This Is Where I Leave You

goes, hits the hall at a slow jog, and runs into Linda’s arms. They embrace fiercely for a moment and then press their foreheads together, whispering to each other, tears flowing. Mom takes Linda’s face in her hands and, with great tenderness, plants a soft, lingering kiss on her mouth. Then she takes her by the arm and they walk out the front door, leaving the rest of us to figure out how to breathe in a room in which the oxygen supply has suddenly, inexplicably been depleted.
    Peter Applebaum is the first to react. He clears his throat and rises to his feet. “Well,” he says. “That was unexpected.” He turns and walks sadly to the door, his head bowed in defeat. He was up for the challenge, maybe even invigorated by it, but this ...he is too old for this. I get up and catch him at the front door.
    “Mr. Applebaum.”
    He turns around, surprised. “Peter.”
    “Peter. You didn’t need that kind of headache anyway.”
    He shakes his head and smiles faintly. “I’m seventy-two years old. I drink my coffee alone every morning, and I fall asleep with the TV on every night.” He smiles. “There are headaches, and there are headaches.”
    “There will be other widows. I mean, have you seen some of these husbands?”
    He has clear blue eyes and the wry smile of a much younger man.
    “Your mouth to God’s ear.”
    “They’ll be dropping like flies, I’m telling you.”
    He laughs a little, then pats my cheek. “Don’t get old, kid. That was where I went wrong.” I watch him as he heads somberly down the street. At seventy-two years old, women can still run roughshod over your heart. That’s something that never occurred to me, and I find it terri fying, but oddly reassuring.

Chapter 45
    My parents had an active and noisy sex life. Years of Dad’s puttering in our walls had rendered them porous and poorly insulated, and we could hear them, as we lay in our beds at night: the steady bump of their headboard, Dad’s low grunts, Mom’s over-the-top porn star cries. We tuned it out like all the other noises a house makes: the clanging of the old steam radiators, the creak of the stairs, the hum of the refrigerator compressor, the plumbing gurgling in the walls. Dad never talked to us about sex. I guess he figured we’d pick it up through osmosis.
    I was six years old when I walked in on them. I had woken up with a headache and padded down the hall to their room, the attached slippers of my pajamas whispering against the wood floor. Mom was on top, her back to me, rocking up and down, and I thought she must be exercising. Sometimes she exercised in front of the television, in tights and leg warmers that made her look like a cat. “I’m trying to look as good as her,” she explained, nodding her head at the woman on the screen, who, like Mom, was on all fours, raising her leg behind her like a dog about to pee.
    “She looks like a dog,” I said.
    “That’s Jane Fonda, and she is no dog.”
    Jane Fonda had her hair piled up in a headband, which made her look like Mrs. Davenport, my kindergarten teacher. Mom, in her high ponytail and sports bra, looked like the genie in I Dream of Jeannie, whom I considered to be the most beautiful woman on the planet and whom I intended to marry one day. We would live in her blue bottle, which would stay on a shelf in Mom’s kitchen, so we could emerge in a funnel of smoke every evening to have dinner with my family. When we were done Jeannie would blink and all the dishes would be done.
    “You’re prettier than Jane Fonda,” I told Mom.
    “Of course I am, sugar,” she said, grunting as she lifted her leg. “But she has a better butt.”
    I laughed at the notion of a better butt. “But no one can see your butt.”
    “Women like to have nice butts even if no one sees them.”
    “That’s silly.”
    “Isn’t it?”
    On the TV, Jane lifted her other leg. When it became apparent that she wasn’t going to pee, I lost interest.
    Mom was moving up and down on her bed, but there was no Jane Fonda on the television, just a steady panting. Also, she was naked. I looked at her butt and wondered if it was as nice as Jane Fonda’s.
    “Mommy?”
    When she turned to see me, I saw my father’s disembodied head, crammed awkwardly against the headboard, his hair mussed, his forehead dripping with sweat. He looked like he’d been buried up to his neck in the sand.
    “Hey, Judd,” Mom said, still rocking slightly, each breast bouncing lightly to a diff erent