This Is Where I Leave You

Chapter 2

I’m packing up my car for the two-hour drive to Elmsbrook when Jen pulls up in her marshmallow-colored SUV. She gets out quickly, before I can escape. I haven’t seen her in a while, haven’t returned her calls or stopped thinking about her. And here she is looking immaculate as ever in her clinging gym clothes, her hair an expensive shade of honey blond, the corners of her mouth inching up ever so slightly into the tentative smile of a little girl. I know every one of Jen’s smiles, what they mean and where they lead.

The problem is that every time I see Jen, it instantly reminds me of the first time I ever saw her, riding that crappy red bike across the quad, long legs pumping, hair flying out behind her, face flushed with excitement, and that’s exactly what you don’t want to think about when confronted with your soon-to-be ex-wife. Ex-wife in waiting. Ex-wife elect. The self-help books and websites haven’t come up with a proper title for spouses living in the purgatory that exists before the courts have officially ratified your personal tragedy. As usual, seeing Jen, I am instantly chagrined, not because she’s obviously found out that I’m living in a crappy rented basement, but because ever since I moved out, seeing her makes me feel like I’ve been caught in a private, embarrassing moment—watching porn with my hand in my pants, singing along to Air Supply while picking my nose at a red light.

“Hey,” she says.

I toss my suitcase into the trunk. “Hey.”

We were married for nine years. Now we say “Hey” and avert our eyes.

“I’ve been leaving you messages.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“I’m sure.” Her ironic inflection fills me with the familiar impulse to simultaneously kiss her deeply and strangle her until she turns blue. Neither is an option at this juncture, so I have to content myself with slamming the trunk harder than necessary.

“We need to talk, Judd.”

“Now’s not a good time.”

She beats me to the driver’s-side door and leans against it, flashing me her most accomplished smile, the one I always told her made me fall in love with her all over again. But she’s miscalculated, because now all it does is remind me of everything I’ve lost. “There’s no reason this can’t be amicable,” she says.

“You’re fucking my boss. That’s a pretty solid reason.”

She closes her eyes, summoning up the massive reserves of patience required to deal with me. I used to kiss those eyelids as we drifted off to sleep, feel the rough flutter of her lashes like butterfly wings between my lips, her light breath tickling my chin and neck. “You’re right,” she says, trying to look like someone trying not to look bored. “I am a flawed person. I was unhappy and I did something inexcusable. But as much as you might hate me for ruining your life, playing the victim isn’t really working out for you.”

“Hey, I’m doing fine.”

“Yeah. You’re doing great.”

Jen looks pointedly at the crappy house in which I now live below street level. It looks like a house drawn by a child: a triangle perched on a square, with sloppily staggered lines for bricks, a lone casement window, and a front door. It’s flanked by houses of equal decrepitude on either side, nothing at all like the small, handsome colonial we bought with my life’s savings and where Jen still lives rent-free, sleeping with another man in the bed that used to be mine.

My landlords are the Lees, an inscrutable, middle-aged Chinese couple who live in a state of perpetual silence. I have never heard them speak. He performs acupuncture in the living room; she sweeps the sidewalk thrice daily with a handmade straw broom that looks like a theater prop. I wake up and fall asleep to the whisper of her frantic bristles on the pavement. Beyond that, they don’t seem to exist, and I often wonder why they bothered immigrating. Surely there were plenty of pinched nerves and dust in China.

“You didn’t show up to the mediator,” Jen says.

“I don’t like him. He’s not impartial.”

“Of course he’s impartial.”

“He’s partial to your breasts.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, that’s just ridiculous.”

“Yes, well, there’s no accounting for taste.”

And so on. I could report the rest of the conversation, but it’s just more of the same, two people whose love became toxic, lobbing regret grenades at each other.

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” she finally says, stepping away from the car, winded.

“I’m always like this. This is how I am.”

My father is dead! I want to shout at her. But I won’t because she’ll cry, and if she does, I probably will, and then she’ll have found a way in, and I will not let her pierce my walls in a Trojan horse of sympathy. I’m going home to bury my father and face my family, and she should be there with me, but she’s not mine anymore. You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I’m heading into the trenches alone.

Jen shakes her head sadly and I can see her lower lip trembling, the tear that’s starting to form in the corner of her eye. I can’t touch her, kiss her, love her, or even, as it turns out, have a conversation that doesn’t degenerate into angry recriminations in the first three minutes. But I can still make her sad, and for now, I’ll have to be satisfied with that. And it would be easier, so much easier, if she didn’t insist on being so goddamned beautiful, so gym-toned and honey-haired and wide-eyed and vulnerable. Because even now, even after all that she’s done to me, there’s still something in her eyes that makes me want to shelter her at any cost, even though I know it’s really me who needs the protection. It would be so much easier if she wasn’t Jen. But she is, and where there was once the purest kind of love, there is now a snake pit of fury and resentment and a new dark and twisted love that hurts more than all the rest of it put together.

“Judd.”

“I have to go,” I say, opening my car door.

“I’m pregnant.”

I’ve never been shot, but this is probably what it feels like, that split second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet. She was pregnant once before. She cried and kissed me and we danced like idiots in the bathroom. But our baby died before it could be born, strangled by the umbilical cord three weeks before Jen’s due date.

“Congratulations. I’m sure Wade will be a wonderful father.”

“I know this is hard for you. I just thought you should hear it from me.”

“And now I have.”

I climb into the car. She steps in front of it, so I can’t pull out.

“Say something. Please.”

“Okay. Fuck you, Jen. Fuck you very much. I hope Wade’s kid has better luck in there than mine did. Can I go now?”

“Judd,” she says, her voice low and unsteady. “You can’t really hate me that much, can you?”

I look directly at her with all the sincerity I can muster. “Yes. I can.”

And maybe it’s the complicated grief over my father that has finally begun plucking at my nerves, or maybe it’s simply the way Jen draws back as if slapped, but either way, the intense hurt that flashes behind the wide pools of her eyes for that one unguarded instant is almost enough to make me love her again.

Chapter 3

My marriage ended the way these things do: with paramedics and cheesecake.

Marriages fall apart. Everyone has reasons, but no one really knows why. We got married young. Maybe that was our mistake. In New York State, you can legally get married before you can do a shot of tequila. We knew marriage could be difficult in the same way that we knew there were starving children in Africa. It was a tragic fact but worlds away from our reality. We were going to be different. We would keep the fire stoked; best friends who fucked each other senseless every night. We would avoid the pitfalls of complacency; stay young at heart and in shape, keep our kisses long and deep and our bellies flat, hold hands when we walked, conduct whispered conversations deep into the night, make out in movie theaters, and go down on each other with undimmed enthusiasm until the arthritic limitations of old age made it inadvisable.

“Will you still love me when I’m old?” Jen would say, usually when we were in bed in her dorm room, lying drowsily on her dented mattress in the thick musk of our evaporating sex. She’d be lying on her belly and I’d be on my side, running a lazy finger down the shallow canyon of her spine to where it met the rising curves of her outstanding ass. I was stupidly proud of her ass when we were dating. I would hold open doors for her just to watch it bounce ahead of me, high and tight and perfectly proportioned in her jeans, and I would think to myself, That is an ass to grow old with. I looked at Jen’s ass as my own personal achievement, wanted to take her ass home to meet my parents.

“When my breasts sag and my teeth fall out, and I’m all dried up and wrinkled like a prune?” Jen would say.

“Of course I will.”

“You won’t trade me in for a younger woman?”

“Of course I will. But I’ll feel bad about it.”

And we would laugh at the impossibility of it all.

Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right. We were that couple for a while, nauseatingly impervious assholes, busy staring into each other’s eyes while everyone else was trying to have a good time. When I think about how stupid we were, how obstinately clueless about the realities that awaited us, I just want to go back to that skinny, cocksure kid with his bloated heart and perennial erection, and kick his teeth in.

I want to tell him how he and the love of his life will slowly fall into a routine, how the sex, while still perfectly fine, will become commonplace enough that it won’t be unheard of to postpone it in favor of a television show, or a late-night snack. How they’ll stop strategically smothering their farts and closing the door to urinate; how he’ll feel himself growing self-conscious telling funny stories to their friends in front of her, because she’s heard all his funny stories before; how she won’t laugh at his jokes the way other people do; how she’ll start to spend more and more time on the phone with her girlfriends at night. How they will get into raging fights over the most trivial issues: the failure to replace a roll of toilet paper, a cereal bowl caked with oatmeal left to harden in the sink, proper management of the checkbook. How an unspoken point system will come into play, with each side keeping score according to their own complicated set of rules. I want to materialize before that smug little shit like the Ghost of Christmas Past and scare the matrimonial impulse right out of him. Forget marriage, I’ll rail at him. Just go for the tequila. Then I’ll whisk him away to the future and show him the look on his face . . .

. . . when I walked into my bedroom and found Jen in bed with another man.

By that point, I probably should have suspected something. Adultery, like any other crime, generates evidence as an inevitable byproduct, like plants and oxygen or humans and, well, shit. So there were no doubt a handful of ways I could have figured it out that would have spared me the eye-gouging trauma of actually having to witness it firsthand. The clues must have been piling up for a while already, like unread e-mails, just a click away from being read. A strange number on her cell phone bill, a call quickly ended when I entered the room, the odd unexplained receipt, a minor bite mark on the slope of her neck that I didn’t remember inflicting, her markedly depleted libido. In the days that followed, I would review the last year or so of our marriage like the security tapes after a robbery, wondering how the hell I could have been so damn oblivious, how it took actually walking in on them to finally get the picture. And even then, as I watched them humping and moaning on my bed, it took me a little while to put it all together.

Because the thing of it is, no matter how much you enjoy sex, there’s something jolting and strangely disturbing about witnessing the sex of others. Nature has taken great pains to lay out the fundamentals of copulation so that it’s impossible to get a particularly good view of the sex you’re having. Because when you get right down to it, sex is a messy, gritty, often grotesque business to behold: the hairs; the abraded, dimpled flesh; the wide-open orifices; the exposed, glistening organs. And the violence of the coupling itself, primitive and elemental, reminding us that we’re all just dumb animals clinging to our spot on the food chain, eating, sleeping, and fucking as much as possible before something bigger comes along and devours us.

So when I came home early on Jen’s thirty-third birthday to find her lying spread-eagle on the bed, with some guy’s wide, doughy ass hovering above her, clenching and unclenching to the universal beat of procreation, his hands jammed under her ass, lifting her up into each thrust, her fingers leaving white marks where they pressed into his back, well, it took some time to process.

It hadn’t yet sunk in that it was Jen in the bed. All I knew was that it was my bed, and the only man who had any business having sex in it was me. I briefly considered the possibility that I was in the wrong house, but that seemed like a long shot, and a quick glance over to the picture of Jen on my night table, young and luminous in her bridal gown, confirmed that I was in the right place. Which was something of a minor relief actually, because to make that kind of mistake, to actually let yourself into your neighbor’s house and walk upstairs to their bedroom oblivious to your error, was probably cause to expect the worst from a brain scan. And if I had walked in on my neighbors rutting like dogs in the middle of the afternoon, I doubt that even the most heartfelt apology would have been accepted, and I’d never be able to make eye contact with them again, let alone ask them to get the mail when we went on vacation. Also, our neighbors, the Bowens, were in their late sixties and Mr. Bowen was eating his way toward his third heart attack. Even if he was still sexually active, which I highly doubted given the circumference of his gelatinous gut, the effect of such an untimely intrusion would probably have sent him into cardiac arrest. So, all things considered, it was probably a good thing that I was in my own house.

Except, that being the case, it posed a handful of troubling scenarios, the most obvious of which was that the woman writhing on the bed in a pool of her own sweat, inserting her French-manicured index finger like a dart into the bull’s-eye of her lover’s anus, was my wife, Jen.

Which, of course, I’d known the instant I stepped into the room. But my brain was shielding me from the realization, giving me little random thoughts to process, just to keep me distracted, really, while, behind the scenes, my subconscious scrambled to assemble the facts and prepare a strategy for damage control. So instead of thinking, right away, Jen is fucking someone, my marriage is over, or something along those lines, my next thought was actually this: Jen never sticks her finger into my asshole during sex. Not that I had any desire for her to do so, especially now that I was seeing firsthand, so to speak, where it had been. We did some fun, nasty stuff from time to time, Jen and I—positions, props, creamy desserts, et cetera—but I fell squarely into that category of men who simply never feel the desire to bring their asshole into the mix. Not that I was judging the men who did.

Except for the man who was currently impaled two knuckles deep on my wife’s index finger, one digit away from the one she used to flip the bird at the guy who had cut us off in the HOV lane last week, two away from the diamond eternity band I’d bought her on our fifth anniversary. I was judging him pretty severely, actually. So much so that it took me an extra beat to realize that he was, in fact, Wade Boulanger, a popular radio personality who, in addition to screwing my wife and apparently enjoying the occasional bit of anal stimulation, was also my boss.

Wade is the host of a popular WIRX morning drive radio program called Man Up with Wade Boulanger. He talks about sex, cars, sports, and money. But mostly about sex. He consults on air with porn stars, strippers, and prostitutes. He takes calls from men and women who tell him, in graphic detail, about their sex lives. He announces and then rates his own farts. He tells lovelorn, sex-starved callers to “Man up already!” There are T-shirts and coffee mugs and bumper stickers with the catch-phrase. He is a professional asshole, syndicated in twelve markets. The advertisers line up like sheep.

I’m not knocking it. I was his producer. I booked the guests. I oversaw the interns screening the calls, the I.T. geeks who run the website. I met with the station bosses about format and sponsorship. I liaised with legal, H.R., and advertising. I ordered lunch and bleeped the curse words.

I’d been fresh out of college and working as an assistant at WRAD, a small local station, when Wade’s career was just heating up, and for some reason he liked me. When his producer was fired over a flap with the FCC, Wade hired me. We took long lunches after the show, whole afternoons spent in restaurants on the station’s dime, drinking dirty martinis and coming up with bits. He called me his voice of reason, valued my opinion, and took me with him when he moved from the local affiliate to WIRX. And when the show went into syndication, he threatened to walk when the station balked at my contract.

Wade is tall and beefy, with dark, wiry hair and a cleft that makes his chin look like a tiny ass. His teeth are a shade of white not found in nature. At forty, Wade still references his fraternity brothers like they matter, still evaluates passing breasts out loud, still calls them tits. He is that guy. It’s easy to picture him in his frat-boy prime, chugging down beers to rounds of applause, humiliating pledges, slipping roofies into the red plastic cups of pretty freshman girls at keggers.

There’s nothing in life, really, to prepare you for the experience of seeing your wife have sex with another man. It’s one of those surreal events that you’ve imagined at one point or another without any real clarity, like dying or winning the lottery. When it comes to knowing how to react, you’re in uncharted territories. And so, in the absence of any reaction, I stood there frozen, watching Jen’s face as Wade pumped away at her like the piston of a wide, hairy engine. Her head was arched back, chin pointed up to God, as she panted heavily through her wide-open mouth, eyes clamped shut with pleasure. I tried to recall if she’d ever looked so intensely committed, so beautifully dirty when we had sex, but it was hard to say. I’d never had this vantage point before. Also, it had been forever since we’d had sex during the day, and at night it’s harder to make out the nuances of your partner’s expression. Then Jen let out a long, urgent moan that started low before suddenly jumping up a few octaves into this kind of wounded puppy’s yelp. I was pretty damn sure I’d never heard her make that sound before. And as she did it, her hands slid down Wade’s back to grab his ass and pull him deeper into her.

I found myself wondering about Wade Boulanger’s cock.

Specifically, was it bigger than mine? Thicker? Harder? Was it slightly curved, the way some cocks are, hitting places inside of her that mine had never hit, heretofore untapped bits of soft tissue that made her cry out like that? Was Wade a more skilled lover? Had he studied Tantric technique? He had certainly slept with enough hookers and porn stars to have gotten some hands-on instruction. From where I was standing, it certainly looked like Wade knew what he was doing, but, in fairness, I had never seen myself have sex. Jen and I never videotaped ourselves the way some couples did, and now I kind of regretted that. Reviewing the game tapes every now and then might have been helpful. For all I knew, I looked every bit as convincing. But that yelp . . . I’d been having every kind of sex with Jen for over ten years, and she had never yelped like that. I’d have remembered.

I realized that I was already thinking about how I would tell Jen—my Jen—about this later, how I would describe this insanity to her tonight when I got home. But I already was home. And my Jen didn’t exist anymore, had dispersed into mist right before my eyes. And this new Jen, this squealing, sweating, anal-probing Jen, didn’t need me to tell her. She could probably tell me a few things.

I experienced a smattering of microscopic pinpricks across my stomach, the first hint of the anguish being readied below in the darkest recesses of my churning guts. It was still forming, but I could already feel the intense heat of it rising up into my chest like a concentrated laser beam, and I knew that once the world started spinning again, it would blossom into a white-hot flash and incinerate me.

And still they fucked, in and out, up and down, grunt and yelp, like they were going for a record, and underneath it all, the sounds you don’t think about, the slapping and slishing, the farting suction, the mechanical sounds of intercourse, the air thick with the pungent smell of their sex. And still I stood there, letting it happen, trembling like a weed. Then Wade lifted Jen’s left leg over his head and brought it down onto her right one, turning her onto her side without missing a thrust. It was not an easy maneuver to accomplish without withdrawing, this little bit of stunt fuckery, but the ease with which he did it, and the way Jen turned and rolled on cue, made it clear that they’d been down this particular road before. And that’s when it occurred to me to wonder how long this had been going on: a month? Six months? How many positions had they mastered? How much of my marriage was a lie? Jen was fucking Wade Boulanger sideways on my bed, on the rumpled Ralph Lauren duvet she’d bought at Nordstrom when we first moved into the house. My life, as I knew it, was over.

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I was holding a large birthday cake.

I had left work early to pick up the cake, a chocolate-strawberry cheesecake, her favorite. Jen always called in sick on her birthday. We were going to go out for dinner later, but I’d come home early to surprise her with the cake. In the driveway, I opened the box and planted thirty-three candles and one for good luck. I stopped in the foyer to light the candles with a long-stemmed oven lighter bought specifically for this purpose. I could hear her moving around upstairs, so I discarded the box and headed up, treading slowly and evenly on the balls of my feet like a cat burglar, articulating each step the way you do to keep candles lit. Now the candles were already more than halfway melted, gobs of spent red wax splashed across the pristine white frosting like blood dripped on snow. If things had gone according to plan, Jen would have blown them out by now. Then she would have wiped a chunk of frosting off with her finger and licked it, kissed me with cream cheese lips, and we would have lived happily ever after. But I hadn’t planned for this contingency and now the cake was ruined.

Later, I knew, there would be a slew of painful questions that resolved nothing. How could she do it? When did it start? Why? Were they in love, or simply after the thrill of illicit sex? Which answer did I prefer?

I didn’t really want to know the answers to any of these questions. When you’ve borne witness to your wife’s illicit copulation, you’d probably have a better chance at achieving some sort of closure with a .357 Magnum at close range than with the scientific method. But I knew I’d ask regardless, because that’s what you did. I’d been forced into a movie, and there was nothing to do but follow the script. But right then, at that very moment, it came to me like a revelation, the single most important question to be asked, and I was pretty damn certain I was ready to know the answer. The question, in its simplest form, was this: How far up Wade Boulanger’s ass could I jam a chocolate-strawberry cheesecake with thirty-three burning candles and one for good luck?

Pretty damn far, as it turns out.

After that, many things happened, quickly and simultaneously.

The first thing that happened was that Wade screamed. Not because he suddenly had an asshole full of chocolate-strawberry cheesecake, although that certainly would have been reason enough. Wade screamed, I would find out later from an indiscreet paramedic, because, before entering Jen, he had applied a cream to his cock, a cream advertised on his radio program, formulated to enhance sexual performance, and a cream that, unbeknownst to him, was highly flammable, and now, thanks to the thirty-three birthday candles and one for good luck, his testicles were on fire. They hadn’t put a warning on the label, probably because most men keep their privates away from open flames as a matter of routine. So Wade screamed as he flew off—and out—of Jen, and rolled across the bed onto his back, cupping his flaming scrotum as he went. To make matters worse, he’d been only seconds away from ejaculating when he caught fire, and now, even as he writhed in pain, he spurted tiny ribbons of baked ejaculate into the air.

As Wade screamed and burned and came hotly into his hands, Jen screamed as well, rolling as fast as she could in the other direction. Jen screamed first because Wade had pulled out of her with such force, knocking the bridge of her nose with his forehead hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. And then, through the kaleidoscopic prism of her tears, she saw me standing at the foot of the bed, my hands covered in red and brown cheese goop, and so her scream was one of surprise and shame, which turned to pain as she rolled off the bed, landing in a heap on the floor, the heel of Wade’s overturned, four-hundred-dollar loafer digging painfully into her thigh.

And I screamed, because what I felt right then was so much worse than burned balls or a broken nose, which is what Jen would later find out she had suffered. This wrecked room had been my bedroom; this bed, smeared with cheesecake and bodily fluids, had been my bed; and this woman, this naked, cowering, crumpled woman on the floor, had been my wife, and now, in a matter of seconds, I had lost them all.

And then everyone stopped screaming and there followed one of those moments of dead silence where you just stand there feeling the planet spin beneath your feet until it makes you dizzy. The smells of sex and burnt scrotum filled the air like a gas leak, and I swear, if someone had lit a match the room would have exploded.

“Judd!” Jen cried out from the floor.

Still groaning in pain, his eyes lit with terror at the untold damage his testes might have sustained, Wade rolled clumsily off the bed and charged into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. Naked men shouldn’t run. From behind the door, the sound of running water could be heard, punctuated by Wade’s guttural curses.

I looked at Jen, sitting naked on the floor, her back up against her night table, knees pulled up against her flattened breasts as she sobbed into her hands, and I felt the urge to get on my knees and pull her into my arms, the way I would have under pretty much any other circumstances. And I actually felt myself moving toward her, but then stopped. It had been only a minute or so since I’d walked through the bedroom door, and my brain had not yet adjusted to this suddenly transformed world where I no longer comforted Jen because I hated her. I was a whirling mass of outdated reflexes and violent impulses, and I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do. The urge to flee was overwhelming, but leaving the two of them in my house seemed too much like unconditional surrender. I needed to lash out, hide, get out of there, weep, plant my thumbs in Wade’s eye sockets to crush his eyeballs, hold Jen, strangle Jen, kill myself, go to sleep, and wake up and be twenty again, all in the same instant. A complete nervous breakdown was not out of the question.

Jen looked up at me, stricken, her eyes red with tears, blood and snot running from her nose down her chin and onto her chest. I actually felt bad for her, and hated myself for it.

“I can’t believe you did this,” I heard myself say.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, shivering into her arms.

“Get dressed, and get him out of my house.”

That was the extent of our conversation. Nine years of marriage gone in a heartbeat, and not very much to say about it. I stepped out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind me hard enough to dislodge something in the drywall, which could be heard rattling inside as it fell. I stood in the hall for a moment, shaken and desolate, exhaled a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, and headed downstairs to smash her grandmother’s china to smithereens, which is what I was still doing when the police and the paramedics showed up.

“So what happens now?” Jen said. We were standing in the kitchen, attempting a conversation amidst the copious ruins of the shattered china.

“Shut up.”

“I know this won’t mean anything to you right now, but I am really sorrier than I’ll ever be able to tell you.”

“Stop talking.”

It wasn’t going very well.

“There’s no excuse for what I’ve done. I’d been unhappy for so long, you know, just kind of lost, and—”

“Will you please just shut your goddamn mouth?!” I shouted at her, and she flinched as if she thought I might hit her. Her nose had already swelled considerably and was starting to turn a nasty shade of purple in the spot where Wade’s forehead had smashed it earlier. When word of our troubles spread through the neighborhood, her bruised face would be the subject of tireless speculation among the housewives as they whispered over their nonfat lattes.

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. “I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need you to answer them in as few words as possible. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

“How long have you been fucking Wade?”

“Judd—”

“Answer the question!”

“A little over a year.”

You’d have thought, after the events of the last half hour, that I was beyond shocking by now. A little over a year wasn’t a fling, a random sexual indiscretion. It was a relationship. It meant that Jen and Wade had an anniversary. On our first anniversary, we had checked into a bed-and-breakfast in Newport. Jen wore a lavender negligee and I read her this goofy poem that made her cry so that later I could still taste the salt on her cheeks. How had Jen and Wade marked their first anniversary? And, now that you mention it, where did they count from? Their first flirtation? First kiss? First fuck? The first time someone said “I love you”? Jen was both sentimental and meticulous with her calendar and no doubt knew the exact dates of every one of those milestones.

For the last year or so, Jen had been running off at every possible opportunity to have sex with Wade Boulanger, my overly athletic, alpha male boss. It was inconceivable to me, no different than if I’d just found out that she was a serial killer, which would have been preferable actually. I’d have attended the trial, nodded somberly at the guilty verdict, told my story to People magazine, and gone about my business. At least I’d know where I was going to sleep that night.

“A little over a year,” I repeated. “You’re some kind of liar then, huh?”

“I’ve become one, yes.” She held my gaze, almost defiantly.

“Do you love him?”

She looked away.

I wasn’t expecting that, and it hurt.

Jen sighed, a long, dramatic, self-pitying sigh, as I considered the ramifications of slitting her throat with a shard of china. “We had our problems long before things started with Wade.”

“Well, nothing like the ones we’ve got now.”

She may have said something after that, but I had stopped hearing her. There was just the crunch of bone china underfoot as I walked across the kitchen, and the wailing hinge of the front door as I swung it open, and the sudden hiss of expelled air when my body finally remembered to start breathing again.

What the hell happens now?

I sat in my car, still in the driveway, gripping the wheel tight enough to turn my knuckles white, paralyzed with indecision. There is nothing sadder than sitting in a car and having absolutely nowhere to go. Unless, maybe, it’s sitting in a car in the driveway of the home that is suddenly no longer your home. Because, generally, even when you have nowhere to go, you can at least go home. Jen hadn’t just cheated on me, she’d made me homeless. A red-hot rage colored my fear like blood in the water, made me tremble. I wanted to throttle Jen, to feel her windpipe collapse under my thumbs. I wanted to stab Wade with one of those curved knives designed by aboriginal tribes for gutting humans, in through the sternum and up behind the chest plate to puncture vital organs, watch the dark blood, thick with dislodged bits of tissue, gurgle out of his mouth. I wanted to commit a dramatic suicide, drive through a guardrail into the Hudson River, leave Jen paralyzed with a guilt that would haunt her for the rest of her life, like I knew the sight of Wade humping her would now always haunt me. But she’d probably just go back into therapy, maybe even to that shrink she’d left because he made it a practice to hug her tightly after every session, a Freudian copping a feel. He would somehow convince her that she was the victim in all of this, that she owed it to herself to be happy again, and then my death would have been in vain. The best I could hope for was that she’d cheat on Wade by sleeping with her horny therapist, but was it actually cheating if you cheated on your illicit lover? I was new to all of this and didn’t know the bylaws.

In the rearview mirror I could see the front of the house, the bottom corners of the living room picture window, the line where the stone foundation gave way to staggered red bricks. My entire life, the sum total of my existence, was contained behind that wall, and it seemed to me that I should be able to step out of the car, walk through the front door, and simply reclaim it. The door would stick; it always did in the warmer months and needed to be pressed down as the doorknob was turned while you leaned your shoulder into the heavy alder wood. I had the keys right there, jingling against the steering column that I had no idea which way to turn.

What the bloody motherfucking hell happens now?

I checked my watch, the white-gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona Jen had bought me for my thirtieth birthday. I’d been fine with the Citizen I wore, missed it, actually, when she gave me this bulky piece of showy hardware, but things like that were important to Jen. She’d taken to the suburbs like an actress getting into character for a new role, and she was always determined that we both look the part.

“We could go on a great vacation for what this watch costs,” I’d objected.

“We can go on a great vacation anyway,” she said. “Vacations come and go. A watch like this is an heirloom.”

I was too young to have an heirloom. The word conjured up images of bedridden old men with yellow, calcified toenails and skeletal wrists, wasting away in musty rooms that smelled of Lysol and decay. “It’s five mortgage payments,” I said.

“It’s a gift,” Jen said, getting all snippy like she sometimes did.

“A gift that I paid for.”

I’d been married long enough to know that the remark was wrong and unkind and not remotely constructive, but I said it anyway. I did that sometimes. I couldn’t begin to tell you why. You get married and patterns form. Jen was genetically incapable of rendering any kind of verbal apology. I sometimes said shitty things that I didn’t quite mean. We accepted these foibles in ourselves and in each other, except at the moments they actually surfaced in real time, at which point we had to fight the urge to savagely bludgeon each other.

“So our money is your money?” Jen said, her eyes lighting up with the joy of indignation, and just like that, she had seamlessly transitioned us into a different fight. This was a skill she’d perfected over time, like a boxer who jabs and moves before the counterpunch can arrive. Arguing with her never failed to make me dizzy.

In the end, I kept the watch; there was never really any question. The Citizen was relegated to the little compartment in my sock drawer that held a set of keys to our old apartment, a couple of obsolete cell phones, my college I.D. card, a couple of Japanese throwing stars from my brief ninja phase in junior high, the foul ball I’d caught off Lee Mazzilli at Shea Stadium when I was a kid, and a handful of other artifacts from versions of myself long since dead and buried.

And now the Rolex said three o’clock in the afternoon. I needed some time to think, to consider the situation, figure out my next move. I fingered the buttons on my cell phone, flipped through my list of contacts, but I already knew I wouldn’t call anyone. Maybe Jen and I could still fix this thing, and if we did, we wouldn’t want anyone looking at us funny. I knew irrevocable damage had been done, innocence had been lost, trust slaughtered, but still, it was the age-old conundrum: If a wife sleeps with a boss, but no one finds out about it, did it actually happen? There was no one to call, no friends who weren’t also connected to Jen. I thought about calling my mother, but my father was in a coma and she had enough to deal with. My life was in a free fall, and there was nowhere to turn. A cold sense of desolation lodged itself somewhere in the base of my throat, and suddenly I was no longer enraged or devastated, but terrified of the immense, throbbing loneliness that was only now closing like a vise on my internal organs.

I drove through Kingston’s small business district, past the train station, to the I-87 overpass. I pulled over and watched the interstate for a while, the eighteen-wheelers and early commuters speeding past just ahead of the afternoon rush that would soon choke the northbound side. I considered getting on the highway and driving north, stopping only for gas and donuts until I reached Maine. I would find a small seaside town, rent a little house, and start over. The winters would be rough, but I’d trade in my Lexus for a rugged pickup truck with chains on the tires. I’d get a job, maybe something where I worked with my hands, drink at the local pub, adopt a one-eyed Labrador, and make friends with the fishermen. They’d tease me about my roots, maybe even affectionately refer to me as “New York.” In time, I would develop the faintest down-east accent. There would be a woman there, also from somewhere else, also running from an ugly past. She would be pretty and vulnerable and we would know each other instantly, would love each other fiercely, the way only two damaged people can. Nothing else would matter. Everyone in town would come to the wedding, held in the gazebo on the lawn of the town square. We’d be congratulated on the marquee of the local diner, right above the blue-plate special.

But then reality reasserted itself. There would be no small house in Maine, no one-eyed Labrador, no pretty, dark-eyed woman to make me whole again, and for a moment I sat there and mourned them. Then I turned the car around, still trembling—I hadn’t stopped since I’d left the house—and headed back into town, telling myself the interstate would still be there tomorrow, but for now, I was going to have to find something a little closer to home.

There’s not very much I’m proud of when it comes to the weeks that followed. I went into hibernation in the Lees’ dank, rented basement, growing roots on the sagging couch that the advertisement had called a “daybed.” The room smelled of mildew and laundry detergent, and when it was quiet, I could hear the lone, bare lightbulb humming in its socket. I watched television pretty much nonstop. I rarely showered and grew a beard. I masturbated joylessly. I shaved the beard into a goatee and gained fifteen pounds. I composed long, humiliating e-mails to Jen, rage-filled diatribes and pathetic entreaties, tapping away furiously on my BlackBerry until my thumbs burned, cursing, excoriating, imploring, begging, and, ultimately, deleting. I lay there at night, staring at the ceiling as the house’s ancient plumbing shook and clanged violently behind the thin drywall, picturing Jen and Wade going at it like porn stars to the rhythm of the banging pipes. Bang! Bang! Bang! And then climax, to the rumble of water through the walls every time one of the Lees flushed, which was pretty much every fifteen minutes or so. My God, it was like those two never stopped urinating. All night, at regular intervals I could hear them above me, Mrs. Lee’s quick pitter-patter, the hiss of Mr. Lee dragging his slippers, the heavy plastic smack of the toilet seat, and then the flush, which sounded like white-water rapids behind the scraped gypsum walls of the basement. I was thirty-four years old and homeless, lying awake in the dead of night on a lumpy sofa bed in a rented basement, listening to my landlords piss and shit while my former wife and former boss sixty-nined in my head. Rock bottom rose up to meet me.

Chapter 4

The gravedigger looks like Santa Claus, and I don’t believe for a minute he doesn’t know it. With his long white beard and stout build, he has to know the effect of wearing a red and white anorak and how inappropriate the whole getup looks in the Mount Zion Cemetery. When you spend your days putting corpses into the ground, I guess you have to find the fun where you can. But this morning, as we bury my father in a teeming downpour, Saint Nick is all business, even as his ridiculous raincoat makes him stand out like a bloodstain against a sky the color of a dead tooth. He quietly directs the pallbearers in the placement of the coffin onto the hydraulic frame rigged over the freshly dug grave. Paul and I are at the head of the coffin, and Wendy’s husband, Barry, is in the middle, across from the empty spot where Phillip would have been if he’d shown up. My uncle Mickey and his son Julius, fresh off the plane from Miami, carry the foot of the coffin. We haven’t seen Mickey in decades—he and Dad had a falling-out over some money Dad lent him—and Julius is all but a stranger to us. They look like suntanned gangsters, this uncle and cousin, in their unnecessary designer sunglasses, their slicked-back hair, their matching diamond pinky rings.

“To the right,” Saint Nick says. “All together now. No one lower him yet. You in the back, come up about six inches . . . there you go. Now on my mark, we’re going to lower him. Gentlemen at the feet, you’re out first, and watch your fingers . . .”

