This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  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.

  1:30 p.m.

  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 in
nocent 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

  1:45 p.m.

  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 tha
t 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

  4:10 p.m.

  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.