This Is Where I Leave You

Chapter 32

Dad is bent over me, fixing my wooden leg with a socket wrench. I’m on a chair and he’s on his knees in front of me, turning the wrench and humming Simon and Garfunkel. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. Yes I would. I can see through his curly, gray hair to where it’s thinning at his pink scalp, can smell the grease on him, can smell the detergent coming off his favorite blue work shirt. The socket wrench clicks noisily as it spins, and I can see the long muscles in his forearms flex and move as he turns it. He has spent his life working with tools, and they fit naturally into his hands. I’m staring down at him, knowing that I can’t tell him that he’s dead, that if I do he’ll disappear. I want him to look up at me, want to see his face, but he is focused on the leg and he doesn’t look up. “Almost there,” he says. Then he puts down the socket wrench and grabs on to my knee with both hands. “Here we go,” he says. He pulls on the prosthesis, which slides off my knee and splits down the middle, and his hands come away with one half of it in each, and there is my real leg again, hairless and pink, but whole and unharmed. Then he looks up at me and smiles widely, like he might have smiled at me when I was a little boy, like he never did once I was older, a warm and loving smile, uncomplicated by my own encroaching manhood, and the love surging between us is electric and palpable. When I wake up I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to escape the dim silence of the basement to find him again, but there’s only darkness and the sad, steady whisper of the central air handler behind the wall, telling its mechanical secrets in the dark.

Chapter 33

Upon top of the house. Looking over miles of roof; slate, concrete, copper, clay, all bathed in the pink glow of the sun rising over Elmsbrook. There’s a bird, maybe a cardinal, maybe a robin, I don’t know, it has a red chest. It’s chirping in the branch of a tree of equally uncertain nomenclature. Elm, or oak, or ash. I think I used to know things like that, the names of birds and trees. Now it feels like I don’t know much about anything. I don’t know why planes fly, and what causes lightning, and what it means to short a stock, and the difference between the Shiites and Sunnis, and who’s slaughtering whom in Darfur, and why the U.S. dollar is so weak, and why the American League is so much better than the National League. I don’t know how Jen and I became strangers in our own marriage, how we let something that should have brought us closer derail us like a couple of amateurs. We were two reasonably smart people in love with each other, and then, one day we were less so, and maybe we were headed here anyway, maybe she just got there first, because she felt the loss of our baby more acutely. For a moment, a feeling circles me, something approaching clarity, maybe even acceptance, but it fails to settle and ultimately dissipates.

I think about Jen. I think about Penny. I could probably have something with Penny, but I’d still be thinking of Jen. I could maybe try to win Jen back, but I’d still be thinking of Wade. And so would she. He’d be a ghost, haunting our bed every time we touched. So what do I do?

There are just too many things I don’t know.

The girl in last night’s movie saw the way the sheepdog trainer carried his injured daughter and she just knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing mattered more than being with him. She knew. But she wasn’t a real person, that girl, she was an actress with an eating disorder who was charged with DUI last year and who slept with her married director just long enough to wreck his life before falling out of love and off the wagon. That’s love in real life: messy and corrupt and completely unreliable. I like Penny, and I still love Jen, and I hate Jen and I couldn’t leave Penny’s sad little apartment fast enough. I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don’t know.

I just don’t know.

There’s a scraping sound behind me, and Wendy climbs onto the roof, still groggy with sleep.

“Hey there.”

“Good morning.”

She stands beside me and reaches into the chimney for a second, her hand emerging with a box of Marlboros and a lighter. “Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Mind if I do?”

I don’t answer because it wouldn’t matter. You can’t let your dog crap on the sidewalk, but it’s perfectly acceptable to blow carcinogens down other people’s throats. Somewhere along the way, smokers exempted themselves from the social contract.

Wendy lights up, inhaling so deeply that I can picture her lungs inflating and darkening with smoke. “So, Barry’s getting the hell out of Dodge.”

“Where to?”

“Everywhere. California, Chicago, London. His fund took a big hit last year with the whole subprime thing, and I say that with no actual concept of what the whole subprime thing actually is. But apparently everything depends on getting this deal done.”

“Are you worried?”

She shrugs. “It’s Barry. This is what he does. If I worried, that would defeat the whole purpose of being married to him.” She takes another drag on her cigarette. “So, you slept with Jen last night?”

“Penny.”

“Oh! Good for you. Right?”

“I feel like I’ll never be able to have sex with someone new without thinking the whole time about the fact that I’m having sex with someone new.”

Wendy shrugs. “You’ll get over it.”

From below comes the sound of the front door closing, and a moment later Linda crosses the front yard. She stops on the sidewalk and turns her face up to the sky, letting the morning breeze kiss her face, before heading down the block toward her house.

“She’s here early,” Wendy muses.

“She’s here late,” I say.

“Oh,” Wendy says. Then, “Oh! No!”

“Exactly.”

“No way! You think?”

“Nothing surprises me anymore.”

A quiet moment while Wendy processes the new information.

“It kind of makes sense, a little,” she says.

“Kind of.”

“If so, how do we feel about it?”

“We are numb.”

Wendy considers that for a moment, tapping her lip with the end of her cigarette. “Yes. That’s a perfect description of what we are.”

The bird that may or may not be a cardinal or a robin takes flight, swooping down toward the backyard to catch the air pocket that will take her to the next tree. It would be nice to be able to do that, I think. To just pick up from wherever you were that wasn’t working out for you and ride the winds to a better place. I’d be in Australia by now.

“You slept with Horry.”

“He told you?”

“I was up here yesterday morning too. Saw you do the walk of shame.”

She shrugs. “It’s no big deal.”

“It’s adultery.”

Wendy raises her eyebrows at me, biting back whatever it was she was prepared to say, a rare display of restraint. We are perched on a roof and you can’t be too careful.

“Horry is grandfathered in.”

“Is that how it works?”

“That’s how it works.”

“That makes half of your graduating class eligible.”

She laughs and stubs out her cigarette on a roof shingle. “In an alternate universe where Horry didn’t get his brains bashed in, he and I are married. Once in a blue moon I get to visit that universe.”

“And it’s really that simple.”

“My alternate universe, my rules.”

Behind and below us, the back door slams. We turn around to look down into the backyard. Tracy is standing at the head of the pool in a black one-piece bathing suit. Her dive is flawless, her stroke strong and graceful. She swims back and forth with machinelike precision, doing those little somersaults against the wall at each end like she’s in the Olympics. I get tired just looking at her.

“Poor thing,” Wendy says.

Tracy slices through the water like a shark, and Wendy and I watch her from our perch above the world, unaccustomed to such grace and discipline. I think, not for the first time, that she deserves better than Phillip, better than this family of ours. Someone should save her from us while there’s still time.

Chapter 34

There are tricks to paying a shiva call. You don’t want to come during off-peak hours, or you risk being the only one there, face-to-face with five surly mourners who, but for your presence, would be off their low chairs, stretching their legs and their compressed spines, taking a bathroom break, or having a snack. Evenings are your safest bet, after seven, when everyone’s eaten and the room is full. Weekday afternoons are a dead zone. Sunday is a crapshoot. Do a drive-by and count the parked cars before you stop. If you’re lucky, there will already be a conversation going on when you come in, so you won’t have to sit there trying to start one of your own. It’s hard to talk to the bereft. You never know what’s off-limits.

And speaking of limits, there apparently aren’t any when it comes to Mom’s slinky wardrobe. The old expression goes, a good speech is like a woman’s skirt: short enough to hold your attention, long enough to cover the subject. Mom’s short denim skirt isn’t a speech, it’s more like a quick, dirty joke, the kind people are always e-mailing to you. And she’s wearing a tight black camisole with spaghetti straps. She looks like a retired stripper.

You would think everyone we know has already been over, but apparently not. The shiva calls start bright and early, people wanting to get their obligations over with in time to enjoy one of the last warm Sundays of the season. They sit visiting with us like they’ve got all the time in the world, while their golf clubs, tennis rackets, and swimsuits lie waiting for them in the trunks of their cars.

Boner shows up with a group of Paul’s old buddies, all ex-jocks. They talk about the Yankees and the Mets and their fantasy baseball league, while their wives sit quietly beside them with looks of bored indulgence. Better baseball than mistresses and hookers, their expressions say. Boner is in jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, every inch the cool rabbi off duty. His wife, Emily, is pretty and quiet, with nervous eyes and a flickering smile that never quite achieves ignition. The other guys have this running joke of apologizing to him every time they swear or say something off-color, which is pretty much every other minute. You can tell he’d like to swear a blue streak right back at them, but he is surrounded by his congregants, and it would be bad for business.

“Hey, Judd,” Dan Reiss says to me. “How are things with Wade Boulanger?”

“What?”

“Man Up. Don’t you work on the show?”

“Not anymore.”

“That’s too bad. I love that guy.” He contorts his face and says, “Man up already!” in a hoarse, nasal voice.

“That’s a good impression.”

“You think?”

“Sure.”