Movie directors often shoot funerals in the rain. The mourners stand in their dark suits under large black umbrellas, the kind you never have handy in real life, while the rain falls symbolically all around them, on grass and tombstones and the roofs of cars, generating atmosphere. What they don’t show you is how the legs of your suit, caked with grass clippings, cling soaked to your shins, how even under umbrellas the rain still manages to find your scalp, running down your skull and past your collar like wet slugs, so that while you’re supposed to be meditating on the deceased, instead you’re mentally tracking that trickle of water as it slides down your back. The movies don’t convey how the soaked, muddy ground will swallow up the dress shoes of the pallbearers like quicksand, how the water, seeping into the pine of the coffin, will release the smell of death and decay, how the large mound of dirt meant to fill the grave will be transformed into an oozing pile of sludge that will splatter with each stab of the shovel and land on the coffin with an audible splat. And instead of a slow and dignified farewell, everyone just wants to get the deceased into the ground and get the hell back into their cars.

We, the pallbearers, step away soaked and muddy from the grave and melt back into the fair-sized crowd gathered graveside, where an ineffective canvas pop-up shelter has been erected to fend off the rain. Friends, neighbors, and business associates all jockey for position under the canvas, the less fortunate ones forced to the edges, where the pooled water pours down from the roof in thick, drenching rivulets. Paul stands beside his wife, Alice, who leans against him to warm him as he cries. Barry finds Wendy, who hands him back his BlackBerry, which he can’t resist checking before sliding it into his belt holster like a gunslinger. I stand beside my mother, whose red eyes are dulled by the Valium she chose not to split today. Her hair, gray at the roots and auburn everywhere else, is pulled into a tight bun. Her black suit is formfitting and, as always, she’s showing way too much surgically enhanced cleavage. The height of her stiletto heels, like the diameter of her breast implants, is inappropriate for both her age and the occasion. She squeezes my hand, avoiding direct eye contact, and I feel Jen’s absence like a festering wound.

“It’s okay to cry,” Mom says quietly.

“I know.”

“You can laugh too. There’s no correct emotional response.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Mom is a shrink, obviously. But she’s more than that. Twenty-five years ago she wrote a book called Cradle and All: A Mother’s Guide to Enlightened Parenting. The book was a national phenomenon and turned my mother into something of a celebrity expert on parenting. Predictably, my siblings and I were screwed up beyond repair.

You’ve seen Cradle and All, thick as an almanac, with red and black borders and cover art of a naked toddler morphing into a teenager. The book starts with breast-feeding and toilet training and goes all the way through puberty (defecation to masturbation, we used to say), advising mothers in the same frank, maternal, gratuitously shocking tone Mom often used with us. On the back cover is a photo of Mom striking a sex kitten pose on our living room couch. There’s a tenth-anniversary edition, a fifteenth, a twentieth, and next year they will be releasing an updated twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, and Mom will do a twenty-city signing tour and all the major talk shows. There has been talk of an Oprah segment and the possibility of a face-lift before the book tour.

“Today we say good-bye to Morton Foxman, beloved husband and father, dear brother, and cherished friend.”

The speaker is Boner Grodner. He was Paul’s best friend when we were kids. Now he’s Rabbi Charles Grodner of Temple Israel, but to those of us who grew up with him, who were invited to the back of the school bus, where he presided over private viewings of purloined pornography from his father’s extensive collection, he will always be Boner. When Boner wasn’t smoking pot with Paul and trying to discern the hidden messages in Led Zeppelin songs, he was holding forth shamelessly on the pros and cons of various sex acts.

“Mort was never a big fan of ritual . . . ,” Boner says.

“Will you look at that,” Wendy says, elbowing me in the ribs. I follow her gaze across the cemetery to the access road, where a black Porsche has noisily pulled up. And for a moment, I don’t recognize him, this man attempting to knot his tie while running across the wet lawn in his rumpled suit pants and motorcycle jacket like he’s finishing a marathon. And then I do, from the way he runs shamelessly toward us, without the slightest hint of decorum. He is wearing moccasins, of all things.

“Phillip,” my mother says softly, and signals Boner to stop.

By this point Phillip’s given up on the tie, which he leaves hanging unknotted around his neck. He comes running down the lawn and then slides the last few feet, like we used to do on the slight slope of our front lawn when it rained, coming to a stop right in front of my mother.

“Mom,” he says, and throws his wet arms around her.

“You came,” she says, overjoyed. Phillip is her baby, and he’s spent his life reeling in the slack as fast as she can cut it for him.

“Of course I came,” he says. He pulls back and looks up at me. “Judd.”

“Hi, Phillip.”

He grabs my arm and pulls me into a dramatic hug. Phillip, my baby brother, who used to climb into bed with me, smelling of lavender baby shampoo, and press his smooth, rounded cheek against mine, gently pulling at my arm hairs as I told him stories. He loved to guess the morals of Aesop’s fables. Now he smells of cigarettes and mouthwash, and he’s put on a good ten pounds or so since I last saw him, most of it in his face. I feel the familiar wave of loss and regret that always seems to accompany our infrequent reunions. I’d give anything for him to be five again, happy and unbroken.

He reaches past me to shake hands with Paul, who reciprocates quickly and self-consciously, trying to speed things along and get the funeral back on track. Phillip kisses Wendy’s cheek.

“You got fat,” she whispers.

“You got old,” he responds in a stage whisper, loud enough for everyone to hear. Behind him, Boner clears his throat. Phillip turns around and straightens his jacket. “Sorry, Boner. Please continue.” Wendy hits the back of his head. “Charlie! Sorry. Rabbi Grodner,” he says quickly, but the chuckles have already rippled through the crowd and Boner looks momentarily homicidal.

“Before I call on Mort’s eldest son, Paul, to remember his father for us, I’d like to read a short psalm . . .”

“I shouldn’t have called him that,” Phillip whispers to me, eyes wide. “Damn.”

“It was an honest mistake.”

“It was disrespectful.”

I am tempted to point out that showing up a half hour late to his father’s funeral might also be construed as disrespectful, but it would be pointless. Phillip has always been happily impervious to advice and criticism.

“Be quiet!” Paul hisses at us. Phillip winks at me. And here we stand at our father’s grave, the three Foxman men, all roughed from the same template but put through different finishing processes. We each have our father’s dark curly hair and square, dimpled chin, but there would be no mistaking us for twins. Paul looks like me, only bigger, broader, and angrier; me on steroids. Phillip looks like me, only slimmer and much better-looking, his features rendered more gracefully, his smile wide and effortlessly seductive.

When Boner finishes reading his psalm, Paul steps up to deliver what is meant to be a eulogy but instead seems to be an acceptance speech for the Most Dedicated Son award. He thanks Dad for teaching him how to run the business; he thanks his wife, Alice, for taking a leave of absence from her job as a dental hygienist to help out at the stores when Dad fell ill, he thanks Mom for taking care of Dad, and then he talks at length about what it was like working with his father, running Foxman Sporting Goods, the Hudson Valley’s premiere sporting goods chain. He does not mention any of his siblings, all of whom are wet and cold and wishing for an orchestra to play him off the stage.

When he finally wraps up, he seems surprised that there is no applause. Saint Nick flips a switch on the hydraulics, and Dad’s coffin slowly descends into the grave. Once he is down, Boner steps forward and solemnly hands a tall garden shovel to Paul. “It is customary for members of the immediate family to each shovel some dirt into the grave, fulfilling the obligation of burying a loved one,” he says. “Our sages say burying someone is considered the truest form of kindness and respect, as the deceased will not be able to thank you for it.”

That’s kind of funny, actually, since Dad was not exactly prone to expressing gratitude to his children when he was alive. You were either screwing up, or you were invisible. He was quiet and stern in a way that led you to expect an Eastern European accent. He had soft blue eyes and unusually thick forearms, and when he made a fist it looked like he could punch through anything. He mowed his own lawn, washed his own car, and painted his own house. He did all these things capably, painstakingly, and in a way that silently passed judgment on anyone who paid for someone else to do it. He rarely laughed at jokes, just nodded his understanding, as if it was all pretty much what he’d expected. Of course, there was a lot more to him than that, it’s just that none of it is coming to me right now. At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues.

Paul digs into the large mound and tosses a scoop of muddy earth into the grave. He hands the shovel to me, and I do the same, and when the dirt hits the coffin I can feel something in me start to shake. I close my eyes against the hot wetness, and I can see Dad, reclining on a lounge chair in our backyard, gripping the hose gun and shooting at the moving targets of his young children as we ran between bases, making a machine-gun noise with his lips. He liked us as young children. It was when we grew older that he didn’t know what to make of us. Childhood feels so permanent, like it’s the entire world, and then one day it’s over and you’re shoveling wet dirt onto your father’s coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything. I hand the shovel to Wendy, who digs up maybe a tablespoon or so of damp earth and who manages to miss the open grave entirely. Phillip, who is congenitally incapable of moderation, digs up a comically huge pile that turns out to have a stone in it. The stone hits the coffin like a gunshot, startling us all, and the gray silence is pierced by a long howl as Phillip falls to his knees, sobbing. “Daddy!” he cries, while the rest of us watch him unravel, standing by silently horrified and, probably, ever so slightly envious.

Chapter 5

We all reconvene at Knob’s End, the cul-de-sac where my parents’ house stands. The house, a large white colonial, stands at the center of the dead end, where the blacktop blossoms into a wide circle, ideal for street hockey and bike riding. West Covington is a major thoroughfare through Elmsbrook, winding its way past strip malls and corporate parks before finally veering off into the residential area, where at the last rotary, it becomes Knob’s End. When people give directions to any home or business on West Covington, they use our house as a negative landmark; if you see the big white house, then you’ve gone too far. Which is precisely what I’m thinking as I pull into the driveway.

Dad was obsessive about maintaining the house. He was a handy guy, always painting and staining, cleaning out the gutters, changing out pipes, power-washing the patio. He was an electrician by trade, but he gave it up to go into business, and he missed working with his hands, couldn’t face the weekend without the prospect of manual labor. But now the paint is cracked and flaking off the window frames, there’s an ugly brown water stain just below the roofline, the bluestones on the front walk rattle like loose teeth, and the rose trellises lean away from the house like they’re trying to escape. The lawn hasn’t been watered enough, and it’s brown in patches, but the twin dogwoods we used to climb are in full bloom, their crimson leaves fanned out like an awning over the front walk. Consumed with Dad’s slow death, Mom forgot to cancel the pool service, and so the swimming pool in the yard glistens with blue water, but the grass is starting to come up through the paving stones around it. The house is like a woman you find attractive at a distance. The closer you get, the more you wonder what you were thinking.

Linda Callen, our neighbor and my mother’s closest friend, opens the door and hugs each one of us as we step into the house. She’s a pear-shaped woman with an easy smile, and there’s something vaguely rodent-like about her, not in a feral way, but more like a wise mother rat from a Disney cartoon, the sort that will sit in a tiny rocking chair and wear little rat glasses and be voiced by Judi Dench or Hellen Mirren. A kindly, regal, Academy Award-winning rat. She’s known us since birth and looks at us as her own children. Her son, Horry, stands behind her, staring at his feet as he takes our coats.

“Hey, Judd,” he says to me.

“Hey, Horry.”

He stiffens up when I pat his back. “I’m very sorry about Mort.”

“Thanks.”

