This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  10:00 a.m.

  “IT WAS A Saturday morning,” Wendy says, “and, Mom, you were on a lecture tour. Dad was up on the roof, hammering the rain gutters back on or something. He was making a racket, so I was down in the basement, watching TV. It was a Brady Bunch movie, I still remember. The one where they go to Hawaii.”

  “I remember that one,” Phillip says. “Alice hurts her back having a hula lesson, because of Peter’s bad luck charm.”

  “Right,” Wendy says. “That’s not really germane to my story.”

  “I remember thinking it was nice that Alice got to go on vacation with them,” Phillip says. “I mean, she was the housekeeper. You got the feeling that she hadn’t really gone anywhere before.”

  “Phillip remembers every show or movie he’s ever seen,” Tracy says proudly, like we might not know.

  “Now if only that were a marketable skill,” Wendy says.

  Tracy looks miffed, but Phillip laughs. He and Wendy have a long history of insulting each other. They don’t even hear it anymore.

  Tracy and Alice are on the couch; Linda is in an armchair, her feet up on one of the plastic folding chairs; and Barry is reading the Wall Street Journal in the backyard while the boys run around. The rest of us are back in our low shiva chairs, steeling ourselves for another ass-numbing day of greeting visitors at crotch level. Mom has asked us all to remember personal stories about Dad, which she is scribbling into a large brown journal.

  “So, anyway, that’s where I was, watching television, when I got my first period.”

  “I have one daughter, and I wasn’t here the day she became a woman,” Mom says. “I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

  “Hardly your worst offense,” Wendy says with a smirk. “So I run upstairs and I scream out the window to Dad, but he can’t hear me over the hammering. So I step outside and call up to him, but he still can’t hear me. So I grab a baseball off the lawn—Paul was always leaving baseballs on the lawn—and I throw it up to the roof. I only meant for it to hit the roof and roll down, just to catch his attention, but I guess I didn’t know my own strength, and the ball hits Dad square on the back of his head, and he loses his balance and falls off the roof, pulling the rain gutter off with him as he goes.”

  “I don’t remember this at all,” Phillip says.

  “Because it didn’t happen on a television show,” Wendy says. She turns to Tracy. “Phillip was their last child. He was basically raised by the television. We don’t hold it against him.”

  “Spiteful bitch,” Mom says with a smile.

  “So Dad’s lying on the ground, flat on his back. His arm is broken, and he’s got this big gash on his forehead, and his eyes are closed, and I’m sure I’ve just killed him. So I scream, ‘Daddy, wake up!’ And he opens his eyes and he says, very calmly, ‘I spent all morning putting that gutter on.’ Then he gets up, and we get in the car, and he drives one-armed to the emergency room. And the nurse at the desk looks him up and down and says, ‘What in the world happened to you?’ and he says, ‘My daughter got her period.’”

  Everyone laughs.

  “That’s such a perfect story,” Mom says, scribbling. “That’s so very Mort.”

  “Victoria—that was the nurse’s name—took me to the bathroom and taught me how to put in a tampon while they set Dad’s arm, and I still see her face every time I use a tampon. She was a big old Jamaican woman with little black freckles like Morgan Freeman, and she said, ‘Just ease it in, child. Don’t you be scared. Bigger tings dan dis goin to go in dere. And come out.’ I had nightmares for weeks.”

  “That was great. Can you tell another story about your period?”

  “Shut up, Judd. Why don’t you tell your favorite memory now?”

  “I’m still thinking.”

  “I’ve got one,” Phillip says. “When I was in Little League, I had trouble catching. So they put me out in right field. And in the last inning, I dropped two balls that cost us the game. Our coach was this fat guy, I forgot his name. He got all crazy and started screaming at me. He called me worthless. So Dad stepped between us and I didn’t see what he did, but next thing I know, the coach is on the ground, and Dad is stepping on his chest. And he says, ‘Call my son worthless again.’”

  “That’s fantastic,” Alice says, clapping. “I never heard that one.”

  “This might sound twisted, but I hope, when I have a kid, that someone calls him a name, just so I can do for him what Dad did for me.”