“What’s he like off the air?”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Well, yeah. But is he a good guy?”

They talk about high school, relive their greatest triumphs on the baseball field. Everyone is careful not to mention college, but the specter of Paul’s injury looms large over the conversation. Their very avoidance of the topic is reminder enough, like the puffy scar that snakes up the side of his neck. You can see the muscles tightening in his face, the tautness of his lips in their neutral position. His life is a daily reminder of the life he might have had. I feel a surge of pity and tenderness toward him. I want to tell him that I understand, that I forgive him for being such a total prick to me.

I think about making a list of all the things I need to tell people before it’s too late.

GREG POLLAN, AN old friend of mine from high school, comes by. Our friendship was based almost entirely on our mutual admiration of Clint Eastwood. We would talk to each other in Clint’s tough-guy rasp, and if we passed each other in the halls, we would squint and draw imaginary .357 Magnums. I know what you’re thinking; did he fire six shots, or only five? Go ahead, make my day. At some point we moved on to Sylvester Stallone. In high school, if you can find a girl who will kiss you and maybe let you touch her breasts and a guy who likes the same movies as you, your world is pretty much complete. Now Greg is fat and married and his eyes bulge in their sockets, threatening to pop out and shoot across the room. Triplets, he tells me. A goiter. He is unshaven and tired and he heard an old friend was sitting shiva in the neighborhood and made it his business to come. Even though he’s exhausted and probably could have used the time better just turning up the A.C. in his car and closing his eyes. I try to imagine a situation in which I’d have been equally decent.

“So, I hear you produce the Wade Boulanger show.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s very funny.”

“Sometimes.”

“I could do without all the farting though.”

“You and me both.”

“My wife hates him.”

“Mine loves him.”

“She thinks he’s a misogynist blowhard, calls him Rush Limbaugh with a boner.”

“That’s pretty accurate, I guess. What are you up to?”

“Well, I was doing risk assessment for a while, and now I’m kind of consulting, by which I mean I got laid off.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“So now I take care of the girls—they’re four—and Debbie sells medical supplies. Also, we have an Amway website. I’ll leave you my card.”

I wonder how he gets up in the morning.

He tells me about some of the other kids from our class he’s kept tabs on. Mike Salerno is divorced and drives a Ferrari. Jared Mathers is gay, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Randy Sawyer owns a string of bowling alleys. Julie Mehler is a state senator. Sandy Flynn’s house burned down, but they all got out. Gary Daley was arrested for having kiddie porn on his office computer. And so on. Judd Foxman’s pregnant wife left him for a popular misogynist blowhard radio personality. As a one-line update, I fit in quite nicely, actually. Better than I ever did back in the day.

Greg gets up from his chair. His skin is cratered and sallow. There are sweat marks on his polo shirt, under his flouncing man-breasts. One or two other visitors have to move their chairs to accommodate his exit. At some point in time, Greg gave up on things and accepted his fate to spend the rest of his life fat and exhausted and dull as a butter knife.

“Great to see you,” he says. His hand is thick and clammy.

“Thanks for coming, man. I appreciate it.”

“You bet.”

He lumbers out of the room with the unhurried gait of a circus elephant. He was once a funny kid, pleasant-faced and not repulsive. A certain type of girl liked him. I wonder if he remembers our Clint Eastwood and Stallone impressions, if he watches Rambo like I do when I come across it flipping through the cable channels late at night, when the world is spinning much too fast for me to sleep.

Chapter 35

It’s a day for reunions. Some old girlfriends of Wendy’s show up. She hides her diamond rings and sits up straighter. She trots out her boys for a command performance of cuteness. Ryan sulks, but Cole obliges, letting the women lift him up, pointing out their ears and eyes. Ryan picks his nose and wipes it on his shorts. Everyone coos. Snapshots of children are passed around and exclaimed over. Everyone is adorable. Everyone is perfect. No one here has ever produced an ugly or even ordinary baby.

The women look each other over as they chat, measuring thighs, bellies, hips, and asses, taking into account body types and recent pregnancies. They silently evaluate and pass judgment, realigning themselves in the pecking order. It’s a brutal business, being a woman. Wendy sucks in her gut and crosses her legs, pointing her toes like a ballerina in a last-ditch effort to coax her calf muscle out of hiding. She has our mother’s legs, sheathed in thick, smooth skin that defies definition.

Someone procures an old yearbook and they all shriek like hyenas.

PETER APPLEBAUM IS back to comfort my mother at close range. There are other people over, attempting to visit with her, but he doesn’t register them. He is a hammer, she is a nail, and the rest of them are screws. He’s had a haircut since we last saw him, almost military in its closeness, and he has shaved the dark, gangrenous fuzz off his earlobes. His cologne fills the room like bad news. He is pulling out all the stops, Applebaum is. He has not many more years of sexual function ahead of him, and there is no time for the subtlety of a slow flirtation. He pats Mom’s arms, takes her hand in both of his, and strokes it relentlessly. That’s just his way. Mom tries to draw some of the other visitors into the conversation, tries to retrieve her hand, but Applebaum holds the line, talking and stroking, his bushy eyebrows unfurling like caterpillars.

Linda steps out from the kitchen, her expression grim, and makes her way through the visitors. She whispers something into Applebaum’s ear, and his expression falls, his face turning red. He follows Linda back into the kitchen while Mom looks on, somewhat concerned. Behind the swinging door, slightly raised voices are drowned out by the sound of the Cuisinart. A few moments later, Applebaum shuffles down the front hall, stooped and deflated, pausing just long enough to leave a few bills on the tip plate next to the memorial candle. I feel sorry for him. There is some basis for comparison between us, I think.

Linda reemerges at the kitchen door and she and my mother exchange a long, dense look over the heads of the shiva callers, decimating whatever lingering doubts I might have had. Wendy looks over at me, raising a drawn eyebrow into something like a question mark, but she’s not really asking.

SOME DISTANT RELATIVES have driven up from Long Island to pay their respects: my mother’s first cousin Sandra, her husband, Calvin, and their twin teenage sex-kitten daughters. The girls are vacant and beautiful and wield their budding sexuality with a certain lack of control, like a toddler with a power tool. They stretch their long, ripe bodies out on the couch and look around the room with the dismayed air of the recently conned. It was a long way to come for a room full of irrelevant relatives.

There is an air of striving perfection about this family, evident in Sandra’s expensive-looking haircut and pedicure, Cal’s—for that’s what they call him—diamond-encrusted watch and expensive polo shirt with a golf club logo, in the girls’ smooth, tanned legs dipped into white canvas tennis shoes, their blown hair, their flawless complexions. This isn’t a family, it’s a Christmas card. You can picture the plush carpets of their home in Long Island with views of the Sound, the stonework around the front door, the marble and mirrors in the foyer, the perfectly manicured lawn, the sixty-inch plasma television and leather furniture in the den, the art deco living room that no one is allowed into with shoes, the two-year leases on their matching Lexuses.

I don’t like Cal. Cal’s friends, if he has any, probably don’t like him either. He has hairy forearms, showy biceps, a store-bought tan, and predatory eyes that seem to be looking for a conversation to interrupt, an argument to have. But Mom seems genuinely fond of Sandra, whose mother died when she was a young girl. Mom’s parents took her in for a few years. There’s a bond there.

“Cindy’s on the swim team, All-American,” Sandra tells mom. “And Dana’s captain of the lacrosse team.”

“We should send them equipment,” Mom says. “Paul, you’ll send them a package?”

“Sure, Mom.”

“I can’t believe Mort’s gone,” Sandra says, and then, unbelievably, starts to cry.

“He was a tough old guy,” Cal says. If I didn’t know this was his crude way of showing respect, I’d throw something at him. And then he’d probably beat the shit out of me.

“He was always very fond of you,” Mom says, taking Sandra’s hand, and I’m thinking, If he was so fond of her, why is this only the third time in my life I’ve seen these people?

“Wendy, where’s the wedding album?”

Wendy pulls out the album, which creaks like a rusty hinge, and Mom and Sandra start playing a game where they identify dead relatives I’ve never heard of: aunts and uncles, a cousin with polio, a family friend who went to jail for armed robbery. “Come here, girls,” Sandra says. The two girls slink over like cats. Phillip watches them a little too closely. Wendy smacks the back of his head.

“What?”

“You know what.”

Mom shows us all pictures of her wedding—the washed-out colors, the men with their mustaches, the cigarettes during dinner, the bad toupees, the black plastic spectacle frames that make every man look like he works for the CIA. “You see how pretty I was,” Mom says to the bored twins. She’s not bragging. She’s just looking at their dewy perfection and realizing that she’s so much older than she ever believed she’d be. In most of the photos, Dad looks worried in his borrowed tuxedo, like there might be all sorts of trouble brewing right outside the frame. But there’s one of the two of them, on the stairs of the catering hall; he’s carrying her in his arms and they’re laughing, at the photographer, at themselves in their ridiculous gown and tux, at the idea that they can do this thing, start a family. A lump forms in my throat and lodges there. You can kind of see who they were back then, innocent and in love; long before kids and a mortgage and rottweilers and cancer and possible (probable) lesbianism.

“He looks so handsome there,” Sandra says.

“I could barely walk the next morning,” Mom says.

The girls giggle loudly and shake like wind chimes. Wendy smacks Phillip’s head again. This time he doesn’t ask why.

PAUL AND HIS friends have stepped outside into the side yard, where Paul’s old batting cage still stands. Boner, who played shortstop in high school, wonders if he can still hit Paul’s fastball. Paul wonders if he can still throw it. Horry, who lettered in football and played hockey in the county league, will don the musty catcher’s gear, and Dan, who played outfield, will call balls and strikes. The other guys will stand around spinning bats like swords and making asinine comments, and Phillip and I will watch to see who makes a fool of himself first. There’s simply no way to calculate the odds.

Paul pulls out his old glove and starts warming up, throwing lightly to Horry, rolling his shoulder around in its socket to loosen up. Even after all this time, his motion is graceful and assured, his body uncoiling precisely from his windup to launch each pitch. Boner tries out a few bats—we have no shortage of gear—and then steps into the netting, digging his flip-flops into the grass, settling down into his stance. He works the bat around for a little bit, and then Dan steps behind Horry, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and says, “Batter up!”

Paul’s first pitch goes a little wide and Boner holds his swing in check. Dan calls it a ball. The second pitch is low, but Boner swings anyway and misses.

“Strike one! One and one.”

Paul shakes his head, not pleased with the pitch. He rolls his head around on his neck and shrugs his shoulders a few times. Then he settles and stares down the batter. He winds up and unleashes a straight fast-ball that lands in Horry’s glove before Boner’s swing has even crossed the plate.

“Strike two!”

The other guys applaud and cheer. They are all meatheads, their best years behind them. Tracy and Alice join us in the yard, along with Boner’s wife and a few random shiva callers who are happy for the diversion. Paul bangs his mitt against his shoulder and grimaces a little, like it’s tender. His next pitch is a changeup, and Boner manages to catch the edge of it, fouling it up into the net.

“Strike two!”

“Come on,” Boner says. “Now I got you.”

Paul removes his mitt to rub his pitching shoulder for a minute, trying to mask the pain he’s feeling.

“Paul,” Alice says. “It’s enough.”

His ligaments were shredded like cheese, the muscle ripped right off the bone. They did what they could to reassemble the working parts, but the lumpy patchwork mess of surgically spliced tissue beneath his skin cannot support the strain he’s putting on it with these pitches.

“It’s fine. I just need one more pitch.”

“The hell you do,” Boner says.

Alice shakes her head sadly.

That’s the thing about jocks. They’re wired to compete, regardless of angry wives or busted shoulders. They will not back down. If Paul strikes him out, Boner will leave here bruised and bitter. If Boner hits off Paul, Paul will brood about it for days. Whoever wins will gloat and talk some supposedly good-natured trash to rub it in. There can be no draw. Someone’s going down.

Paul steps back onto the rubber mound, shaking his shoulder and rolling his neck. He leans forward onto his front knee and takes a deep, measured breath. Horry pounds his mitt. Boner swings his bat, squares up his stance, and settles down. Everyone is sweating and deadly serious, the fact of the shiva completely forgotten. “If it reaches the point where I think you’re being a fucking idiot,” Phillip says under his breath, “then you’re probably being a fucking idiot.”

Paul winds up and something goes wrong on his release. Three-quarters of the way through, he lets out an anguished cry and prematurely releases the ball, which flies hard and fast and right into Boner’s face. Both men fall to their knees at the same time, Paul clutching his shoulder in pain, Boner’s nose bleeding through his fingers, staining his white batting gloves. Boner’s wife shrieks and runs to his side. Alice stands her ground outside the cage, willing herself to be unmoved, but then caves and runs to Paul, helping him to his feet, asking him whispered questions. It occurs to me that there’s a deep and genuine love between them, and I wonder why I should find that so surprising. Dan and Emily help Boner to his feet, and Horry pulls off his mask and says, “Whose bright idea was this anyway?”

Paul walks gingerly over to Boner to apologize. They say some macho things to each other, bang fists, and slap asses, and in this manner, all is forgiven. Someone procures an ice pack from the freezer to press on Boner’s bruised face. They may be over-the-hill idiot jocks, but you have to admire their code. If only all our conflicts could be resolved with a few grunts and a smack on the ass.

Chapter 36

The parade of weathered flesh continues. Sitting in our shiva chairs, we develop a sad infatuation with the bared legs of our visitors. Some of the men wear pants, and for that we are eternally grateful. But this being late August, we get our fair share of men in shorts, showing off pale, hairless legs with withered calves and thick, raised veins like earthworms trapped beneath their flesh who died burrowing their way out. The more genetically gifted men still show some musculature in the calf and thigh areas, but it is more often than not marred by the surgical scars of multiple knee operations or heart bypasses that appropriated veins from the leg. And there’s a special place in shiva hell reserved for men in sandals, their cracked, hardened toenails, dark with fungus, proudly on display. The women are more of a mixed bag. Some of them have managed to hold it together, but on others, skin hangs loosely off the bone, crinkled like cellophane; ankles disappear beneath mounds of flesh; and spider veins stretch out like bruises just below the skin. There really should be a dress code.

Two friends of mine from the radio show come by. Jeff is one of the writers, short and hairy in a way that makes him look dirty at all times. Kenny is an engineer, a former musician and roadie, with colorful tattoo sleeves up both of his arms and long blond hair that he wears like a guitar god from the eighties. We were work buddies, hanging out in the break room, bonding over television shows and playlists, and sympathizing with Jeff, who bitched about Wade bungling all his best bits. Sometimes, when the show was over, Kenny would roll a joint and we’d sit in the control room unwinding while he played the guitar. I haven’t seen either one of them since I quit. They come in looking scared out of their minds. It’s touching, really.

“Hey,” Jeff says as they sit down. “I’m really sorry about your dad.”

“Condolences, man,” Kenny says.

“Thanks. How are things at the station?”

“Oh, you know, same shit, different day.” Jeff.

“It’s not the same without you.” Kenny.

“Who’s producing?”

An awkward look passes between them.

“Um, I am,” Kenny says.

“Congratulations,” I say. “Good for you.”

“I feel bad about it, man.”

“Hey, it’s fine. I quit.”

“They were going to bring someone new in,” Jeff explains.

“No,” I say. “That’s great. I’m glad it’s you.”

“Doesn’t mean I think he’s any less of a dipshit.” Kenny.

“He’s been more of a bastard ever since you left. You really kept him in line.” Jeff.

“Apparently not enough.” Me.

They aren’t sure whether it’s okay to laugh at my little joke. Jeff changes the subject, updating me on the soap-opera lives of the rest of the staff. Kenny stares wide-eyed at my mother’s breasts, like they might come to life at any moment and attack him. I affect an air of cool detachment, reminding myself to be touched that they came, while I count down the minutes until they leave. Ryan and Cole come in to stare at Kenny’s tattoos, and Kenny gives them the tour, showing them each one and explaining what it is.

“That’s my Harley,” he says.

“Harley,” Cole repeats.

“That there is the queen of hearts and over here is the album cover of The Wall, by Pink Floyd.”

“Pink Boy.”

“And that little bird smoking the doobie is Woodstock. You know, Snoopy’s friend?”

“Big Bird.”

“Close enough. And that there is some spiritual Japanese writing, but I forgot what it means.”

I walk them to the door and shake both of their hands. “Thanks for coming.”

“Yeah. See you soon.”

“Take care, man.”

I watch them climb into Kenny’s restored Camaro. They’ll probably stop for lunch at TGI Friday’s and talk about me in deeply sympathetic tones. Then they’ll pull onto the interstate, crank up the classic rock, and resume their lives. It’s quite likely that I will never see either one of them again, and the thought saddens me. They were daily fixtures in my life for the last seven years or so, and now they are gone. Or, more accurately, I am. Just like that. That’s the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.

I step through the crowd and slide wearily back into my seat, instantly depressed. Phillip throws his arms around me and pats my back. He’s always had the ability to hone in on a mood.

“It was really nice of Bon Jovi to come,” he says.

AND STILL THEY come. Everyone we ever knew in our lives, pouring through the doors out of a sense of friendship, duty, community, or simply to secure reciprocation when it comes their turn to mourn.

Because more time has elapsed since the funeral and people are less worried about the appropriateness of it all, because there are apparently a lot of single women out there, because Mom has clearly put the word out, because I’m sitting here on display for all to see, because there is a premium placed on a divorced man without kids and no one here knows any better yet, and because some women of a certain age seem to think it’s their God-given right to act as brokers in affairs of the heart, the matchmakers are out in full force today.

Lois Braun wants to set me up with her daughter Lucy, who—and Lois is emphatic on this point—could have married any number of the many boyfriends she had, if only she weren’t so driven in her career. Lucy is now a vice president at PepsiCo, makes more money than she knows what to do with, and is finally ready to consider appropriate suitors. And for all I know, Lucy Braun might be my soul mate, or at least a bright, attractive woman with the body of a centerfold. But Lois’s hair is dyed a different shade of blond than her eyebrows, and her skin hangs off her jaw in loose jowls with the texture of an orange peel, and when she speaks of Lucy in her hoarse smoker’s voice, she sucks all traces of potential sexuality right out of her. Right out of the world, actually.

Barbara Lang’s ex-husband has a stepdaughter who is a catalog model. She is divorced once and widowed once, but you’d never know it from her great attitude. She’s currently writing a book on what to do when you’re beautiful but your life sucks anyway, and she lives in Boston, but the world is so much smaller these days.

Renee Harper is a certified matchmaker and she wants me to avoid the dangerous pitfalls of online dating by hiring her to find and screen potential dates. I wonder what organization certifies matchmakers, what the criteria are, and, more immediately, how a sixtysomething woman who wears leopard-print spandex pants and bubblegum-pink lipstick to a Sunday-afternoon shiva call can possibly expect to be taken seriously as an arbiter of good taste.

“So, you’ll call me?” Renee says, pressing her card into my palm.

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“No. Not really.”

Renee looks at me uncertainly.

“He’s kidding.” Mom.

“No, I’m not.”

“He’s not.” Wendy.

“He’s serious as a heart attack.” Phillip.

“I’m sorry,” Renee says, sounding more pissed than contrite. “I was just trying to help.”

I look at Renee Harper, and Barbara Lang, and Lois Braun. They are smug and clueless and riding my last nerve. “I am still legally married,” I say, raising my voice to the point that all the other hushed conversations going on around the room die instantly. “I’m still married and I have a baby on the way and I’m dealing with the death of my father, and this pathological need you all have to throw every sad lonely woman you know at me is not helping.”

“Okay, Judd,” Mom says.

“Do I really look so pathetic to all of you? Like I couldn’t possibly meet someone on my own? Half the people in the world are women. Odds are that at least a few of them would be willing to go out with me.”

“Damn right,” Phillip chimes in. “And it’s not like he’s been celibate since he moved out. He had sex last night, FYI.”

“Don’t help me, Phillip.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Lois, Barbara, and Renee rise to their feet as one, lips pursed, faces burning with humiliation. They offer a chorus of mortified apologies in low, strained voices as they make their way out of the room. I estimate it will take them roughly three minutes to convert their shame to indignation. They’ll blame the whole thing on my bad manners, benevolently excuse me on the grounds of my grief, and live to meddle another day. They couldn’t have made it this far without developing some fairly foolproof defense mechanisms.

“Don’t worry about it, girls,” Mom calls after them. “You were just being kind. It’s not you he’s angry at.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it is them.”

Mom fixes me with a hard look, then leans back in her chair. “Well, I can see you’re beginning to vent all that anger you have locked up in you, and that’s healthy. I just think you could be a little more judicious in choosing your venue. There are a lot of innocent bystanders here.”

“You always encouraged us to express ourselves in the moment. To let it out.”

“That’s right, honey. I also encouraged you to move your bowels twice a day. That doesn’t mean I want to be there when you do.” She nods to herself for a moment. “That was good, the whole venting-your-waste metaphor. I need to write that down.” She pulls herself up off the chair, making a quick apology to what’s left of her audience, and exits stage left, through the kitchen to her office.

Chapter 37

After my little outburst, I am deemed unfit for shiva, so I load Ryan and Cole into Wendy’s rented minivan to drive them over to Wonderland, a second-rate amusement park a few miles down the interstate. I figure Wendy could use the break, as she’s been offhandedly remarking, more than usual, about smothering them in their sleep. Wendy also told me to keep a close eye on Ryan, as he tends to wander, so I call for reinforcements.

“I’m taking my nephews to Wonderland. Want to come?” I say when Penny picks up.

“I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of commitment,” she says.

She is waiting in front of her building when we pull up, looking edible in a T-shirt, short shorts, and tennis shoes. She could be nineteen. She could be my girlfriend. We could be going out to the amusement park, where we’d kiss on the lines, hold hands on the rides, and share cotton candy. I’d win her one of those giant stuffed animals and we’d carry it around the park with us like a badge of honor. Afterward it would take up permanent residence on her pink bedspread, where she’d lie across it while we spoke for hours on the phone.

Seeing her fills me up and breaks my heart all at once.

“I’m glad you called,” she says, climbing into the minivan.

“So am I.”

Her smile fills the car. Her feet go up on the dash, and she plays the drums on her raised thighs. The legs on this girl are really something else, smooth and toned and pretty damn flawless. If I look any longer, I will crash the van. We ride to the park, singing along to Cole’s Sesame Street disc. Penny still remembers most of the words.

At the entrance, I buy the premium package and goofy hats for all of us. The kids love the hats, which are baseball hats with built-in dog ears on the top. I have the three hundred dollars I stole from Wade’s billfold burning a hole in my pocket, and my goal is to leave here broke. A kid with a name tag and a digital camera asks us to pose for a picture with the cheesy plaster palace behind us. There are countless pictures of my family at various ages in just this spot. If we pulled them out of all the messy albums in the living room bookcases, you could probably track the steady growth of our family, like annual pencil marks on the wall to show how tall you’ve grown. Dad isn’t in any of the Wonderland pictures, because he was always the one taking them, with this old Yaschika he’d bought when he first got married, because why the hell would he pay for a picture he could take better himself? As a matter of fact, you’d have to turn a lot of pages to find Dad in any of our albums. The inadvertent result of being the default photographer is that he was relegated to the role of a bit player in the actual recorded history of our family. There are entire years of our lives where he doesn’t appear at all.

Penny puts her arm around me and we put our hands on the boys’ shoulders. She pinches my ass when the camera flashes. The kid gives me a claim ticket and points out the booth where I can buy the photo later. I pocket the ticket, but I know I won’t claim the photo. A photo of the four of us doesn’t make any sense.

The sky is gray but not threatening yet. Hired teenagers walk around in ratty medieval costumes, looking hungover and bored as they pose for pictures with their aluminum swords. We take the boys on the carousel, the balloon race, the scrambler, and an airplane ride, everything that goes around in circles. Then Ryan announces he’s too big for the kiddie rides, so I take him out to the larger park, leaving Penny to ride the mini coaster with Cole. Ryan and I ride the Buccaneer, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Spider, and the Dragon, a wooden coaster famous for being the first ever built on the East Coast. Someone in an office somewhere actually thinks this is a valid selling point for a thrill ride. Ryan clings tightly to my arm, and I pretend for a moment that he’s my son, that later we will fall asleep together reading stories in his bed. Then we find Penny and Cole and we all sit down for a late lunch of pizza and fries at one of the concessions. Ketchup and Cole are a deadly combination, and by the time we’re done, his stained T-shirt makes it look like he’s been in a knife fight. I buy him a Wonderland shirt, and then Ryan, who is no idiot, purposely drips ketchup on his own shirt. Kids are transparent, but they get the job done.

Later we get fake tattoos. Ryan gets the Superman logo on his tiny bicep. Cole gets Scooby-Doo. Penny gets a heart with an arrow through it on the back of her hand. I get a yellow and red firebird on the inside of my forearm. Cole falls asleep in his stroller and I push him across the park to the bandstand, while Ryan runs ahead of us. Penny wordlessly wraps her fingers around my elbow as we walk, and when I look at her she looks right back at me, daring me. There has been no time in your life that you wouldn’t have killed for a girl like this to look at you like that. Then she does, and something in you doesn’t respond and you realize that you don’t understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.

There’s a local rock band playing loud covers at the bandstand. We find a bench and buy some cotton candy. Ryan nods off on the bench, his head on Penny’s lap. I sit next to her, watching the band while she feeds me wisps of cotton candy. I lean over and kiss her sticky lips. She rests her head on my shoulder. “Can we stay until it gets dark?” she says.

Penny is beautiful. Not smoldering, like Jen, but pretty and sexy and witty and fun. And she has the added distinction of seeming to genuinely like me. Sometimes, contentment is a matter of will. You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you’ve lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.

A few minutes later my cell phone rings and it’s Jen. “Something’s wrong,” she says.

“What?”

“The baby. Judd . . . I’m bleeding.”

“What, spotting?”

“More than that.”

“Did you call an ambulance?”

“I called you. Judd, I’m going to lose this one too, aren’t I?”

“Just try to take it easy. Are you still at the hotel?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Lie down. I’m calling an ambulance.”

I hang up and dial 911. I’m conscious of Penny listening to me as I give them the salient details. The lady on the other end sounds fat and bored, but I appreciate her gruff efficiency. When I hang up, I look at Penny, still beside me, looking pretty and lost. “I’m sorry. We have to go.”

“So I gathered,” she says, not quite looking at me.

I stand up and fuss with Cole’s stroller while Penny softly wakes up Ryan and stands him up.

“So, your wife is pregnant. It’s yours?”

“Yeah.”

“That seems like a pretty important piece of information to have shared, maybe.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m still processing it myself.” I turn to head toward the park exit, but Penny stays where she is.

“I think I’ll stay,” she says.

“What?”

She shrugs. “Unless you need my help getting them to the car.”

“What? No. That’s fine, but I mean, how will you get home?”

“I’ll call a car service later. It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. There’s nowhere I need to be.”

“Okay. I’ll call you later.”

She shakes her head and smiles sadly. “I don’t think you will, Judd Foxman.” She steps forward and kisses my cheek. “I hope everything turns out okay.”

I look at her, wondering what it is about her that makes me want to simultaneously devote my life to her and get as far away from her as I can possibly get.

“Penny.”

“You have to go.”

Ryan grabs on to the side of the stroller and we start making our way down the wide fairway toward the exit. When I turn around, Penny’s back on the bench, listening to the band, tapping her foot to the beat and looking off toward the bandstand, or maybe past it. I look back every so often to watch her fade into the distance, which, I realize now, is what I’d been doing all along.

Chapter 38

I drop the kids back at Knob’s End, and then Phillip drives me over to the hospital in the Porsche. He drops me off at the emergency room and then goes to find parking. Jen is lying on a gurney behind some curtains, while a resident runs a probe over her belly. I remember this like it was yesterday, the last one to arrive, the tears in Jen’s eyes, her gel-coated stomach bloated with our dead baby. Not again. Please.

“There’s no heartbeat,” she says, and starts to cry.

“The baby’s in a tough spot to get a read,” the resident says. She is a rotund woman with bulging eyes and no discernible lips. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“I’m sorry, Judd,” Jen sobs, reaching out for me. She grabs my hand before I can avoid her and pulls it over her mouth, crying onto it. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. Just try to relax.” I find myself stroking her hair with my free hand. I go to this place where I’m totally present, but I’m also thinking that forty minutes ago I was walking through an amusement park with Penny, holding her hand, kissing the cotton candy off her lips. I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.

“I can’t believe this is happening again,” Jen gurgles. Her tears are hot on my fingertips. The resident continues to move the probe around. I can’t believe we’re here doing this again, losing another baby. Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.

“I deserve this,” Jen says. “I do.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“What I did to you . . .” She looks up at me, her features slashed with regret. “I ruined us.”

“Listen!” the resident says sharply. We turn to her, and then we hear it through the static, a fast, rhythmic, robotic swish.

“What’s that?” I say, but of course I know. I’ve done this before.

“It’s your baby’s heartbeat.”

“It sounds so fast,” Jen says.

“To you, maybe,” the resident says. “It sounds just fine to me.”

On the gurney, Jen closes her eyes and cries with relief, still clinging to my hand. With my free hand, I wipe away my own tears before she can see them.

“So why was she bleeding?” I say.

“It could be any number of benign reasons. I’ve paged the ob-gyn on call. Someone will be down in a minute. But the baby doesn’t seem to be in any distress.”

“Wait,” I say when she lifts the probe off Jen. “Can we listen for another minute?”

The resident flashes a kind, lipless smile and pulls out some kind of canvas belt gadget from a drawer and wraps it around Jen’s belly. Then she leaves, and it’s just Jen and me, listening to the frantic, throbbing heartbeat of our unborn child. She looks at me with shining wet eyes and smiles. “That’s our baby,” she says, beaming.

“He sounds nervous.”

She laughs. “Wouldn’t you be?”

We listen for a little longer. Beat, swish, beat, swish, beat, swish.

“Judd,” Jen says, not quite looking at me. “We can do this, right?”

And this is where I stop regretting the way things should have been the first time I heard my baby’s heartbeat. This is where I surrender to the magic of it all, the karmic appropriateness of becoming a father right now, when I’ve just lost my own. And maybe I do feel something; it’s hard to say, because we’ve only just begun to try the moment on for size when the curtains fly open and Wade steps in, effectively murdering the moment and all the ones to follow.

THE LAST TIME I saw Wade, I attacked him with an office chair. The time before that, I jammed a lit cheesecake up his ass and almost burned his balls off. So it’s understandable that his first reaction upon seeing me is to flinch and assume a defensive posture. He stands in the doorway looking uncertainly at me, then moves past me self-consciously to approach Jen on the gurney. “You okay, babe?” he says. There are guys who can pull off “babe.” I’m not one of them. Wade is, and I mean that in the worst possible way. I start scanning the shelves for sharp objects. “I got here as fast as I could. My GPS messed me up.”

“I’m fine,” Jen says.

“Good. Good.” He rubs her shoulder lightly and then stops, too aware of me in the room. There’s no choice but to turn and face me.

“Hey, Judd. How’s it going?”

“It’s going swell, Wade.”

There’s a knock on the door, and a bearded doctor enters the room, carrying Jen’s chart.

“Jennifer Foxman?”

“Yes,” she says.

My last name, still attached to her, is a kick in the crotch.

“I’m Doctor Rausch, from ob-gyn.” He turns to Wade. “Mr. Foxman?”

“No,” Wade says.

“I’m Mr. Foxman,” I say.

“Nice to meet you,” Doctor Rausch says perfunctorily, before looking at Wade. “And you are?”

“He’s my wife’s lover.”

“Shit, Judd,” Jen says, covering her eyes. “Not now.”

“Wade Boulanger,” Wade says, extending his hand. “It’s complicated.”

“Not the radio jock.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Doctor Rausch smiles. “My wife hates you.”

“The wives generally do.”

“Not mine, unfortunately,” I say.

Doctor Rausch looks at me like I’m spoiling his good time. “Okay,” he says, pulling some latex gloves out of his pocket. “I’ve got an ulcer and a long shift to get through. Whatever’s going on here, you’re not going to make it my problem. You two can wait outside.”

“But I’m the father,” I say.

“Congratulations. Now get the hell out of my exam room.”

“SO, THIS IS some predicament we find ourselves in,” Wade says.

We are standing against the wall in the crowded waiting room. There is what appears to be an entire Little League team and their parents sitting around, waiting for an injured teammate. Two construction workers prop up a third whose foot is wrapped in a blood-soaked towel. On a small television mounted too high for effective viewing, someone is cooking a soufflé.

“This predicament, as you call it, is my life. My family.”

“Jen is my family too now.”

“Jen is where you’re presently parking your cock.”

“Don’t talk about her like that.”

“I’m not, you dumb shit. I’m talking about you.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you’re shooting blanks.”

“Fuck you.”

“Um, excuse me, guys,” one of the Little League dads says, indicating the children present. But this train has already left the station.

“I know you pretty much fuck anyone who will have you. You fuck the interns, you fuck the sales reps, you fuck the sponsors, or, in one case that I know of, the sponsor’s daughter, who at the time was not quite eighteen yet, was she? I know you won’t last with Jen, because the last thing you want is to be saddled with someone else’s kid. I know you’ve been praying for a miscarriage ever since you got the call and that now you’re weighing your options, looking for the fastest way out of this mess. I know you want to think that underneath it all you’re really a decent guy, but you’re not so sure, are you, and for what it’s worth I can pretty much confirm for you that underneath it all, you’re not a decent guy at all. You’re just an empty soul, devoid of any real substance. So you’ll keep getting laid and getting paid to be the voice of the lowest common denominator, until, as inconceivable as it seems, someone even lower then you comes along, and then you’ll get old and obscure, and you’ll die alone.”

It’s safe to say we’ve got everyone’s attention now. The Little League parents are horrified. The kids can barely contain their exhilaration that a grown-up said “fuck” so many times in one sentence. The construction guys are unimpressed.

“You feel better now?” Wade says with a shit-eating grin.

“Not even a little.”

“That’s too bad. It was a good speech.”

“Let’s just not talk, okay? Can we do that?”

“I didn’t turn her, Judd,” Wade says. “I didn’t seduce her or come on to her, or anything.”

“And by not talking I meant exactly what you’re doing right now.”

“She was lonely and angry and lost, and I didn’t do that to her. You did that, all by yourself.”

“And you saw an opening.”

“Yes, I did. I’ll admit it. She’s beautiful, and I’m human. I crossed the line. But I didn’t fuck her any more than she fucked me. It takes two, my friend. And believe me, no one was more surprised than me when it became something more. So you can go on hating me for it; I certainly would if I were you. But she came after me, Judd. Not the other way around. She came after me. You know that’s true, and that’s the thing you can’t get past.”

“That doesn’t make me want you any less dead.”

“Yeah, well, get in line.”

And that’s when I decide to hit him. I’ve already assaulted him twice before, but neither time was really that satisfying. I need the intimacy of direct violence, the blunt force of bone on bone. But moving from conversation to violence is just as hard as moving from flirting to kissing. There’s that leap you have to take, to shed your inhibitions and expose your naked impulses.