When Horry was a toddler, his father, Ted, got drunk and somehow managed to drown himself in little Horry’s inflatable wading pool while Linda was out shopping. She came home to find Horry shivering in the pool, crying hysterically over his partially submerged dead father. After that it was just the two of them, living up the block from us and, more often than not, in our house. A grade ahead of Paul and behind Wendy, Horry integrated seamlessly into our family. In high school, he fell for Wendy, like everyone else in Elmsbrook did at some point or another, but he had the inside track, and so for a year or so we would walk in on them making out in darkened rooms. Then, in his sophomore year of college, Horry got into a fight in a bar—details are sketchy—and the upshot was that someone took a sawed-off baseball bat to his head and now Horry is a thirty-six-year-old man who lives with his mother and cannot drive a car or focus on anything for more than a few seconds. Sometimes he has these mini seizures where he stiffens up and loses the ability to speak. Every day my dad would pick him up and take him with him to the store, where Horry helped out in the stockroom and took everyone’s lunch orders. Now I guess he’ll be working for Paul.

When Wendy sees Horry, she throws her arms around him without taking off her raincoat, and he drops the coats he’s gathered to hug her back.

“Hey, Sunflower.”

“Horry,” she whispers into his neck.

His shirt is speckled with raindrops from her coat. He kisses her wet scalp, and when she pulls back, her eyes are red.

“Don’t cry,” he says.

“I’m not,” she says, and then bursts into tears.

“Okay, okay,” Horry says, blinking nervously as he bends down to pick up the coats he dropped.

SERENA, WENDY’S BABY girl, screams like she’s been stabbed. We can all hear her in amplified stereo as we eat lunch, thanks to the high-tech baby monitor Wendy has set up on the table in the front hall, but Wendy doesn’t seem at all inclined to go upstairs and quiet the baby. “We’re Letting Her Cry,” she announces, like it’s a movement they’ve joined. If they’re letting her cry anyway, I don’t really see the point of the baby monitor, but that’s one of those questions I’ve learned not to ask, because I’ll just get that condescending look all parents reserve for non-parents, to remind you that you’re not yet a complete person.

And the screaming baby is the least of it. Ryan, Wendy’s six-year-old, has discovered the living room piano, which hasn’t been tuned in decades, and he’s pounding out a throbbing cacophony with both fists. Barry, who has decided that now would be an optimal time to return some business calls, is pacing the hall between the dining room and the living room, loudly arguing the finer points of some deal that will no doubt add to his already grotesque fortune. Because he’s wearing a wireless earpiece, he looks like a lunatic ranting to himself. “The Japanese will never go for that,” he says, shaking his head. “We’re ready to commit, but the paper price is unacceptable.”

The thing about people who work in finance is that they consider their job infinitely more important than anything or anyone, and so it’s perfectly legitimate to tell everyone else to fuck off because they have a conference call with Dubai. Billions of dollars are involved, so things like a kid’s birthday or a wife’s dead father are simply not at the top of the agenda. Barry is almost never around, and when he is, he’s on the phone or scanning his BlackBerry with the furrowed brow of one who is dealing with shit that dwarfs your shit exponentially. If Barry was sitting next to the president of the United States during a nuclear attack, he’d still be staring down at his BlackBerry with his default expression, the one that says You think you’ve got problems? From what I can see he is not very good to Wendy, barely registers her existence, and leaves her to do all the heavy lifting with the kids. Wendy, though, has inherited our mother’s genetic imperative to keep up appearances. Everything is wonderful. Period.

“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.”

“Get out while you still can!” Alice jokes too loudly. Her agitated smile is a long, crooked fissure across her cheeks, widening painfully before faltering and then disappearing altogether.

“We’ve been down this road before,” Barry says. “It’s a nonstarter.”

“And this is my mom,” Phillip says, turning Tracy to face our mother, who is sitting beside Linda, forcing a smile.

“Hello, Tracy. I hope you won’t judge our behavior too harshly. It’s been a trying day.”

“Please, Mrs. Foxman. I’m the one who should apologize, for arriving unannounced at such a difficult time.”

“So why don’t you?” Wendy says.

“Wendy!” Mom snaps.

“He called Barry an ass.”

“I’m sorry,” Phillip says. “It’s been a while. It’s entirely possible, though highly unlikely, that Barry is no longer an ass.”

“Phillip.” Tracy says his name sternly, with control and conviction, and Phillip clams up like a trained dog.

“Phillip is nervous,” Tracy says. “This is hard for him. Obviously, he would have preferred to make the introductions under better circumstances, but in addition to being Phillip’s fiancée, I am also his life coach, and we both felt, at this difficult time, that it would help him greatly if I were here.”

“Define ‘life coach,’” my mother says, her tone clipped and loaded.

“Tracy was my therapist,” Phillip says proudly.

“You’re his therapist and you’re dating him?” Wendy says.

“As soon as we realized our feelings for each other, I referred Phillip to another colleague.”

“Is that even ethical?”

“It’s something we grappled with,” Tracy says.

“It just happened,” Phillip says in the same instant.

And then little Cole comes down the stairs, naked from the waist down, carrying the old white potty that’s been sitting under the sink in the hall bathroom since Phillip was toilet trained. Cole is in what Wendy refers to as his E.T. stage, wherein he waddles around the house like E.T., exploring and trashing everything within reach, making strange little noises as he goes. He steps over to Barry, who has finally ended his call and sat down at the table, and proffers the potty for his inspection. “Look, Daddy,” he says. “T!”

Barry looks down, uncomprehending. “What does he want?” Like he’s never met his three-year-old son before.

“T!” Cole yells triumphantly. And indeed, the crap in the potty does seem to be shaped like a crude letter T. Then Cole bends down and heaves the potty up over his head in a high arc that brings it crashing down onto the dining room table, shattering glasses and sending silverware flying. Alice screams, Horry and I dive for cover, and the contents of Cole’s overturned potty land on Paul’s plate like a side dish. Paul jumps back like a grenade has landed, so violently that he somehow takes Alice down with him in a jumble of limbs and chair legs.

“Jesus Christ, Cole!” Barry screams. “What the hell is wrong with you!”

“Stop yelling!” Wendy yells.

Cole looks up at his frazzled, worthless parents and, with no preamble, bursts into a loud, fully realized crying fit. And since neither one of them seem inclined to comfort him, I exercise my uncle privileges and pick him up to blubber into my neck, his tiny kid butt sticky against my forearm. “Good job, little man,” I say, “making in the potty like that.” Positive reinforcement and all that. After this trauma, the kid will likely be in diapers until he’s ten.

“I make a T,” he says through subsiding tears, rubbing his snot on my collar, and there’s nothing sweeter than a two-year-old speaking, with his high-pitched sincerity and his immigrant English. I’ve never really appreciated kids the way some people do, but I can listen to Cole talk all day. Of course, as an uncle, I’m not the one who has to scrape his crap off the table.

“That’s right, Cole,” I say, looking over at Paul’s plate. “It is a T, and a nice one at that.”

Paul and Alice climb to their feet shaken and nauseated. We are all standing now, posed around the table like a painting, the Foxman family minus one, contemplating the steaming, erudite turd on Paul’s plate. It’s utterly inconceivable that we will survive seven days together here, caroming off each other like spinning molecules in a chemical reaction. There’s no way to know how it will all shake out, but as far as metaphors go, you can’t do much better than shit on the good china.

Chapter 6

If you’ve ever been in a failed marriage, and statistically speaking, it’s a safe bet that you have, or, if not, that you soon will be, then you’ll know that the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it’s some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn’t fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or the Cure on the soundtrack. There you were, minding your own business, walking across campus to class, or stepping into a café for a cup of coffee, or dancing at a wedding, or drinking at a bar with some friends. And then you saw her, laughing at someone’s joke, tucking her hair behind her ear, or taking the stage with a friend to sing a slightly drunken karaoke version of “Ninety-nine Red Balloons” (and she was just drunk enough to cop to knowing the German lyrics too), or she was leaning against the wall, eyebrows arched genially over her lite beer as she surveyed the scene, or she was strolling alone through the falling snow without a jacket, her sleeves pulled tightly over her hands in the absence of gloves, or she was . . .

. . . riding her bike across the quad, on her way to class. I had seen her around, with her small leather backpack, her blond ponytail flying in the slipstream behind her as she sailed past on her red Schwinn. We were both juniors, but we didn’t have any classes together and were probably just a few weeks away from being on nodding terms. But on that day, as she pedaled past me, I called out to her, “Hey! Bike Girl!”

She braked too hard and skinned her shin on the pedal as she slid off the seat. “Ouch! Crap!”

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for you to actually stop.”

She looked at me, perplexed. “But you called out to me.” Her eyes were an incandescent green; I suspected tinted lenses, but I wanted to write a song about them right there anyway. I’d stand outside her dorm room with a guitar and serenade her, while her friends looked on, smiling approvingly in their skimpy pajamas.

“Yeah, I guess I did. Poor impulse control, I’m sorry. I didn’t really have a plan beyond that.”

Her laugh was rich and throaty. She did it like a girl who knew how to laugh, who had a long association with laughing. And she looked at me, this pretty blond girl, the kind of girl from whom I’d been conditioned to expect a smiling but no less firm rejection, and she said, “I’ll give you five seconds to come up with one.”

This was unprecedented, and the miracle emboldened me. “I just thought we’d have a lot to talk about,” I said.

“Really.”

“This bike, for instance. You’re the only girl on campus who rides a bike.”

“So?”

“I think you do it ironically.”

“You’re accusing me of ironic cycling?”

“It’s a growing sport. There’s an Olympic petition.”

“Is your hair always like that?”

I had thick, curly hair like pulled springs, and back in college I kind of gave it the run of the place. “The higher the hair, the closer to God.”

“I limp,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s why I ride the bike when I cross the quad. I was born with one leg shorter than the other.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

“Afraid not.”

So she got off the bike and showed me her custom sneaker. “You see how this sole is almost an inch thicker than the other?”

“Damn. I’m an asshole.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t mean it.”

“I’m Judd, by the way. Judd Foxman.”

“I’m Jen.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll call you Bike Girl for a little while longer.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I’m only going to call you Jen after I’ve kissed you.”

She seemed accustomed to such bold repartee. “But what if you never do?”

“Then it won’t matter anyway.”

“You’re ruling out the possibility of friendship.”

“I’m guessing a girl like you has enough friends.”

“And what kind of girl is that, exactly?”

“An ironic cycler.”

That laugh again, from out of nowhere, like it had been percolating inside her waiting to be released. In the sixty seconds she’d known me, I’d already made her laugh twice, and I’d read enough Playboy by then to know that beautiful women want a man who can make them laugh. Of course, what they really meant was a man who could make them laugh after he’d delivered multiple orgasms on his private jet with his trusty nine-inch cock, but I was on a roll, and hope tentatively unfurled its wings in my chest, preparing to take flight.

I knew that she was much too pretty and well-adjusted for me. Over the last few years, I had carved out a niche for myself on campus among the screwed-up girls with dark lipstick and too many earrings, who worked through their mixed bag of childhood traumas by drinking excessively and having sex with unthreatening Jewish guys with ridiculous hair. This had actually happened exactly twice in as many years, but since it was all the action I’d seen, I liked to think of it as a niche. And I was not at all Jen’s type, but her type, genetically gifted man-boys with expensive sports cars, hairless Abercrombie bodies, and entitlement issues, hadn’t really been working for her as of late. Her last boyfriend, Everett—that was really his name, and he looked exactly how you’re picturing him, only not as tall—had actually told her that her poor posture made her look unimpressive. This from a boy, she later railed to me, with a concave chest and a pencil-thin dick. The one before that, David, had returned from winter break to tell her he had gotten engaged and was getting married that spring. Jen was in turmoil; she was grappling with self-esteem issues and a failed attempt at anorexia. I was in the right place at the right time, and the gods were finally ready to cut me some slack.

