Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Wendy says, exasperated. “Those are just the rules, Ryan. Deal with it.”

“We’ve been here for less than a week, and you’ve been in two fist-fights!” Tracy shouts at Phillip. “This is clearly not a healthy place for you.”

We cannot make out the other half of either conversation because, in true Foxman form, Paul’s and Phillip’s responses are low and monosyllabic. Under attack, we retreat into stoic fortresses built for one. It drove Jen crazy. The more she yelled, the quieter I got, sometimes not uttering a word for hours. Maybe if I had yelled back at her, things would be different now. Maybe yelling back is a kind of marital diplomacy I never learned.

Eventually someone slams the den door and the lights in the kitchen flicker and then go out. Phillip comes stomping into the dim room and opens up the freezer. He grabs an ice pack and sits down across from me, wincing as he presses it against his swollen hand.

“For a guy who punches people so often, I would think you’d know how to do it better,” Wendy says.

“I think I may have broken something.”

“Besides Tracy’s heart?”

Phillip gives Wendy a dirty look. “Don’t you ever get tired of being the thorn in everyone’s side?”

Upstairs another door slams and the lights come back on. On the monitor, Serena starts to scream.

“Fat bitch!” Wendy mutters.

“You said a curse word!” Ryan shouts, gleefully horrified.

“A bitch is a female dog,” Wendy says.

“Bitch!” Cole repeats happily.

The first time I heard my father curse, I was helping him install a timer in the garage for the lawn sprinklers. He had a screwdriver in his mouth, some screws in his hands, and he dropped a key washer, which rolled across the garage and down through the grate of the catch basin. “Ah, shit,” he said. I was eight. I laughed until my ribs ached.

Paul enters the kitchen wordlessly and opens the freezer. Phillip has the only ice pack, so he grabs a slab of frozen meat and slips it under his shirt to press against his shoulder. He leans back against the fridge and closes his eyes for a second. Seated between him and Phillip, I feel conspicuously uninjured.

“I have to get out of here,” Paul says, and heads for the door.

“You’re in no condition to drive with that shoulder,” Phillip says, getting to his feet. “I’ll take you.”

“Lucky me,” Paul says, disappearing into the front hall.

“Asshole,” Phillip says.

“An asshole is a donkey,” Ryan says.

“Asshole,” Cole says. “Bitch. Asshole. Elmo.”

Phillip considers our nephews gravely. “It’s good to see our influence on the next generation. We should seriously consider getting neutered.”

“It’s too late for me,” I say.

“Yes it is. I forgot.” He stands up and fumbles for his car keys. “Okay, then. Have a good night, everyone.”

“Wait!” I say, following him out to the front hall, where Paul is already halfway out the door. “What about the shiva?”

We look into the living room at the five empty shiva chairs lined up in front of the fireplace. “You’ll be fine,” Paul says. “Just nod and smile.”

“You can’t leave me here alone.”

Phillip flips a cigarette into his mouth and leans into the shiva candle to light it, which strikes me as somewhat sacrilegious, but I guess Dad wouldn’t mind. “It’s like a monsoon out there right now. I bet no one will even come tonight. So why don’t you come with?”

“What if people come?”

Phillip grabs a legal pad and pen from a compartment in the hall table and draws up a quick sign:

SHIVA CANCELED ON ACCOUNT OF RAIN. TRY AGAIN TOMORROW. —THE MANAGEMENT.

He jams the paper under the knocker on the front door. “Problem solved,” he says.

Sticky Fingers is in one of the last strip malls on Route 120, just about a mile down the road from the Marriott where Jen is staying. Or was staying. She is no doubt gone by now, hightailing it back to Kingston, with Wade grumbling about revenge scenarios as he drives.

Sticky Fingers. Famous for its spicy buffalo wings and nubile waitresses in their tight black T-shirts with the V-necks cut out jaggedly by scissors. The place is filled with women in short skirts or jeans, and tight sleeveless shirts. These women, with their hair and their bodies, their smiling lips, glossed to a shine. I am acutely conscious of every one of them, of every smooth thigh and creamy neck. I am dealing with major life issues here, death, divorce, fatherhood, and yet here, in this bar, I am all cock. I don’t know why this is, what makes it so, but I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I sit with my brothers at a high round table, licking hot sauce off my fingers, trying to moderate my roving eye. There’s a brunette with the kind of bee-stung lips you want to suck like candy. There’s a blond girl in a short skirt with smooth, perfect legs and the kind of smile you feel in your chest. There’s another blonde, a real one this time, with laughing eyes, and you just know she’d be fun and tender in bed. I want them all, slowly and softly, want to kiss them in the rain, save them from bad men, win their hearts, build a life. I’m probably too old for most of them. Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t been single in over ten years; I can’t tell how old anyone is anymore, including me.

I would kill to be in love again. I loved being in love—the deep kisses, the urgent sex, the passionate declarations, the late-night phone calls, the private language and inside jokes, the way her fingers rest possessively on your forearm during dinner with her friends.

“Boys’ night out,” Phillip says appreciatively. “Why don’t we do this more?”

“Because we don’t like each other very much,” Paul says.

“That’s crap, Paul. You’re too angry at the world to know who you like and who you don’t. I like you, Paul. I love you. Both of you. I was always too young to go anywhere with you guys. I always wished we’d hung out more as brothers.”

“Well then, this must be a big moment for you.”

“The boys are back in town,” Phillip sings.

A waitress comes to bring us our drinks. “Hey, Philly,” she says. “How’ve you been?”

“Hey, Tammy. Looking good.”

We cannot help but watch her as she leaves. God himself stops what he’s doing to watch her ass as she crosses the crowded room. It’s that kind of ass. The kind of ass that fills you with equal parts lust and regret, and then, almost instantly, chagrin, because, for Christ’s sake, it’s just an ass.

“Is there anyone in this town you haven’t fucked?” Paul grumbles.

“Just because she was glad to see me doesn’t mean I fucked her.”

“So you didn’t?”

Phillip shrugs. “It’s not a fair test case. Everyone fucked Tammy Burns.”

“I didn’t,” I say sadly.

“The night’s young. Just be charming and tip well.”

Someone has selected “Sweet Home Alabama” on the jukebox. Phillip sings along, tapping his hands on the table to the little piano riff between verses. Take a hundred jukeboxes from a hundred bars in a hundred cities and they’ll all have “Sweet Home Alabama” in them. I don’t know why that should be the case, but it is. And every one of those bars has two or three assholes who will sing along at the top of their lungs, especially when they get to the part that trashes Neil Young, and then look around like they should get a prize for knowing the words, like everyone doesn’t know the words, like everyone didn’t have that classic rock friend who put it on every mix he ever made, like everyone isn’t sick to death already of “Sweet Home Alabama.”