  “That’s beautiful, Phillip,” Mom says.

  “Yes,” Tracy says. “But why not just hope that no one calls your child a name?”

  Phillip looks at her. “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “You know damn well what.”

  “I was just saying that as long as you’re being theoretical, why not aim higher?”

  “My dad stood up for me. I want to stand up for my kid.”

  “And teach him that violence is a legitimate means of conflict resolution?”

  “He’s going to have to learn it sometime.”

  “A few well-chosen words might have shamed your coach into apologizing.”

  “But if he had, I wouldn’t have had a story to remind me of how my father took care of me, and you wouldn’t have been able to suck all the joy out of it, and where would we all be then?”

  Tracy blinks repeatedly, blushing as she gets to her feet. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I was being insensitive.”

  “Apology accepted,” Phillip says without looking at her.

  “I’m going to take a walk and return some calls.”

  “You meant well, honey,” Linda says to her as she leaves.

  Once she’s gone, Phillip looks around at us sheepishly. “She takes a little getting used to.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have dressed her down like that, in front of your family,” Linda says. “She’s still a guest here.”

  “I thought you were completely justified,” Mom says.

  “We’ll just have to agree to disagree then,” Linda says.

  Mom casts a dark look at Linda before turning to me. “So, Judd, what do you have for me?”

  What I have is nothing. I’ve been wracking my brain, but every memory I have of my father is tied up with everyone else. I know there must have been times when it was just the two of us, but I can’t remember any of them. I can only see him in the context of everyone else. Phillip’s story, in particular, made me think of riding home in Dad’s car after Paul’s games.

  Paul was a standout pitcher, the only one of us with true ability, and driving home from his games, Dad would relive the highlights out loud, shaking his head in disbelief that one of his children was capable of anything other than disappointing him. Having a brother who was the school’s most acclaimed athlete was not without its perks. It may not have been enough to land me a girlfriend, but being Paul’s untalented runt of a brother was still better than being just another pimply underclassman with bad hair and an ass to kick. Still, I hated those car rides after the games, the Cadillac littered with samples and torn packaging, the next month’s sale signage shifting and grinding in the trunk like tectonic plates every time Dad braked, listening to him come out of his customary shell to praise Paul in a way he would never praise me. Wendy would sit directly behind Dad, lip-syncing to his soliloquy, trying to get me to laugh, while Phillip whined about always having to sit between us on the hump, and Mom looked out the window, humming along to the oldies station on the radio.

  In his senior year, Paul was awarded a full baseball scholarship to UMass. Now, not only was he the talented son, he was also paying his own way. Paul was golden. He spent his summer celebrating with his buddies and having sex with a rotation of baseball groupies. It was a busy time for him, and on those rare occasions he was home, he was either passed out in his basement bedroom or hungover at the kitchen table, reading the sports pages and sipping at a black coffee.

  Simmering with envy, I wondered what I could
do to distinguish myself as anything other than a waste of space. Athletics were out—I played hockey in a local league, but there was no school team, and I wasn’t particularly gifted anyway. I briefly considered joining the debate team, but I knew my father wouldn’t see the point to a group of kids putting on striped red and blue ties to argue in public. As far as I could see, my best shot at gaining his approval was to get wounded while foiling an armed robbery at the 7-Eleven. Instead, I spent my summer in the 7-Eleven parking lot, smoking pot and wishing for something bad to happen to Paul.

  And then something did.

  Chapter 12

  11:30 a.m.

  Mr. Applebaum is all over Mom. He clasps her hand between his, he pats her arm, his fingers snaking around her wrist, his eyes darting back and forth across her chest like a tiny tennis match is being played across the line of her cleavage. He’s pulled his folding chair up close to her, and with Mom down in the shiva chair, he is perfectly positioned to ogle.

  “I’ve been through this, Hillary,” he says. His dark, bushy eyebrows call to mind political cartoons as they arch compassionately under his wiry silver hair. “When I lost Adele, the community was very supportive. Mort was wonderful. You remember, he came over and fixed the air conditioner during my shiva? All those people in the house, and the air handler crapped out.”