This is how I do it. I bridge the distance between us by pointing at him and saying, “You don’t get it, you dumb bastard,” until my finger is inches from his eye. He swats the finger away, as expected, and that’s my trigger. But I’ve used my right hand to point, so it’s my weaker, less reliable left hand that swings around with the punch, and Wade reflexively turns away, so that my fist glances impotently off his goddamn shoulder. “Asshole!” he shouts, and shoves me back against the wall, not attacking back, just kind of getting me off of him. But that’s when Phillip finally shows up, and all Phillip sees is Wade shoving me, so he steps in and coldcocks Wade with a high arcing punch he learned from watching mixed martial arts matches on television. The punch hits Wade in the nose and he goes down hard. Phillip stands over him with one foot on his chest and says, “Call my brother an asshole again.”

A fat security guard materializes and pins Phillip’s arms behind him. A second one comes up behind me, grabbing my arm tightly. “Let’s go,” he says, and they hustle us toward the exit.

“My wife is in there.”

“We’ll deal with it outside.”

It’s raining outside, a hard rain that makes a racket against the fiberglass awning of the emergency room. The guards release us beside a parked ambulance. They hold a quick, whispered conversation, and then one of them heads back inside. The other, a large black man with a shaved head and thirty-inch forearms, turns back to us. “Is that the Man Up guy in there?”

“That’s him,” I say.

“Which one of y’all hit him?”

“Nobody hit him, he just fell,” Phillip says.

The guard smiles widely and extends his hand. “Shake my hand, man. I hate that loudmouth motherfucker.”

Phillip shrugs and shakes his hand. “And if you hadn’t pulled me off of him when you did, I’d have really kicked his ass.”

PHILLIP DOESN’T QUITE remember where he parked, so we get soaked walking around the lot. When he finally locates the Porsche, it’s parked a few cars away from Wade’s silver Maserati, with its MAN UP vanity plate. Before I have time to talk myself out of it, I climb up onto the roof of the car and jump up and down on it, screaming obscenities into the rain like a madman. I jump up and land hard on my knees, feeling the metal crumple satisfyingly beneath me. Phillip pops the trunk of the Porsche and pulls out an L-shaped tire iron. “Here,” he says, tossing it up to me. “Go crazy.”

But I’m suddenly out of steam. I slide down the front windshield and sit on the hood. Phillip joins me, and we sit there in silence for a few seconds as the rain pummels us.

“I miss Dad,” I say.

“Me too.”

“Why didn’t I miss him more when he was alive? He was dying for two years, and I only visited him a handful of times. What could have been more important than spending time with your father?”

“He didn’t want us around. He told me so. He didn’t want us to remember him like that.”

“Well, that was probably our time to step up and say ‘Tough shit, Dad.’”

Phillip nods soberly. “Dad was always much tougher than us.”

“I guess. How did we become such wimps?”

“Hey,” Phillip says. “Did I or did I not just take out Wade Boulanger with one punch?”

“You did.”

“Damn straight.” He winces a little as he rubs his hand. “I think I broke my knuckle. Can you even break a knuckle? I should go back in and get it X-rayed.”

“I heard the baby’s heartbeat.”

Phillip looks at me. “That’s great. Right?”

“Yeah.” I’m quiet for a moment. “I told Wade he was hoping for a miscarriage, but the truth is, I think part of me might have been. And how terrible is that, for a baby to be growing in the womb and for the father to be hoping it won’t make it?”

“It’s pretty terrible,” Phillip says, lying back against the windshield to join me.

“Did you think Dad was a good father?”

Phillip ponders this for a moment. “I think he did his best. He was pretty old-school, I guess. He didn’t always get us, didn’t always appreciate us, but come on, look at us, right?”

“I think I could be a pretty good father, actually.”

“I think you’ll be great.”

Raindrops land in small explosions on the Maserati’s gleaming hood. “But I’ll have to forgive her, won’t I? I’ll have to learn to live with the fact of Jen and Wade. I mean, for the sake of the kid.”

“I don’t know anything about parenting, but my guess is that there will be much larger sacrifices to be made.”

I look over at Phillip, who is catching raindrops on his tongue. “You almost sounded wise right there.”

Phillip grins. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

I smile and lean back on the windshield, looking up into the rain. “I’m going to be a dad,” I say.

“Congratulations, big brother.”

“Thank you.”

“You ready to go home?”

“Okay.”

He grabs the tire iron from me, and as he slides off the hood, he swings it to the side, noisily shattering the driver’s-side window. The car alarm goes off instantly, a muted, almost apologetic wail. Phillip looks at me and smiles. “Whoops.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“You just said I was wise.”

“I’m seeing things more clearly now.”

“Glad to hear it.” He offers me the tire iron. “One for the road?”

“I’m trying to rise above here. To forgive and move on.”

“And you will. In exactly thirty seconds.” He tosses me the tire iron. The cold metal feels almost alive in my hands. I shouldn’t be having this conversation. What I should be doing is climbing down off of Wade’s car and talking my way past the security guards so that I can make sure Jen is okay. We are going to be parents together, and there’s no place in that arrangement for juvenile acts of vandalism, no matter how satisfying. But Wade is already in there, probably back on his feet by now, taking charge, charming the doctors, asking all the right questions. I’m the extraneous one, the temperamental biological father who had to be forcibly restrained and removed. I realize now that this is how it will be: Wade on the inside, and me out here in the rain, and no magical heartbeat can change that. I will always be the odd man out, the guy everyone secretly hopes won’t show up to the party and put everyone on edge. And right now, that seems like more injustice than any man should rightfully be asked to swallow. If that’s what I have to look forward to, I’m not sure I’m going to be up for it after all. This is a crucial moment, I know that, but that’s never stopped me before.

And thirty seconds is really all you need with a good tire iron in your hand.

Chapter 39

Back at home, Mom and Linda are having a fight. They are in the kitchen, arguing in hushed tones. I can’t be sure, but it sounds like Linda’s crying. A fist pounds the counter. A cabinet door slams. There are no visitors right now, this being the dinner hour, but there is no dinner right now, since none of us will dare enter the kitchen. More low voices. Then Linda storms down the hall and out the front door, slamming it behind her hard enough to rattle the lightbulbs in their sconces. A minute later Mom comes out, still composing herself, and sinks down into her shiva chair. We all look at her expectantly. “What?” she says. “We had an argument.”

“What about?” Wendy says.

“About none of your business.” She stands up and heads for the stairs. “I think I feel a migraine coming on. I’m going to go lie down for a bit.”

“Hey,” Wendy shouts, stopping her at the foot of the stairs. “What happened to a family with no secrets?”

Mom nods to herself, holding on to the banister for support. When she turns to us, there are tears in her eyes. “It’s been such a long time since we were really a family,” she says.

IT’S A NIGHT for lovers’ tiffs. Alice is pissed at Paul for injuring his shoulder. She is berating him upstairs but is coming in loud and clear through the baby monitor. Back in the den, Tracy is furious with Phillip for hitting Wade. I sit in the kitchen eating dinner, listening to these two very similar arguments play out on different sides of the house. There are perks to being single.

Underneath it all, Alice is really angry at Paul because she’s still not pregnant, and Tracy is angry at Phillip for having sex with Chelsea, which he probably has, or, if not, probably will. He’s definitely been thinking about it. Tracy is angry at herself for letting Phillip make a fool of her, for blinding herself to certain obvious realities, for being in her forties. But this is not the time or place for such thorny issues, so in their frustration they overreact to sprained shoulders and bruised knuckles, and harmony is not in the cards at Knob’s End tonight.

On the plus side, fresh new platters have been delivered. Teriyaki chicken wraps, pasta salad, deviled eggs, and a tray of black-and-white cookies. I don’t know when I’ll eat this well again. Wendy’s boys sit across from me on stools at the kitchen island, freshly scrubbed and dressed in tight pajamas that cling to them like superhero costumes. Their damp hair, perfectly combed, gleams under the recessed lighting. They are like an advertisement for children’s shampoo, or for children in general. Wendy tries to get them to eat, but their tiny stomachs are still bloated and churning from all the sugared crap they ingested at the amusement park today. I experience a clenching pang as I think of Penny. It’s the feeling of having behaved poorly, of having hurt her. I would call her if I had any idea at all what I could possibly say besides “I’m sorry.”

A hard rain pounds at the windows, looking for a way in. On the monitor, Alice yells at Paul. “You could have done permanent damage. And for what? To strike out Boner Grodner?”

“If she wakes the baby, I’m going to kick her fat ass,” Wendy says as she assembles a plate for Mom.

“Mommy, you said a bad word,” Ryan says.

“No, I didn’t, honey.”

“You said ‘ass.’”

“‘Ass’ is just another word for a donkey.”

“So it’s not a bad word?”

“It is when children say it.”

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I think I may have broken something.”

“Besides Tracy’s heart?”

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

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

“Fat bitch!” Wendy mutters.

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

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

“Bitch!” Cole repeats happily.

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

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

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

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

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

“Asshole,” Phillip says.

“An asshole is a donkey,” Ryan says.

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

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

“It’s too late for me,” I say.

