. You’re a woman. So bloody what.” He frowned. “But you’re right. I’ve been writing my games from my male point of view. I wonder—”