  “He knew machines,” Mom says.

  “Look at that,” Wendy whispers. “He’s staring at her breasts, and her head is practically between his knees.”

  “It’s just the angle,” I say. “These low chairs.”

  “These chairs are a practical joke. And Mom should wear less revealing shirts.”

  “She doesn’t own less revealing shirts.”

  “I feel like I’m watching the opening scene of an AARP porno,” Phillip says.

  Mr. Applebaum rubs Mom’s wrist. He’s the only visitor right now, and so he’s got her cornered. Not that she seems to mind the attention. “If you ever need to talk, Hill. Day or night. Just call, and I’ll be there.”

  “I bet he will,” Wendy says.

  “Just call my name,” Phillip sings in a head voice. “And I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you, Peter. I appreciate that.”

  “It can be very lonely.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  Applebaum sighs and looks down at her, reluctant to let go of her hand. “I’ll be back tomorrow to check on you.”

  “Okay.”

  He stands up and then pulls her up by her hand to clutch her in a full-bodied embrace. “You’re going to be fine, Hillary.”

  Mom pats his back while he holds her tight.

  “The old guy just copped a feel,” Paul says, joining in.

  “Give him a break,” I say. “They’ve known each other for years.”

  I remember Applebaum’s wife, Adele, a tall, vivacious woman with big teeth and a resounding laugh. She would grab my hair when I was a kid and say, “Oh, Hill, the girls are just going to go wild over this one!” Then she’d wink at me and say, “Look me up when you’re legal. We’ll run away together.” She started having strokes a few years ago. I remember him pushing her around at Paul’s wedding in a wheelchair. She could only smile with half her face and couldn’t reach my hair with her withered arm. I thought she may have winked at me, but it was hard to tell.

  Applebaum finally lets go of Mom and turns to face the rest of us. “You kids take care of your beautiful mother, okay?”

  “I believe he had an erection,” Wendy says once he’s gone.

  “Oh, stop it. He did not,” Mom says.

  “Pushing seventy and he’s still getting it up,” Phillip muses. “The man’s a keeper.”

  “You’re all being horrible. You’ve known Peter forever. He’s a fine man.”

  “That fine man was hitting on you.” Paul .

  “He was totally hitting on you.” Wendy.

  “He was most definitely not hitting on me,” Mom says, flushed with pleasure.

  Linda sticks her head in from the kitchen. “Is that horny old goat gone yet?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mom says. “He was being compassionate.”

  “Not as compassionate as he’d like, I’m sure.”

  “So, he’s lonely. You and I, at least, should be sympathetic,” Mom says. “At our age, loneliness can seem so permanent.”

  “Ah . . . Look at all the lonely people,” Phillip sings.

  “Well, he might have had the decency to wait until you were through sitting shiva before groping you like that, that’s all.”

  “He’s a tactile man. That’s just his way.”

  That’s just his way. Jen used to say that. Like the first time she met Wade, at the WIRX holiday party, where he couldn’t seem to stop rubbing her arms and touching her back as they talked. “That’s just his way,” she said, which was how she excused all manner of bad behavior except for mine. Once, when she was pissed at me, I went so far as to try it out as an argument for the defense. “That’s just my way,” I said. She smiled sweetly and told me to fuck off. God, I miss our fights.

  Linda is looking at Mom, shaking her head. “You don’t actually believe half the things you say, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Mom says, sitting back in her chair. “I can be pretty convincing.”

  Chapter 13

  2:30 p.m.