But I didn’t know any of that yet. All I knew was that a conversation that should have ended already seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and a girl who, according to the laws of the universe, shouldn’t have given me a second glance was now leaning forward, her smiling mouth aimed unmistakably at mine. It was a quick, soft peck, but I felt the give in her lips, a hint of plush softness just beneath the surface, and I was in love. Seriously. Just like that.

“Poor impulse control,” she said, proud of her daring.

“Jen.” I exhaled slowly, running my tongue along the inside of my lips, savoring the waxy residue of her lip gloss.

“Judd.”

“I think I’m going to call you Bike Girl until we have sex.”

She laughed again, and that was three, for those keeping score at home, and I didn’t stand a chance. Later on, Jen would swear that was the moment she knew she was going to marry me. That’s the problem with college kids. I blame Hollywood for skewing their perspective. Life is just a big romantic comedy to them, and if you meet cute, happily-ever-after is a foregone conclusion. So there we were, the pretty blond girl milking her very slight congenital limp in order to seem damaged and more interesting, and the nervous boy with the ridiculous hair trying so hard to be clever, the two of us hypnotized by the syncopated rhythms of our furiously beating hearts and throbbing loins. That stupid, desperate, horny kid I was, standing obliviously on the fault line of his embryonic love, when really, what he should have been doing was running for his life.

Chapter 7

Boner comes by with three volunteers from the Hebrew Burial Society to deliver the mourning supplies. They rearrange furniture and set things up with a hushed military precision, after which Boner gathers the four Foxman siblings in the living room. Five low folding chairs with thick wooden frames and faded vinyl upholstery are lined up in front of the fireplace. The mirror above the mantel has been clouded over with some kind of soapy white spray. The furniture has all been pushed to the perimeter of the room, and thirty or so white plastic catering chairs have been unfolded and placed in three rows facing the five low chairs. There are two silver collection plates placed on the piano. People paying their respects to the family can make dollar contributions to the burial society or to a local children’s cancer society. A few lonely bills have been placed on each plate like tips. In the front hall, a thick candle formed in a tall glass is lit and placed on the table, next to Wendy’s baby monitor. This is the shiva candle, and there is enough wax in the glass for the candle to burn for seven days.

Phillip nudges one of the low chairs with his toe. “It was nice of Yoda to lend us his chairs.”

“They’re shiva chairs,” Boner says. “You sit low to the ground as a sign of mourning. Originally, the bereaved sat on the floor. Over time, the concept has evolved.”

“It still has a ways to go,” Phillip grumbles.

“What’s with the mirror?” Wendy wants to know.

“It’s customary to remove or cover all the mirrors in a house of mourning,” Boner says. “We’ve fogged up all the bathroom mirrors as well. This is a time to avoid any and all impulses toward personal vanity and simply reflect on your father’s life.”

We all nod, the way you would at a self-indulgent museum tour guide, taking the path of least resistance to get to the snack bar.

“A little while ago, your father called me to the hospital,” Boner says. He was a tense, chubby kid, and now he’s a tense, beefy man, with rosy cheeks that make him look perpetually angry or embarrassed. I don’t know exactly when Boner found God; I lost track of him after high school. Boner, not God. I lost track of God when I joined Little League and could no longer attend Hebrew school classes at Temple Israel, the synagogue we went to once a year for Rosh Hashanah services.

“Your father wasn’t a religious man. But toward the end, he regretted the absence of tradition in his life, in the way he raised his children.”

“That doesn’t really sound like Dad,” I say.

“It’s actually somewhat common for people facing death to reach out to God,” Boner says, in the exact same self-important, didactic tone he employed as a kid when explaining to us what a blow job was.

“Dad didn’t believe in God,” Phillip says. “Why would he reach out to something he didn’t believe in?”

“I guess he changed his mind,” Boner says, and I can tell he’s still pissed at Phillip for the earlier nickname slip.

“Dad never changed his mind,” I say.

“Your father’s dying request was that his family sit shiva to mark his passing.”

“He was on a lot of drugs,” Wendy points out.

“He was perfectly lucid.” Boner’s face is starting to turn red.

“Did anyone else hear him say it?” Phillip.

“Phillip.” Paul.

“What? I’m just saying. Maybe Bone—Charlie misunderstood.”

“I didn’t misunderstand,” Boner says testily. “We discussed it at length.”

“Don’t some people sit shiva for just three days?” Me.

“Yes!” Wendy.

“No!” Boner shouts. “The word ‘shiva’ means ‘seven.’ It’s seven days. That’s why it’s called shiva. Your father was very specific.”

“Well, I can’t be away from the business for seven days,” Paul says. “Believe you me, Dad would never have gone for that.”

“Listen, Charlie,” I say, stepping forward. “You’ve delivered the message. You held up your end. We’ll discuss it amongst ourselves now and come to a consensus. We’ll call you if we have any questions.”

“Stop it!”

We all turn to see my mother and Linda standing under the archway to the living room. “This is what your father wanted,” Mom says sternly, stepping into the room. She has taken off her suit jacket, and her low-cut blouse reveals her infamous cleavage. “He was not a perfect man, and not a perfect father, but he was a good man, and he tried his best. And you all haven’t exactly been model children lately.”

“It’s okay, Mom. Calm down,” Paul says, reaching out for her.

“Stop interrupting me. Your father lay dying in his bed for the last half year or so. How many times did you visit him, any of you? Now I know, Wendy, Los Angeles isn’t exactly next door, and, Judd, you’ve been going through a rough time, I understand that. And, Phillip . . . Well, God only knows what you’ve been up to. It’s like having a son in Iraq. At least then I’d know where you were. But your father made his last wish known, and we will honor it. All of us. It’s going to be crowded, and uncomfortable, and we’ll all get on each other’s nerves, but for the next seven days, you are all my children again.” She takes a few steps into the room and smiles at us. “And you’re all grounded.”

My mother spins on one stiletto heel and plants herself like a child into one of the low seats. “Well,” she says. “What are you waiting for?”

We all hunker down in the seats, silent and sullen, like a group of scolded schoolchildren.

“Um, Mrs. Foxman,” Boner says, clearing his throat. “You’re really not supposed to wear dress shoes when you’re sitting shiva.”

“I have bad arches,” she says, flashing him a look sharp enough for a circumcision.

The one tattered remnant of Jewish observance that my parents had maintained was having the family stay over for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Every year, as summer bled into fall, the call would come, more a summons than an invitation, and we would all descend upon Knob’s End, to argue over sleeping arrangements, grudgingly attend services at Temple Israel, and share an overwrought holiday meal during which, tradition had it, at least one person would theatrically storm out of the house in a huff. Usually, it would be Alice or Wendy, although a few years ago it was memorably Jen, after my father, already well into his peach schnapps, told her, apropos of nothing in particular, that our dead son wouldn’t have been technically Jewish since she was a gentile. This was just a few months after she’d delivered our dead baby, and so no one blamed her for hurling her plate at him as she stormed out. “What got into her?” he said. On the plus side, she insisted we go home immediately, which got me out of having to attend the interminable services at Temple Israel the following morning, where Cantor Rothman’s slow, operatic tenor makes you want to prostrate yourself on the spot and accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.

ALICE AND TRACY are helping Linda in the kitchen. Horry, on Paul’s orders, has gone back to the store to finish out the day. The Elmsbrook store is the flagship, and it stays open until nine every night. Barry is upstairs, watching a video with the boys. So it’s just the four of us and Mom, sitting on low chairs, feeling sheepish and uncomfortable.

“So,” Phillip says. “What happens now?”

“People will come,” Mom says.

“How do they know when to come?”

“We are not the first people to ever sit shiva,” Paul grumbles.

“People will come,” Mom says.

“Oh, people will come, Ray,” Phillip intones, doing his best James Earl Jones. “People will most definitely come.” Phillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics. To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored. When triggered, he will quote thoughtlessly, like some kind of savant.

Paul looks up to catch me staring at the scar on his right hand. It’s a thick, pink line that runs up the meaty edge of his palm, crossing his wrist and ending in a splotchy cluster on the inside of his forearm. There’s another, nastier one on his shoulder that radiates up toward his neck in raised tendrils the color of dead flesh, where the rottweiler missed his jugular by a few inches. Whenever I see him, I can’t help but stare at the scars, looking for the teeth marks I know are there.

He twists his arm around self-consciously, hiding the scar, and flashes me a hard look. Paul has not addressed me directly since I arrived. He rarely addresses me if he doesn’t have to. This is due to a combination of factors, most notably the rottweiler attack that ended his college baseball career before it started and for which he blames me. He’s never come out and said that, of course. Other than Phillip, the men in my family never come out and say anything. So I don’t know for sure if that’s when Paul started hating me, or if that’s just when Paul started hating everybody.

Another possible factor is that I lost my virginity to Alice back in high school, and she to me, which isn’t as creepy as it sounds. Alice was my year in high school, not even on Paul’s radar until many years later, when she cleaned his teeth and he picked her up with the always reliable “Didn’t you used to go out with my kid brother?” By then I was long gone from Elmsbrook, already engaged to Jen, so if anyone is to blame for that one, it’s Paul and not me. He knew going in that I’d been there first. For all I know, he may have even started sleeping with her to somehow get back at me for the dog attack, which would have been twisted and stupid and so very Paul. So now, every time Paul sees me, it’s there in the back of his mind, that I deflowered his wife, that I’ve seen Alice naked, that I’ve kissed the wine-colored birthmark in the shape of a question mark that starts below her navel and ends at the junction of her legs. It was seventeen years ago, but men don’t let go of things like that. And every time Alice and I see each other, we can’t help but flash back to those four months we spent having sex in cars, basements, shrubs, and once, late at night, in the plastic tunnel above the slide in the elementary school playground. You never forget your first time, no matter how much you’d like to.

“How are things at the store?” I ask him.

He looks at me, considering the question. “Same old same old.”

“Any plans to expand to any more locations?”

“Nope. No plans to expand. We’re in a recession, or don’t you read the paper?”

“I was just asking.”

“Although I guess a recession is the least of your problems, huh, Judd?”

“What do you mean by that, Paul?” We are ending our sentences with names, which is the equivalent of fighters circling, looking to throw the first punch.

“Paul,” Mom says.

“It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “We’re just catching up.”

“Forget it,” Paul says.

“No. It’s fine,” I say. “What you meant was, between being unemployed and my wife screwing around, I have bigger things to worry about than the economic state of the country. Right?”

“That’s certainly one way of looking at it.”

“I was surprised I didn’t hear from you when it happened,” I say. “I moved out almost eight weeks ago. I mean, none of you called me. That’s par for the course, I guess. If you didn’t call when we lost the baby, I wouldn’t expect you to call over something as trivial as the end of my marriage. But I figured you’d have called, Paul, just to rub it in a little. It’s lucky Dad died when he did, or who knows when you may have gotten around to it?”

“I’m not happy about it. I always liked Jen.”

“Thanks, Paul.” I wait an extra beat for emphasis. “And I always liked Alice.”

“What did you just say?” Paul says, clenching teeth, fists, and bowels.

“Which part didn’t you hear?”

“All the young girls love Alice.” Phillip sings out the Elton John lyrics, loud and off-key. “Tender young Alice they say . . .”

“So, Phillip,” Wendy says. “How did you go about seducing your therapist?”

“Later,” Phillip says. “It’s just getting interesting.”

“Oh, for crying out loud!” my mother says.

