One thing that I love about Carver’s work is his frankness in expression, unaffected by the fear of political correctness and yet he gets the meaning across in a down-to-earth manner that is more effective because a lot of people can recognize themselves in the the humanness of the flaws of the characters.
The narrator/husband is obviously flippant and resentful of his wife’s associations with her first husband, but even more so, with Robert, "the blind man." Yet he has opportunity to sympathize with Robert because he just recently lost his wife. How does our narrator see something to which he can feel superior? This:
“They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together—had sex, sure—and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding.”
That’s an incredible commentary on a relationship.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology