How to Talk to a Widower by Jonathan Tropper

Author:Jonathan Tropper [Tropper, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Humorous, General, Azizex666, Fiction
ISBN: 9780385338905
Google: rGEEFkQlnYkC
Amazon: B000QCQ8XA
Barnesnoble: B000QCQ8XA
Goodreads: 7171889
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2007-07-17T04:00:00+00:00

23

WHEN I GET HOME, STEPHEN IVES IS ON THE PORCH, trying like hell to break down my front door. He backs up all the way to the porch steps and then charges forward, hitting the door with his shoulder. Judging from his labored breathing and the dark pit stains on his Egyptian cotton dress shirt, he’s been at if for a while already. “Claire!” he yells. “You’re going to talk to me!”

“Go home, Stephen,” Claire calls from an upstairs window. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

I look up to see Claire and Russ perched comfortably on the window ledge outside Russ’s old room.

“Hey, Doug,” Russ says, grinning at me. He’s drinking a Coke and clearly enjoying the show.

Claire waves tiredly, raising her eyebrows apologetically at me. “He won’t leave.”

I turn back to Stephen, who is now trying to kick down the door like a cop, but cops don’t wear flimsy three-hundred-dollar dress shoes, which leave nasty crescent-shaped skid marks on my door, but don’t really give much in the way of tactical support.

“Hey, Stephen,” I say. “What’s new and exciting?”

“Stay out of this, Doug. I’m warning you,” he snarls, flashing me a menacing frown before throwing another running kick at the door. The usually immaculate Stephen, who dresses like a Hugo Boss ad and generally perspires only in the quilted tennis bubbles and steam rooms of his country club, is a sight to behold. His sweaty hair, thick with gel, hangs in descending spikes over his forehead, making him look like Elvis, not fat Vegas Elvis but skinny movie Elvis after he beats up the bullies in the diner who forced him to sing along to the jukebox.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” I say.

“I’m going to hurt you if you take one step onto this porch.”

“It’s my house, Stephen.”

He turns to face me, his handsome jaw trembling with rage, eyes wide and crazed. “Do I look like I give a shit?”

He does not, and I know he doesn’t need a particularly compelling excuse to kick my ass. Stephen has hated me for pretty much as long as he’s known me, and not just because I trashed him in his wedding toast. At Claire’s prodding, he gave me a job at his company, which I could have told him would end badly. I screwed it up in a matter of months, by sleeping with one of the administrative assistants. As it turned out, he’d been planning to fire her, but now that I’d slept with her, he was scared of the legal ramifications, although he had no such concerns when it came to firing me. I used to fuck stuff up like that all the time. I didn’t see the big deal. I do now, but you don’t go and apologize to someone five years after the events in question. And even if I did, the fact would still be etched into my permanent record as far as he’s concerned. He reached out to me and I crapped on his hand. A short while after that I got drunk at Thanksgiving dinner and punched him in the nose.

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