I look at the Rolex Jen bought for me with my own money that I haven’t gotten around to selling on eBay yet. We’ve been sitting shiva for exactly one half hour. The doorbell rings, and God only knows to what depths of passive-aggressive sniping we might have descended if it hadn’t. And as the room starts to fill with the first somber-faced neighbors coming to pay their respects, it becomes clear to me that the reason for filling the shiva house with visitors is most likely to prevent the mourners from tearing each other limb from limb.

When we were little kids, Dad took Paul and me fishing at a wide, shallow creek in the shadow of an overpass near some back roads a few miles north of the town limits. Paul and I pulled water-smoothed rocks from the creek bed and Dad knotted them into our fishing lines to serve as weights. Then, after slicing some inchworms with his pocket knife to bait our hooks, he taught us how to cast our lines out across the creek. For Paul and me, the casting was more fun than the fishing. We would reel our lines in, stretch the rods out behind us, and try to cast as far across the creek as we could. About an hour into this, Paul slung his rod back and managed to hook my ear just before he launched his rod forward. I felt a sudden, hot pain as my ear cartilage tore, the rock in his line flying back to slap my skull, and suddenly I was on my back in the dirt, looking up at a cloudless sky. Dad had to take off his T-shirt to stanch the flow of blood. Paul stood over me apologizing, but angrily, like it was all my fault. Flecks of my blood clung to Dad’s curly chest hairs. I didn’t feel a lot of pain, I just remember being amazed at how Dad’s crumpled T-shirt went from white to completely red in a matter of minutes. The damage to my ear turned out to be minimal, but there’s still the faint depression in the bone behind my ear where the rock hit me, like a fingerprint in hardened clay.

Chapter 8

We’ve been at it for a few hours already, and the visitors keep coming, pouring through the door in an endless stream, as if busloads are being dropped off at the front door every half hour. Knob’s End has become a parking lot, and my face is sore from smiling politely as my mother introduces and reintroduces everyone, my ass numb from the cheap foam underneath the crappy vinyl of the shiva chair. The plastic tips of the flimsy catering chairs set up around the room scrape the oak floor as the guests jockey for position, gradually working their way from the back of the room to the front, where they can ask the same questions as the guests who came before them, invoke the same platitudes, and squeeze my mother’s forearm with theatrically pursed lips. We should have a handout at the door to speed things along, a brief summary of Dad’s illness and all that transpired in the final days, maybe even a photocopy of his charts and a four-color printout of his last CAT scan, because that seems to be what all of his and Mom’s peers want to talk about. And at the bottom of the handout a simple asterisked declaration would state that it’s of absolutely no interest to us where you were when you found out our father/husband had died, like he was John F. Kennedy or Kurt Cobain.

Paul gets by without saying much, offering up a series of Rorschach grunts that people seem to hear as actual responses. Wendy shamelessly takes cell phone calls from her girlfriends back in L.A., and Phillip amuses himself by lying his ass off, seeing how far he can push the boundaries of credibility.

Middle-Aged Woman: My God, Phillip! The last time I saw you, you were in high school. What do you do now?

Phillip: I run a Middle East think tank in D.C.

Phillip: I manage a private equity biotech fund.

Phillip: I’ve been coordinating a freshwater project for UNICEF in Africa.

Phillip: I’m working as a stuntman on the new Spielberg project.

And then there are the platters. Jews don’t send flowers, they send food, in large quantities: fruit platters, assorted cookie platters, cold cuts, casseroles, cakes, wild rice salads, bagels and smoked salmon. Linda, who has effortlessly slipped back into her habitual role of supplemental caretaker for the Foxman clan, sets up the nonperishable items on the dining room table, along with a coffee samovar, which leads to an ad hoc buffet situation. The visitors work their way through the chairs, chat with the bereaved, and then gravitate into the dining room for coffee and nosh. It’s like a wake, except it’s going to last for seven days, and there’s no booze. Who knows what kind of epic party this might become if someone popped the plastic lock on the whiskey bar?

The visitors are mostly senior citizens, friends and neighbors of my parents, coming to see and be seen, to pay their respects and contemplate their own impending mortality, their heart conditions and cancers still percolating below the surface, in livers and lungs and blood cells. Another of their number has fallen, and while they’re here to console my mother, you can see in their staunch, pale faces the morbid thrill of having been passed over by death. They have raised their kids, paid off their mortgages, and they will spend their golden years burying each other, somberly keeping track of their relentlessly dwindling numbers over coffee and crumb cake in houses just like this one.

I’m supposed to be decades away from this, supposed to be just starting my own family, but there’s been a setback, a calamitous detour, and you wouldn’t think you could get any more depressed while sitting shiva for your father, but you’d be wrong. Suddenly, I can’t stop seeing the footprints of time on everyone in the room. The liver spots, the multiple chins, the sagging necks, the jowls, the flaps of skin over eyes, the spotted scalps, the frown lines etched into permanence, the stooped shoulders, the sagging man breasts, the bowed legs. When does it all happen? In increments, so you can’t watch out for it, you can’t fix it. One day you just wake up and discover that you got old while you were sleeping.

There were so many things I thought I might become back in college, but then I fell for Jen and all my lofty aspirations evaporated in a lusty haze. I just never imagined a girl like that would want someone like me, and I had this idea that if I applied all of my energy toward keeping her happy, the future would sort itself out. And so I disappeared without a trace into the Bermuda Triangle of her creamy spread thighs, scraping through my classes with B’s and C’s, and when, shortly after graduation, she accepted my proposal, I remember feeling, more than anything, an overwhelming sense of relief, like I had just finished a marathon.

And now I have no wife, no child, no job, no home, or anything else that would point to a life being lived with any success. I may not be old, but I’m too old to have this much nothing. I’ve got the double chin of a stranger in photographs, the incipient swell of love handles just above my hips, and I’m pretty sure that my hairline, the one boundary I’ve always been able to count on, is starting to creep back on me when I’m not looking, because every so often my fingers discover some fresh topography on my upper forehead. To have nothing when you’re twenty is cool, it’s expected, but to have nothing when you’re halfway to seventy, softening and widening on a daily basis, is something altogether different. It’s like setting out to drive cross-country without any gas money. I will look back at this time and see it as the start of a slow process that ends with me dying alone after living out my days in an empty apartment with only the television and a slow, waddling dog to keep me company, the kind of place that will smell stale to visitors, but not to me, since the stale thing will be me. And I can feel that miserable future hurtling toward me at high speed, thundering across the plains in a cloud of dust like a wildebeest stampede.

Before I know it, I’m on my feet, ducking and weaving through the crowd, intercepting random bits of conversation, keeping my eye on the sanctuary of the kitchen door.

“. . . Paul, the older one. He spoke very nicely . . .”

“. . . on a ventilator for three months . . . basically a vegetable . . .”

“. . . a place down on Lake Winnipesaukee. We do it every year. It’s beautiful. Maureen brings the kids . . .”

“. . . recently separated. Apparently, there was a third party involved . . .”

That last one pierces me like a fishhook—but by then I’m at the door, and I’m not looking back. I step into the air-conditioned quiet of the kitchen and lean up against the wall, catching my breath. Linda is crouched at the fridge, absently chewing on the nub of a raw carrot like a cigar, trying to make room for all of the food that’s been delivered.

“Hey there, Judd,” she says, smiling at me. “What can I get you? And, bear in mind, we have pretty much everything now.”

“How about a vanilla milkshake?”

She closes the fridge and looks at me. “That, we don’t have.”

“Well, then, I guess I’ll have to run out and grab one.”

Her smile is sweet and maternal. “Getting a little intense in there?”

“We passed intense a while ago.”

“I heard the shouting.”

“Yeah . . . sorry. And thank you, you know, for all of your help, for taking care of Mom and everything.”

She looks startled for a second, seems on the verge of saying something, but then just pops the carrot back into her mouth and smiles. From the other room, we can hear my mother laughing.

“Well, Mom seems to be enjoying herself, at any rate.”

“She’s had a long time to prepare for this.”

“I guess so.”

We stand there for a minute, the well of small talk having run dry.

“Horry looks good,” I say, and wish instantly that I hadn’t.

Linda’s smile is sad, ragged, and somehow beautiful, the aching smile of the long-suffering. “You learn not to think about what might have been, and to just appreciate what you have.”

“Yeah. I’m probably not the right guy to hear that right about now.”

She steps over to me and puts her arms on my shoulders. It’s been forever since I’ve been touched, since I’ve even had any sustained eye contact, and I can see my tears reflected in her eyes. “You’re going to be okay, Judd. I know you feel lost now, but you won’t feel this way for long.”

“How do you know?” I am suddenly inches away from a full-on crying jag. Linda diapered me, fed me, mothered me almost as much as my own mother, without ever being recognized for it. I should have sent her Mother’s Day cards every year, should have called her every so often to see how she was doing. How is it that, in all these years, I never once spared so much as a thought for her? I feel a dark wave of regret for the kind of person I turned out to be.

“You’re a romantic, Judd. You always were. And you’ll find love again, or it will come find you.”

“Did it ever find you again?”

Something changes in her expression, and she lets go of me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That was a terrible thing to say.”

She nods, accepting my apology. “It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t,” Linda says, not unkindly. “And it’s not the time or place to go into details, but rest assured, I have not spent the last thirty years sleeping alone.”

“Of course not. I’m an asshole.”

“Maybe, but you get a free pass this week.” She offers up a friendly smirk. “Just don’t abuse it.” She looks out the window to the crowded street in front. “Looks like you’re parked in by Jerry Lamb’s Hummer. Why a retired doctor needs to drive a tank like that in Elmsbrook, New York, is a question for the ages. His penis can’t be that small, can it?” She reaches into her apron and tosses me some keys. “It’s the blue Camry. If you time it right, you can pick up Horry on your way back. I don’t like him walking home this late.”

LINDA’S CAR SMELLS like yeast and flowers. Other than the small gold locket that hangs from her rearview mirror, the car is empty and clean in a way that strikes me as sad. Or maybe anything empty is just striking a chord with me these days. The earlier rain has tapered off into a light mist that dusts the windshield just enough to blur the headlights of oncoming cars. I drive down Centre Street and park at a meter in front of Foxman Sporting Goods’ flagship store.

Dad worked as an electrician, but when Paul was born he decided he wanted a legacy for his children. He borrowed money from his father-in-law to buy a small sporting goods store out of bankruptcy, and over the years he expanded it into a chain of six stores across the Hudson Valley and into Connecticut. He was a firm believer in customer service and a knowledgeable staff, and proudly rebuffed the larger national chains who offered to buy him out every few years. Every Saturday he would visit the five satellite stores, to check their books and troubleshoot. When Paul and I were younger, he would wake us up at first light and hustle us into his car to come along. Dobbs Ferry, Tarrytown, Valhalla, Stamford, and Fairfield. I’d sit in the back, my eyes still glazed with sleep, watching the sun come up behind the trees along the highway through the tinted windows of his secondhand Cadillac. The car smelled of pipe tobacco and the tape deck played a steady rotation of Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, Jackson Browne, and Peggy Lee. Every so often I’ll hear one of those songs, in an elevator or a waiting room, and it will take me right back to that car, lulled into semiconsciousness by the soft thrum of the road seams, my father humming along to the music in his gravelly voice.

Once a quarter he’d bring along Barney Cronish, his accountant. Paul hated it when Barney came, because he had to give up the front seat for him, and because Barney had to stop at every rest stop on the thruway, either to buy a coffee or piss out the last one. Barney also farted loudly and without shame, at which point Paul and I would crack our windows and stick our heads into the wind like a couple of dogs to escape the rancid, cabbage smell. Sometimes my father would press the window lock button in the front and play dumb while we suffocated, which was the closest he came to joking around.

