Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

“Cut it out, Ryan!” Barry hisses in the direction of the piano, covering his earpiece with his palm. Not because it’s annoying, not because the bereaved might want a little peace and quiet, but because “Daddy’s on the phone.” Ryan stops for a second and seems to earnestly consider his father’s request, but fails to see the upside, and so the two-fisted sonata resumes.

“Wendy!” Barry calls, and the way it rolls off his tongue, fast and plaintive, it’s less his wife’s name than a tic to be politely ignored in company, which is what Wendy does.

Linda serves up a meal of poached salmon and mashed potatoes. She circles the table, doling out heaping servings wherever she sees the white of a dish, ducking around Barry, who is still pacing and cursing loudly into his earpiece. Alice helps Linda, because Alice is an in-law and technically not one of the bereaved. Barry doesn’t help, because Barry is technically an asshole.

Alice and Paul have been trying to have a baby for a while now, without much success. She’s taking fertility drugs that cause her to gain weight and hormones that cause her to cry about how fat she is. This according to Wendy, who also informed me that when Alice thinks she’s ovulating, she stays in bed and makes Paul come home on his lunch breaks. “Can you imagine?” Wendy said. “Poor Paul has to get it up twice a day for that . . . ?”

Right now Alice is making a face as she stares at Ryan at the piano. It’s a forced smile that says I am so okay enjoying the cuteness of someone else’s child, even though I can’t seem to grow one of my own. She flashes Paul a meaningful look that he doesn’t catch, so focused is he on shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth and avoiding eye contact with the rest of his siblings.

Ryan has apparently found something else to abuse, and the piano falls silent at exactly the same time that the baby monitor does, and the sudden quiet feels awkward, like we were all hiding behind the noise.

“Bitches ain’t shit but hos and trix!” The rap song blares loudly across the table, and Phillip quickly reaches into his shirt pocket and sheepishly pulls out his flashing cell phone. “I keep meaning to change that ringtone,” he says, flipping it open. “Hey . . . What? No, that’s great! Perfect timing.” He flips the phone closed and looks at all of us meaningfully. “She’s here,” he says, like we’ve all been waiting. Like we have any idea what he’s talking about. Then he strides out of the dining room and hits the front door running. We all run into the kitchen to peer out the bay window to the street, where a woman has just stepped out of the backseat of a dark Lincoln Town Car. The mystery woman has no visible tattoos, no obvious breast implants, no fuck-me pumps, no “bubble butt”—as Phillip generally refers to his ass of choice—straining against a short skirt under which no underwear is being worn. Even at a distance it’s clear that this woman, in her well-tailored pantsuit, with her blond hair tied back in a neat, Grace Kelly bun, is someone who wears underwear. Expensive underwear, I should think, maybe even sexy underwear, from Victoria’s Secret or La Perla. She’s definitely attractive, but sleek and finished, like brushed chrome. In other words, she is exactly the kind of woman you would expect not to have any association with Phillip. Sophisticated, refined, and, from what I can see, significantly older than him.

“Who is that?” my mother says.

“Maybe his lawyer,” Wendy guesses.

“Phillip has a lawyer?” Alice says.

“Only when he’s in trouble.”

“Is he in trouble?”

“Odds are.”

By now Phillip has reached her. They don’t shake hands or kiss chastely, but attack each other with ravenous mouths and sloppy tongues.

“Well, I guess she’s not his lawyer,” Alice says, maybe just a tad snidely. You can never tell with Alice. She doesn’t like Wendy. She’s not crazy about any of us. Alice comes from a nice family, where the siblings and siblings-in-law kiss each other hello and good-bye and remember each other’s birthdays and anniversaries and call their parents just to say hi, calls that end with breezy I-love-yous that are effortless and true. To her, we Foxmans are a savage race, brutish aliens who don’t express affection and shamelessly watch our baby brother grope the ass of a stranger through the kitchen window.

“I’ll e-mail you the ratios,” Barry says behind us. “We’ve inverted them twice already.”

Having traded enough spit for the time being, Phillip and his mystery guest head up the front walk, and we move away from the window, Wendy, as always, getting in the last word: “It would be so like Phillip to be doing his lawyer.”

“THIS IS TRACY,” Phillip announces proudly, standing at the head of the table, where we are all once again seated, having scrambled back when he finished tonguing and groping her and led her up the bluestone path. “My fiancée.” We are probably not all sitting there with our jaws on our plates, but that’s how it feels. Up close, it’s clear she’s a good fifteen or so years older than him, a very well-preserved mid-fortysomething.

“Engaged to be engaged,” Tracy corrects him fondly, in a manner that suggests a long-standing familiarity with correcting Phillip. The women Phillip usually dates aren’t the sort to correct him. They are strippers, actresses, waitresses, hairstylists, bridesmaids who hike up their crinoline for him in the parking lot during the reception, and once, memorably, the bride herself. “I couldn’t help it,” he told me through cracked, swollen lips, from the hospital bed he’d subsequently landed in when the groomsmen tracked him down. “It just happened.” “It just happened” was Phillip’s go-to explanation for pretty much everything, the perfect epitaph for a man who always seemed to be an innocent bystander to his own life.

“Hello, everyone,” Tracy says, confident and composed. “I’m sorry we’re meeting under such sad circumstances.” She doesn’t giggle or crack her gum. Phillip throws his arm around her, grinning like he’s just pulled off a great practical joke. No one says anything for a long moment, so Phillip performs a roll call.

“That’s my sister, Wendy,” he says, pointing.

“Great suit,” Wendy says.

“Thank you.”

“The guy talking to himself is her husband, Barry.”

Barry looks right at Tracy and says, “I can maybe sell another eighth of a point to them. Maybe. But they’ll want some pretty solid assurances. We’ve plowed this field before.”

“Barry is something of an ass.”

“Phillip!”

“It’s okay, baby. He can’t hear us. That’s my brother Paul, and his wife, Alice. They don’t like me very much.”

“Only because you’re such a douche,” Paul says. It’s the first thing he’s said, I think, since he spoke at the funeral. There’s no way to know what’s pissing him off right now. In my family, we don’t so much air our grievances as wallow in them. Anger and resentment are cumulative.

“Nice to meet you,” Alice says, her overly sweet tone meant to apologize for Paul, for the rest of us, for being fifteen pounds overweight, for not being as elegant and composed as Tracy. I was like you once, her voice pleads. A size two with perfect hair. Let’s be best friends.

“And that’s my brother Judd. Actually, he does like me these days, if memory serves.”

“Hi, Judd.”

“Hey.”

“Judd is recently cuckolded.”

“Thanks for clarifying that, Phil,” I say.

“Just looking to avoid any awkward faux pas later on,” Phillip says. “Tracy’s one of us now.”