Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

“So Dad was cool with it,” Phillip says.

“He said he’d always sensed something there,” Mom says.

“So why didn’t you tell us?” I say. “You’ve always been so open about your sex life.”

“I didn’t want to complicate your grief. Mort was a generous and loving husband. He was a good father to all of you. He deserved to be mourned without any distractions.”

Something occurs to me. “It wasn’t Dad who wanted us to sit shiva, was it?”

Mom blushes and looks down at her lap. “Smart boy.”

There are exclamations and groans of dismay from my siblings.

“Oh, come on!” Mom says. “You knew how your father felt about religion. Or, rather, didn’t feel. I’m just surprised you all went along with it for so long.”

“We thought it was his dying request!” Paul says. “Jesus Christ, Mom! What were you thinking?”

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get the four of you to stay in the same place for more than a few hours? My husband, your father, had died. I needed you. And you needed each other, even if you still don’t know it.”

“Boner lied for you,” I say.

Mom shrugs. “Charlie knows where his bread is buttered.”

“Tracy wouldn’t have dumped me if we hadn’t come here,” Phillip says, shaking his head.

“You’re welcome, honey.”

“You ruined my life.”

“Oh, Phillip,” Mom says fondly. “I may have overmothered you and screwed you up in ways large and small, but I think it’s time you took some measure of responsibility for where you choose to put your own penis.”

“You see? Right there. Please don’t talk about my penis. It’s out of your jurisdiction. Mothers do not sit around talking about their grown sons’ penises.”

“So grow up and I’ll stop.”

“You lied to us,” Wendy says softly.

“Yes. I did.”

“But you never lie to us. That’s your thing.”

“I never made love to a woman either,” Mom says proudly. “People can change. Not often, and not often for the better, but it does happen.” Mom, it should be pointed out, is loving this. Her children are shocked and mortified and hanging on her every word. There’s our childhood in a nutshell. It’s like we never left.

Phillip rolls off the couch, wincing in pain as he does, and stands up. “Okay. I forgive you for your lying and your treachery.” He walks over to Mom and Linda and pulls them into a group hug. “I’m happy for you guys.” Then he collapses onto the chair between them. “Anyone have any codeine? I think I’m bleeding internally.”

Mom and Linda are over at Linda’s house celebrating their official coming out. Paul and Alice are in my old bedroom behind closed doors, procreating under my poster of The Cure. Good luck and Godspeed. I give Cole and Ryan baths while Wendy puts Serena to bed. This entails standing outside her bedroom door and listening to her wail. I towel off Ryan while Cole splashes around in the tub, playing wildly with rubber dolphins that squirt water when you squeeze them. “Dawphins,” he says.

“Don’t be an ass, Cole,” Ryan says.

“Hey!”

“It means ‘donkey,’” Ryan says, giggling.

“Stop being a wise-donkey,” I say.

He gives the matter some thought. “You’re a donkey-hole,” he says.

“You watch your mouth or I’ll kick your donkey.”

It takes him a second and then he laughs so hard I can see his ribs vibrating in his torso.

“Kick your donkey,” Cole repeats in the tub. He raises the dolphins up above his head and brings them crashing down into the water, splashing us. “Fucker!”

“Cole!” Wendy hisses from the doorway. She offers me a pained smile. “We’re working on that,” she says to me.

“It sounds like he’s got the hang of it.”

“Fucker dawphin!” Cole says happily.

I am going to be a father, I think to myself.

“IT FEELS LIKE the last day of camp,” Wendy says. She is sitting on the edge of Cole’s bed and I am sitting on the edge of Ryan’s in what used to be Wendy’s bedroom. “Tomorrow we all go our separate ways.”

“You going to be okay on the plane alone with these three?” I say. Deflect emotions with logistics. It’s what we do. Dad lives on in all of us. Our parents can continue to screw us up even after they die, and in this way, they’re never really gone. My siblings and I will always struggle trying to confront an honest emotion. We’ll succeed, to varying degrees, with outsiders, but fail consistently, sometimes spectacularly, with each other. The hardwiring simply runs too deep, like behind the walls of this house; circuit breakers on hair triggers.

“I’ll be fine.”

“And what about Barry?”

“What about him?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Wendy sighs and looks down at her sleeping boy, her face a complex amalgam of love and pain and fear. I don’t know that feeling yet, but I will soon enough.

“I have a very nice life, with a good man,” Wendy says. “I love him for who he is. Sometimes who he is isn’t enough for me, but most of the time, it is. There are women who would leave to find something better. I envy them, but I also know I’m not one of them. And how many of those women truly end up with a better man?” She shrugs. “No studies have been done.”

“And Horry?”

“There is no Horry. Horry is a fantasy. And that’s all I am to him. Time travel. We slept together as a favor to the kids we once were, not because there’s really anything there besides history and some completely useless love.”

She gets off the bed and onto her knees to kiss the forehead of each sleeping boy. Wendy taught me to curse, matched my clothing, brushed my hair before school, and let me sleep in bed with her when bad dreams woke me up. She fell in love often, and with great fanfare, throwing herself into each romance with the focus of an Olympic athlete. Now she’s a mother and a wife, who tries to get her screaming baby to sleep through the night, tries to stop her boys from learning curse words, and calls romantic love useless. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.

I COME DOWN the basement stairs to find Phillip sitting on my bed, holding my duffel bag full of cash. “This is a lot of money,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Can I have some?”

“Define ‘some.’”

Phillip thinks about it for a moment. “A grand?”

“Are you going to gamble it?”

“No.”

“Are you going to buy drugs?”

“Jesus, Judd.” He tosses the bag onto the floor and heads for the stairs. “Forget I asked.”

“Phillip.”

He turns around. “I have nothing, Judd. No home, no job, nothing. I’ve been waiting tables and sponging off Tracy for the last year. I’m just looking for a fresh start here. The plan was to work with Paul, but he’s being a real dick about it.”

“Well, maybe you have to work for him for a while, before you work with him.”

He thinks about it for a moment and then hoists himself up to sit on the Ping-Pong table. “I could probably be persuaded to do that.”

“I’ll talk to Paul,” I say.

“Yeah, because you guys are tight like that.”

“People can change.”

Phillip laughs and sits back down on the bed. “It’s been nice here, this last week, being brothers again.”

“We never stopped being brothers.”

“It felt like we did.”

“Yeah. I guess it did.”