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

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

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

“You can’t leave me here alone.”

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

“What if people come?”

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

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

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

Chapter 40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, Tammy. Looking good.”

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

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

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

“So you didn’t?”

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

“I didn’t,” I say sadly.

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

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

Lately, I get inexplicably angry around pretty girls.

The girls around the bar shake themselves lightly in time to the music, pouting the way girls do when they dance, like they’re experts in something we’ll never understand. I need to stop looking at these girls. No good will come from it. You keep looking at girls like this and then one day you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror behind the bar, and if you’re not yet too old, you’re on the borderline, and the last thing you ever want to be is the old guy in the bar. There’s no dignity in it.

“Isn’t that Horry?” I say, looking over to a corner table. Horry is there, chatting up some hot young thing. I catch his eye and he waves uncertainly. When I look back a few minutes later, he and the girl are gone. I guess I can’t really blame him. I wouldn’t feel comfortable hitting on women in front of the brothers of the married woman I recently slept with. You need GPS to follow the sex lives of this family. I wonder if love is this twisted for everyone or if our family is uniquely talented at making such a mess of it.

Paul slams a dollar bill down on the table. “I’d like to perform a demonstration,” he says. “Phillip. Please go over to the jukebox and choose a song.”

“You get two for a dollar.”

“Then go crazy.”

“Anything in particular you’re in the mood for?”

“Surprise me.”

Phillip hops off his stool and makes his way across the crowded room. “Watch,” Paul says.

“What?”

“He won’t be able to get there and back without touching at least three women.”

There’s a girl at the jukebox, in a little black halter top, her jeans doing that thing where they ride so low on her hips that you wonder what’s holding them up. He leans over and whispers something to her. She looks up at him and laughs. And then she teeters a little bit, maybe because of her high heels, or possibly it’s the free Jell-O shots for women between eight and ten o’clock. I don’t know what makes women teeter. She grabs Phillip’s arm to right herself. It’s simple, effortless even, and the kind of thing that never happens to me. Her fingers continue to clutch his elbow as they chat. How does a simple wisecrack turn into bodily contact?

On his way back he is stopped by two girls who seem to know him. He leans in to accept a kiss from each one, his hands resting lightly on their exposed hips, just above the waist of their jeans, as he chats briefly. He’s about ten feet away from us when he bumps into another girl, graciously guiding her past him with his hand on the small of her back as they trade smiles.

“Four,” Paul says.

“Four what?” Phillip says.

“Nothing.”

Phillip looks mildly irked and then shrugs. When the world is your sexual buffet, you don’t sweat the small stuff. He takes a generous swig of beer. “So, Paul. I think it’s great you and Alice want to have a kid.”

Paul looks up at him and then down at the dwindling foam of his beer. “She’s driving me crazy with it. We’ve burned through our savings on her quest for fertility.”

“I find it interesting that you call it ‘her’ quest and not ‘our’ quest.”

“And I find it interesting that you’re sleeping with a woman in spitting distance of menopause, but I figure that’s your own business.”

Phillip puts down his beer, looking hurt. “You’re an asshole, Paul. You’re an asshole to me, you’re an asshole to Judd. I hope to hell you turn out to be a better father than you are a brother.”

“I’m the lousy brother?” Paul says, raising his voice. “You think it was just Dad who paid to keep you out of jail when you decided to take up marijuana farming? I didn’t take profits for three years so that we could pay off your legal fees. And, Judd? Don’t get me started on you.”

“No need,” I say. “I know all about your great sacrifice. You’ll never let me forget it.”

“What did you just say to me?” Paul says, getting to his feet. His stool clatters to the floor behind him.

I stand up to face him. “It was your own damn fault, Paul. You dragged me to Rusco’s house. I kept telling you I didn’t want to go, but you were going to show everyone what a tough bastard you were. I didn’t ask you to do it, and I’m sick and tired of paying for it. The price is just too damn high.”

“I think we should all just take a beat here,” Phillip says, but it’s too late.

Paul brings his beer mug crashing down on the table. He is seething now, his face red, his fists clenched. Around us, people move away quickly, anticipating a brawl. “I lost my scholarship. I lost everything. You went off to college and never looked back.” He sinks his teeth into every word, and they come out chewed. “And now you want to tell me that you paid a price? You ungrateful prick!”

“You could have gone to college. You chose to stay home and get drunk for two years. Should I have done that with you, pissed away my future out of gratitude?”

“Okay, this is good. We’re all talking here, getting everything out on the table.” Phillip.

The bouncer is suddenly standing behind Paul, giving us a hard look with his one real eye. He’s a retired boxer. There are framed clippings of his fights behind the bar. It’s anyone’s guess what kind of punch the guy might pack today, but he’s got presence, and his expression carries a certain tired wisdom unique to people who have known violence intimately. He places a hand like a meat hook on Paul’s shoulder. “Paul,” he says in a hoarse, surprisingly gentle voice. “You either need to sit down or take this outside.”

Paul nods, still looking at me, and then pats the bouncer’s belly. “It’s fine, Rod. I’m leaving anyway.”

Rod the prizefighter looks pointedly at Phil and then me, visualizing the cataclysmic damage he’ll do to us if it comes to that, before heading back across the bar. Paul throws a few bills down on the table.

“Paul,” I say, feeling remorseful. “I’ve always felt bad about what happened.”

“Just tell me this,” he says, his voice low, his anger spent. “How many surgeries have I had?”

“What?”

“I don’t mean when it happened. I mean since you moved out. How many operations?”

I think about it for a moment. “Three, I guess. Or four if you count the one you had right after I got married. The skin graft thing.”

Paul shakes his head slowly. “Eight.”

“What?”

“I’ve had eight surgeries. Skin and nerve grafts, tissue grafts, surgical pins. And how many times did you visit me in the hospital, or even call the house to see how I was doing?”

“I don’t know. A bunch?”

He holds up two fingers. “Twice. You came to see me twice. That’s it.”

“That can’t be right.”

“It’s not right, but it’s the truth.” He starts heading for the door.

“Paul,” I say. “Wait a minute.”

He turns to face me, and I’m shocked to see a tear running down his cheek. “Going to Rusco’s house was stupid,” he says. “Believe me, I spend time every day wishing I could go back there and stop myself, picturing the world I’d be living in now if I hadn’t gone. But stupid or not, I went there for you. You want to call me a lousy brother? I guess maybe I am. I’ll own up to it. But maybe you are too.”

I sit back on my stool, watching him leave. I should call out to him, stop him, now that we’re finally talking. But we are not a family of communicators. It took five shots and a decade’s worth of repressed anger just to say this much tonight. I’m tapped out, and so is he.

“Well, I think you two had a real breakthrough there,” Phillip says.

“Yeah? Then why do I feel so shitty?”

Phillip pats my back and messes up my hair. “Emotional growth hurts. It’s nothing a few more shots won’t fix.”

He disappears into the crowd at the bar. I am left alone at the table to lick the bottom of my shot glasses and assimilate the new information. You think you have all the time in the world, and then your father dies. You think you’re happily married, and then your wife fucks your boss. You think your brother is an asshole, and then you discover that it’s been you all along. If nothing else, it’s been educational.

PHILLIP RETURNS WITH eight shot glasses jammed between every finger of both hands, another of his worthless skills. Somehow we do them all. The night takes on a kind of kaleidoscopic translucence, and I lose my sense of time and, occasionally, balance. When I come back from a trip to the bathroom, we’ve been joined by Phillip’s old girlfriend, Chelsea. “Look who I bumped into,” Phillip says. Chelsea is dressed for the hunt in a short denim skirt and a tank top that grants a generous view of her lightly freckled cleavage as she leans forward to kiss my cheek. “Fancy running into you guys here,” she says, in case I haven’t properly registered the complete randomness of this encounter from Phillip’s remark. Chelsea’s fingers dance up Phillip’s arms like he’s an instrument she’s playing. I try to catch his eye, but he looks away every time. I want to tell him that he can’t behave like this on my watch, but the shots have warmed my blood and toasted my veins, and someone has turned up the music, and to be heard I’d have to put my mouth close to his ear, like Chelsea is doing right now.

On my next bathroom trip, I see Horry making out with a skinny girl in the little nook between the men’s room and the kitchen. She’s a sloppy kisser, her tongue sliding out of her mouth to lick his lips when they separate, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Good for you, Horry, I think. I am drunk and lost and would very much like to be making out with someone of no consequence right now, mashing tequila tongues, sliding my fingertips over smooth, booze-warmed skin. Instead, I urinate for a half hour, reading the stall graffiti, still smelling Chelsea’s shampoo from when she kissed me hello.

When I get back to the table, Chelsea and Phillip are gone. The jukebox is playing goddamned “Sweet Home Alabama” again, and I think I’m going to be sick. The bathroom has a line, so I stumble out to the parking lot and puke behind one of the Dumpsters. I feel a little better after that, halfway to sober. The rain has finally stopped, or not really stopped, but dwindled to a fine, foggy mist that cools my burning skin. I wonder how I’m going to get home.

