You and a Guest Will Fly Round-Trip Coach from Los Angeles to Beautiful Maui

only there is no guest, just you and this empty seat where your wife should have been and a pink-haired woman bunched into the window seat, eyes shut, lips moving as the jet’s engines rumble and thrum. Your wife would have small-talked her, showed her the funny picture of your son and the grandkids—tongues out, eyes crossed—taken a few days before he climbed the rickety stairs into the attic and hanged himself from a beam after which your wife took to her bed for weeks where she couldn’t stop looking at the photo saying how happy they looked, so happy and, okay, to make her happy you booked a pair of tickets to The Price Is Right where she won this trip for two only cancer happened, swift and lethal, and now it’s just you and an empty seat and no one to hear you say oh, look! when the plane shudders and lifts into the sky, but you say it anyway to the pink-haired woman by the window and when she looks out at the clouds that are cats and crabs or the shapes of states, you think you could hold your phone up and snap a selfie of the two of you, look at it later and see how happy you are, just look how happy.