  The bank teller has a great ass. I know this because she had to get up and go to her boss’s office when I told her I wanted to withdraw sixteen of the just under twenty thousand dollars remaining in mine and Jen’s joint checking account. When she returns, I see that she has nice lips too—full and pouty—and she has a dimple in one cheek, and something about her eyes and the way she chews her gum makes me think she’s a very sexual person. Her name is Marianna, which I know because it’s on the little badge she has affixed just beside her breasts, which aren’t particularly large but come together nicely in her push-up bra to form a perfectly adequate suntanned cleavage in the V-neck of her blouse. My guess is that she didn’t go to college, at least not a four-year college. Probably community college for her associate’s degree, and then right into the bank’s training program. She is the kind of girl who dates the kind of guys who will ultimately screw around on her, guys like her brothers, who work with their hands and drink too many beers while watching football, and have a stupid tattoo of a dragon or the Rolling Stones’ lips on their scapulas, guys upon whom she projects more romance and ambition than is actually there, and then she asks her girlfriends, who are hairdressers and medical technicians and tanning salon clerks and secretaries, why she can’t find a nice guy. And I’m dying to tell her that I’m a nice guy. I’m the last nice guy. And I haven’t been kissed or rubbed in months, and I’m as horny as a high school kid, but I’m also dying to fall in love, and if you let me, I’ll fall in love with you, and cherish you, and listen to your dreams and your hurts and I’ll be faithful and funny and I’ll never forget your birthday or make out with your girlfriend and blame it on too many shots, or come home from guys’ night out drunk and smelling of strippers. That’s what I want to tell her, but instead I say, “Can I have an envelope for that?” and if you want to know where all the good guys are, we’re standing right in front of you, lacking the balls to actually make ourselves heard.

  This is something that’s been happening to me more and more lately. The world is suddenly brimming with young, nubile women, and I can’t leave the house without falling in love. I intuit whole personalities from a single smile, live out entire relationships with the woman sitting in the next car at a red light. Legs and lips hypnotize me. I am smitten by skin and breasts and hair, by smiles and frowns, by the freedom of an unhurried gait, the grace of a shrug. I imagine myself not only having sex with these women, but living with them and meeting their parents and sharing the Sunday paper in bed. I am still raw and soft from losing Jen, still missing a level of detachment and discernment, undersexed and lonely and not yet fit for mixed company.

>   Marianna carefully loads sixteen thousand dollars into a large manila envelope for me, and she has a yellow sunset painted onto the red nail of each ring finger, and her skin is creamy and immaculate, and I know that I will never kiss those plump lips, never see her naked, never even make her smile. We are separated by three inches of bulletproof glass and a million other barriers that I can’t articulate or overcome. So I take my envelope and file away her generic smile for further worthless review. I leave the bank more heartbroken and deflated than when I entered it, and that is saying something.

  Chapter 14

  Wade made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t firing me.

  “I want to make this perfectly clear,” he said. “I am not firing you.” It had been six or seven tear-fused panicky days since I’d walked in on him and Jen, days spent curled up in a ball in the Lees’ basement, still ensconced in a hollow daze, alternately enraged, grief-stricken, terrified, and shitfaced.

  Wade was sitting behind his large Asian desk in his large corner office. He didn’t need a desk; he did no paperwork. He didn’t need an office either. The running joke was that the sole reason for the office was so that he had a place to screw the hot interns. Ha ha.

  He pulled his lips back into a thoughtful grimace, revealing a symmetrical wall of large, bleached white teeth. If you were to draw a caricature of Wade, you would emphasize those supernaturally perfect teeth, his ridiculously broad shoulders, and, of course, his unrepentant cock. “Obviously, this is a very difficult situation. You hate me right now. Of course you do. I’m sure you’d like nothing better than to bludgeon me to death with a blunt instrument. What I did was inexcusable, and I feel terrible about it. I know you probably don’t believe that, but it’s true.”

  He smiled sheepishly at me, as if he’d just admitted something mildly embarrassing about himself, like he suffers from constipation or gets regular pedicures. Then he shrugged those broad spherical shoulders that throbbed like organs beneath his expensive dress shirt. I guess I’d always been somewhat envious of Wade’s shoulders, because when you get right down to it, mine are just your basic, stripped-down version, while Wade’s are the fully loaded models that fill a shirt perfectly and look just as good out of one. I could hope they’re obscenely hairy, the way some men’s are, but it would be futile, because Wade is the kind of guy who would never stand for shoulder hair. He’d have it permanently removed by laser, and even though results vary, he’d be the guy for whom it worked. I’d probably get burned or develop a permanent discoloration. This stuff is all preordained.