Dad didn’t seem to know how to be around us when he wasn’t working. He was great with us when we were small, would cradle us in his massive forearms or bounce us on his knee while humming Mozart . . . As toddlers, we would cling to his sausage fingers as he walked us down the block, and he would lie down with us at bedtime, often falling asleep on the bed with us, until Mom came to get him. But he seemed hopelessly bewildered by us once we got a little bit older. He didn’t understand our infatuation with television and video games, seemed bewildered by our able-bodied laziness, by our messy rooms and unmade beds, our longer hair and our silk-screened T-shirts. The older we got, the further he retreated into his work, his weekend papers, and his schnapps. Sometimes I think that having Phillip was my mother’s last-ditch effort to find her husband again.

The hunter-green awnings of the shop, usually speckled with dried bird droppings and water stains, have recently been cleaned, and the windows, anticipating the fall season, are crammed with hockey, ski, and snowboard gear. The mannequin in the corner is wearing a goalie mask, and in the ominous flicker of the fluorescent light he looks like Jason, the serial killer from those Friday the 13th movies. Elmsbrook is the perfect town for a serial killer, and I mean that in the best possible way. It’s always the picturesque towns, with clean sidewalks and clock towers, where Jason and Freddy come to slaughter oversexed teenagers. Centre Street has a cobblestone pedestrian walkway with benches and a fountain, the stores have matching awnings, and the overall vibe is pleasant and well kept.

And maybe because I’m thinking of serial killers, when Horry suddenly knocks on my window, I jump in my seat. Or maybe it’s because he looks kind of scary. His long hair is held off his face by a white Nike headband with the price tag still attached, flapping against his forehead, and there’s a good inch of ash suspended at the tip of the cigarette wedged between his lips.

“You scared me,” I say.

“I have that effect on people.”

I laugh, not because it’s funny, but to be polite. You can’t help but feel bad for Horry, but you’re supposed to treat him like anyone else, because he’s damaged but not an idiot, and he’ll sniff out your pity like a dog sniffs out fear.

“Shouldn’t you be at home, sitting Sheba?”

“Shiva.”

“Shiva is an Indian god, the one with six arms. Or maybe it’s four arms and two legs. I don’t know. Six limbs, maybe.”

“Well, it also means ‘seven’ in Hebrew.”

“Six limbs, seven days . . .” He pauses to ponder the potential theological implications for a moment but reaches no conclusions other than now would be a good time to take another drag on his cigarette. “Well, shouldn’t you be there?”

“Yes, I should,” I say. “How are things inside?”

“Dead.” He shrugs. “You coming in?”

“Nah. I just stopped by because your mom thought you’d want a lift home.”

“She sent you?”

“She knew I was going out.”

He shakes his head and grimaces. “I need to get my own place, like, yesterday.”

“So why don’t you?”

He taps his head. “Brain injury. There are things I can’t do.”

“Like what?”

“Like remembering what the fuck it is I can’t do.” He opens the passenger door and throws himself down in the seat. “You’re not allowed to smoke in Mom’s car,” he says, blowing a ring.

“I’m not. You are.”

“I have plausible deniability.” He flicks his ash onto the floor mat. “You used to date Penelope Moore, didn’t you?”

“Penny Moore. Yeah. We were friends. Whatever happened to her?”

“She teaches ice skating over at the rink. The indoor one, where we played hockey.”

“Kelton’s.”

“Right. I still skate there sometimes.”

“You were a pretty good hockey player.”

“No, you were a pretty good hockey player. I was a great hockey player.”

“I never would have thought she’d still be living here.”

“Why, because she doesn’t have a brain injury?”

“No! Horry. Jesus! I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.”

But he’s grinning at me through the haze of smoke that has filled the space between us. “I’m just messing with you, Judd. Lighten up.”

“Fuck you.”

“I am already good and fucked, my brother from another mother.”

“Wow. Penny Moore. What in the world made you think of Penny Moore?”

“She’s in the store.”

“Right now?”

“Yeah. She works the register on weeknights. You should go in and say hello.”

“Penny Moore,” I say. The name alone conjures up her wicked smile, the taste of her kiss. We once made a pact, Penny and I. I wonder if she still remembers.

“She’d be happy to see you, I bet.”

“Maybe some other time,” I say, starting the car.

“I say something wrong?”

I shake my head. “It’s just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.”

Horry nods sagely. “Welcome to my world.” He fishes around in his pockets for a moment, spilling some loose change onto his seat before pulling out a sloppily rolled joint, which he lights from the dying embers of his cigarette. He inhales deeply and then offers me the joint, still holding his breath.

“None for me, thanks,” I say.

He shrugs and lets the smoke dance around his open mouth. “Helps me keep my head right,” he says. “Sometimes, when I feel a seizure coming on, this kind of heads it off at the pass.”

“Won’t your mom smell that?”

“What’s she going to do, ground me?”

His voice is suddenly, uncharacteristically belligerent, and I get the sense that Linda asking me to pick him up was a salvo in a long-standing battle between mother and son.

“Everything okay with you, Horry?”

“Everything is swell.”

He swings the blunt my way.

“I have to drive,” I say.

He shrugs and takes another long drag. “More for me.”

Chapter 9

The shiva is still in full swing when I return to the living room. “Judd!” my mother shouts as I’m trying to slink quietly back to my seat. Every eye in the room finds me. “Where were you?”

“I just needed to get some air,” I mutter, sliding back down into my shiva chair.

“You remember Betty Allison?” she says, indicating the birdlike woman sitting on the chair directly in front of me. The shiva chairs, by design, are lower than the chairs of the visitors, and so my view tends to be up the nostrils and skirts of the people seated directly in front of me.

“Sure,” I say. “How are you, Mrs. Allison?”

“I’m so sorry about your father.”

“Thanks.”

“Betty’s daughter Hannah was divorced last year,” my mother says brightly, like she’s delivering a nugget of particularly good news.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say.

Betty nods. “He was addicted to Internet porn.”

“It happens,” I say.

“Judd’s wife was cheating on him.”

“Jesus Christ, Mom!”

“What? There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

There are about twenty other people in the room, talking to my siblings or each other, and I can feel all their heads turning to us like a stadium wave. In the third grade, I briefly suffered from the paranoid delusion that when I went to the bathroom during class, the blackboard became a television screen and my entire class watched me piss. That’s what this feels like.

“Hannah and her son are here visiting for the summer,” Mom says, undeterred. “I thought it might be nice for you two to catch up, that’s all.”

In the first grade, Hannah Allison was immortalized in an inane jump-rope song the girls sang during recess to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” Hannah Allison, Hannah Allison / Two first names, two first names / You can call her Hannah / You can call her Allison / What a shame, two first names. Hannah cried about the song, there was a meeting between her parents and the principal, and the song was banned from the school-yard. Like all banned songs, it became an instant underground classic and continued to haunt Hannah until her peers outgrew jump rope in favor of Run-Catch-Kiss. Beyond that, I remembered a small, mousy girl with bushy eyebrows and glasses.

“I’m sure Hannah has her own problems,” I say, hoping my mother will see the murder in my eyes.

“Nonsense,” Betty says. “I’m sure she’d love to hear from an old friend.”

Betty and my mother smile conspiratorially at each other and I can hear the telepathy buzzing between them. Her husband was addicted to porn, his wife screwed around . . . it’s perfect!

“I’m not ready to start dating anytime soon,” I say.

“No one said anything about dating,” my mother says.

“That’s right,” Betty agrees. “Just a friendly phone call. Maybe a cup of coffee.”

They both look at me expectantly. I am conscious of Phillip’s elbow in my ribs, his low, steady chuckle. I’ve got six more days of this, and if I don’t nip it in the bud, my mother will be trumpeting my situation to the entire community.

“The thing is, I enjoy some good Internet porn myself, every now and then,” I say.

“Judd!” my mother gasps, horrified.

“Some of it is done very tastefully. And especially now, being single and all. It’s a great resource.”

Phillip bursts out laughing. Betty Allison’s face turns red, and my mother sits back in her chair, defeated. Hannah Allison and her two first names have been wiped off the board.

“He’s just being funny,” Mom says weakly.

“I would have to disagree,” Betty says.

Phillip is laughing so hard that tears stream down his face as he slides down in his shiva chair. Everyone in the room looks at him, horrified by the sight of unfettered glee in a shiva house, but in a minute or so he’ll be done laughing, and then, to anyone who sees him, his tear-streaked face and red eyes will seem entirely appropriate.

THE LAST VISITORS have finally left. You can feel the house exhaling, returning to its normal proportions. After my shabby behavior toward Betty Allison, Linda began quietly shooing out the guests, her voice soft but unyielding as she told them that we’d been through a long and emotional day.

Unbeknownst to me, the sleeping arrangements were decided while I was out earlier. Wendy has pretty much taken over the upstairs, commandeering Phillip’s room for the baby’s Portacrib, her own old bedroom for Ryan and Cole, and the guest room for her and Barry. Phillip and Tracy are on the sofa bed in the den behind the kitchen. Paul and Alice have unceremoniously taken my childhood bedroom, which is where I always stayed when I visited with Jen. But now, being the lone single sibling, I have been relegated to the basement, which seems to be the default for me these days.

As kids, Paul and I shared a room until he sprouted pubic hair and moved down to the basement, where the hiss and clank of the boiler would drown out his Led Zeppelin, his phone calls with girlfriends, and his ever busier masturbation schedule. Paul had been allowed to furnish the basement as he saw fit, which is why the sofa bed cannot be fully opened without hitting the corner of the Ping-Pong table, which is itself positioned against a support column, so whether it’s a game of Ping-Pong or a good night’s sleep you’re after, you’re going to be shit out of luck.

DEATH IS EXHAUSTING. Whether it’s from the trauma of burying my father or from spending the entire day in close proximity to my family, I barely have the energy to take my pants off before collapsing on the mostly opened sofa bed, my legs tilted upward toward the Ping-Pong table. There, beneath the house, in the oblong shadow cast by the single naked lightbulb, I can feel the panic rising, the sense that I’m disappearing. A few miles away, my father is buried in a grassy bluff overlooking the tangle of blacktop where the interstate and thruway intersect. We are both underground, both gone from the world. At least his legs are fully extended.

I turn on my cell phone. As expected, there’s a new voice mail from Jen. She’s been calling me every day for the last few weeks, determined to achieve some level of amicability and open communication to facilitate a quick and peaceful divorce and so that she can believe she’s been forgiven. She always cared a little too much about being liked, and the guilt over her betrayal isn’t nearly as upsetting to her as the fact that I now despise her. I’ve taken to keeping my phone off and not returning her calls. I am still perfecting the art of hating her, and until I’ve got it down, I don’t feel ready to engage. This infuriates her, and so she tries every possible approach to draw me out: contrite, dispassionate, tearful, philosophical, plaintive, and witty. Sometimes I play her messages, left over the course of weeks, all in a row, listening to the erratic swing of her tone between each beep. Tonight she actually descends into something of a rage, telling me I can’t keep avoiding her, threatening to empty our joint checking account if I don’t return her call by tomorrow. No doubt she’d like to be divorced by the time she and Wade have their baby. I especially like today’s voice mail, because she’s shouting at me like I’m standing right there in front of her, like it’s an actual conversation. Still, just to be safe, first thing tomorrow I’ll run out to the bank and withdraw the bulk of what’s left in our checking account. It was around twenty-two thousand dollars last time I checked, although the balance has probably fallen a bit since then. I have a feeling her next voice mail will break new ground.