Chapter 41

I can’t recall if I settled the tab or not, but no one’s come running out after me, and just the thought of going back inside starts my stomach acid frothing, so I’ll just assume it’s all good. I decide to take a walk. The neon lights of Route 120 spread out ahead of me like the Vegas Strip. P.F. Chang’s, the Cheesecake Factory, the Pitch & Putt, Sushi Palace, Apple-bee’s, Rock & Bowl, Szechuan Gardens, and the digital marquee of the AMC multiplex, all flashing and blinking, burning pink and red streaks into my eyelids when I close them. Generations of broken glass twinkle like glitter in the pavement. Teenagers rove in loud packs that form and disperse as they move down the sidewalk. Cell phones ring, obscenities fly. Blow jobs are administered in throbbing cars in the darkest corners of abandoned parking lots. They’ve been laying pipe beneath the blacktop forever now, and they don’t bother taking down the barricades on the weekends anymore, so every few stoplights, traffic slows to a crawl, cars ejaculated out of the bottlenecks one by one, burning rubber just to make a point, since there’s really nowhere here worth rushing to. They whiz by like missiles, these cars crammed with kids exactly like the one I used to be. Once in a while you can make out their laughter above the hollow din of tires scorching the blacktop like fighter jets on a runway.

There’s a fountain in front of Sushi Palace, spraying a high illuminated geyser that changes colors every few seconds. Red, yellow, green, and violet. I stop to watch it for a little bit. A couple of kids sit on the edge of the fountain, kissing with such unabashed fervor that I have to look away.

As I walk, a silver car passes me and then quickly brakes, causing the cars behind it to swerve left and honk angrily. You don’t see many Maseratis in Elmsbrook. The car pulls onto the shoulder and Wade climbs out. He’s wearing the same suit he wore earlier and has a bandage across the bridge of his nose, a smear of purple bruising spreading out from under it. He frowns as he approaches me, picking up speed as he goes.

“What are you doing?” I say.

His punch arrives well before my worthless block can get there, landing squarely on my chin and lower lip, and down I go. There is a version of this fight in which a crowd of pedestrians grows around us as we grapple and trade punches, until I tackle Wade and we fall over into the sushi fountain, where I pummel him into submission, standing over him in victorious disgust, casually spitting some blood into the fountain. But I’m too drunk and tired to fight, so I curl up and close my eyes, prepared to absorb the kicks that will follow. After a few seconds I look up to see Wade standing above me, combing his hair with his fingers. “That was for my car,” he says.

I get up on one knee and taste the salt and copper of blood on my lips. “Fair enough.” I wipe my mouth with my sleeve and get to my feet.

“You’re drunk.”

“And you’re an asshole. Are we going to just stand here stating the obvious?”

He shakes his head and smiles fondly at me. “You never could hold your liquor.”

He reaches through the shattered passenger window to his glove compartment and comes out with a white towel, which he tosses to me. We lean against the car and I press the towel against my lips. It comes away bloody.

Rowdy, hopped-up college kids pass us in an endless, noisy blur like they’re being mass produced or squeezed out of a tube—guys skulking in their T-shirts and cargo shorts, girls in low-slung jeans and flip-flops, pimples and breasts and tattoos and lipstick and legs and bra straps, and cigarettes; a colorful, sexy mélange. I feel old and tired and I just want to be them again, want to be young and stupid, filled with angst and attitude and unbridled lust. Can I have a do-over, please? I swear to God I’ll make a real go of it this time.

“You were right, what you said about me,” Wade says.

“What do you mean?”

He shakes his head and looks over his shoulder. “I’m not a decent guy. Not really.” He pulls out a cigarette and lights it. “I think I always just told myself I was, that at some point I’d grow up and start behaving.” He rubs the back of his neck as he blows smoke into the mist. “I always figured I could stop anytime I wanted to.”

“What do you want, Wade?”

He peers down his nose at the glowing ember of his cigarette. “I don’t know. Nothing, really. I just saw you as I was driving past, and I realized that I never actually apologized to you.”

“So you hit me.”

“Yeah. I didn’t actually know I was going to do that until I did it.”

“Got it.”

“I know it won’t change anything, but I just figured it was better said than not.” He looks across the parking lot. “You want your job back?”

“Fuck you.”

“I just thought I’d ask.” He tosses the cigarette into a puddle and nods at me. “I’m really very sorry for everything. You were my only real friend, and it sucks that we’re not friends anymore. I deserve it, but it still sucks. And whether you believe it or not, I really hope you guys will be able to put things back together, man. Sincerely.”

The planet lurches beneath my feet. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Wade takes a deep breath and shakes his head. “I was kidding myself. I’m not going to be any kid’s stepfather.”

“You broke up with Jen?”

He shrugs, then turns and steps off the curb, walking around to the driver’s side of the Maserati. “I think it’s what’s best for everyone.”

I stare at him, incredulous, as the rage in me builds. “It’s what’s best for you.”

“I know it looks that way.”

“It is that way. You had a good thing going as long as she stayed married to me, as long as you didn’t have to take any responsibility.”

“It wasn’t like that, Judd. I really did love her.”

“And now you don’t.”

“Love isn’t enough.”

“She walked out on her marriage for you.”

He looks at me over the scraped, dented roof of his car. His smile is sad and broken. “I’m a professional bastard, Judd. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He pushes a button on his key chain and opens the door.

It would be so perfect right now if a passing eighteen-wheeler lost control on the rain-slicked road and just plowed into him, irreversibly embedding his crushed corpse into the steel and leather of his Maserati. They’d have to bury the car with him and justice would be served with poetic flair. But this is real life, and in real life Wade gets to fuck my wife, to fuck my life, bloody my mouth, and then flash me a last rueful grin before speeding away on twelve Italian cylinders. His tires spin briefly on the slick blacktop before catching and hurtling him out into the traffic, just another set of red lights disappearing into the horizon.

If nothing else, I am now completely sober.

I sit down on the retaining wall of a parking lot, my mind racing. Jen has been left. Jen is alone in the world for the first time in her adult life—alone and pregnant and vulnerable and contrite and probably scared out of her mind. I don’t know what it is I’m planning to do, or maybe I do, maybe I know exactly what I’m planning to do. Whichever it is, I like my chances.

MY CAB DRIVER is Mr. Ruffalo, who taught English and driver’s ed when I was in high school, until he fell for one of his students, Lily Tedesco. They would set off every Tuesday in the driver’s ed car, Lily’s hands positioned firmly at ten and two, and then pull over behind the county park, where they would discuss their plans to run away together after she graduated, and where she would crouch down between his legs, balancing herself on the training break to prove her love. They must have been spotted at some point because one day Mrs. Ruffalo showed up outside the school and tried to stab her husband with a steak knife hidden in the pocket of her red velour housecoat. No charges were ever filed, but the school board voted unanimously in favor of termination. Now he’s divorced and driving the graveyard shift, and probably never gets to see the two kids who are now much older than they are in the bent and faded pictures he has taped to the sun visor of his cab. Life is huge, but it can turn on a dime.

“You’re Foxman, right?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“I teach you to drive?”

“Yes. I had you for freshman English too.”

“Really?”

“Romeo and Juliet. Silas Marner. The Catcher in the Rye.”

“That’s pretty good.”

“You made us each memorize one of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English.”

He laughs. “I was some kind of asshole, huh? It’s funny what we remember.” He cracks his window to light a cigarette. “You mind?”

The lights of Route 120 turn into a streak of colors in the grimy window of the cab. “Wonderful Tonight” is playing on the radio, and we stop talking to listen in silence. I have to believe it makes Ruffalo feel as sad and lost as it does me. He pulls up to the house just as the song is ending.

“You the ball player?”

“No, that’s my brother, Paul.”

He nods as I hand him a twenty. “That boy had a gift. It was a real shame what happened to him.”

“Thanks.”

“Death from above,” he says ominously. “No one is safe.”

“Tell me about it.” I overtip, although I suspect the extra seven bucks won’t make much of a difference in whatever it is that now passes for Mr. Ruffalo’s life.

DOWN IN THE basement, I wash some of Boner’s foam spray off the mirror to better study my reflection. My bottom lip is split and swollen, my eyes bleary, my cheeks pale and puffy. I look like a corpse pulled from the river a week after the suicide. It’s time for a gut check. I mean that literally. I pull off my shirt, which is caked with just enough blood and vomit to represent a much wilder night than the one I’ve had, and step back to study my torso. The overall effect does not match the image I cling to in my head. My belly is not yet what you’d call a gut, but you can see where the inevitable expansion will happen. I have no real chest to speak of; you’d miss it altogether if it weren’t for the two hairless nipples pressed on like decals. Broader shoulders would create the illusion of fitness, but I am sorely lacking in that department as well. The overall impression is lean but soft, and getting softer. This is the package, ladies. Come and get it.

I lie down on the floor to do some sit-ups and promptly fall asleep.