This Is Where I Leave You

us, I’d like to read a short psalm...”
    “I shouldn’t have called him that,” Phillip whispers to me, eyes wide.
    “Damn.”
    “It was an honest mistake.”
    “It was disrespectful.”
    I am tempted to point out that showing up a half hour late to his father’s funeral might also be construed as disrespectful, but it would be pointless. Phillip has always been happily impervious to advice and criticism.
    “Be quiet!” Paul hisses at us. Phillip winks at me. And here we stand at our father’s grave, the three Foxman men, all roughed from the same template but put through different finishing processes. We each have our father’s dark curly hair and square, dimpled chin, but there would be no mistaking us for twins. Paul looks like me, only bigger, broader, and angrier; me on steroids. Phillip looks like me, only slimmer and much better-looking, his features rendered more gracefully, his smile wide and effortlessly seductive.
    When Boner finishes reading his psalm, Paul steps up to deliver what is meant to be a eulogy but instead seems to be an acceptance speech for the Most Dedicated Son award. He thanks Dad for teaching him how to run the business; he thanks his wife, Alice, for taking a leave of absence from her job as a dental hygienist to help out at the stores when Dad fell ill, he thanks Mom for taking care of Dad, and then he talks at length about what it was like working with his father, running Foxman Sporting Goods, the Hudson Valley’s premiere sporting goods chain. He does not mention any of his siblings, all of whom are wet and cold and wishing for an orchestra to play him off the stage. When he finally wraps up, he seems surprised that there is no applause. Saint Nick flips a switch on the hydraulics, and Dad’s coffin slowly descends into the grave. Once he is down, Boner steps forward and solemnly hands a tall garden shovel to Paul. “It is customary for members of the immediate family to each shovel some dirt into the grave, fulfilling the obligation of burying a loved one,” he says. “Our sages say burying someone is considered the truest form of kindness and respect, as the deceased will not be able to thank you for it.”
    That’s kind of funny, actually, since Dad was not exactly prone to expressing gratitude to his children when he was alive. You were either screwing up, or you were invisible. He was quiet and stern in a way that led you to expect an Eastern European accent. He had soft blue eyes and unusually thick forearms, and when he made a fist it looked like he could punch through anything. He mowed his own lawn, washed his own car, and painted his own house. He did all these things capably, painstakingly, and in a way that silently passed judgment on anyone who paid for someone else to do it. He rarely laughed at jokes, just nodded his understanding, as if it was all pretty much what he’d expected. Of course, there was a lot more to him than that, it’s just that none of it is coming to me right now. At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues.
    Paul digs into the large mound and tosses a scoop of muddy earth into the grave. He hands the shovel to me, and I do the same, and when the dirt hits the coffin I can feel something in me start to shake. I close my eyes against the hot wetness, and I can see Dad, reclining on a lounge chair in our backyard, gripping the hose gun and shooting at the moving targets of his young children as we ran between bases, making a machine-gun noise with his lips. He liked us as young children. It was when we grew older that he didn’t know what to make of us. Childhood feels so permanent, like it’s the entire world, and then one day it’s over and you’re shoveling wet dirt onto your father’s coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything. I hand the shovel to Wendy, who digs up maybe a tablespoon or so of damp earth and who manages to miss the open grave entirely. Phillip, who is congenitally incapable of moderation, digs up a comically huge pile that turns out to have a stone in it. The stone hits the coffin like a gunshot, startling us all, and the gray silence is pierced by a long howl as Phillip falls to his knees, sobbing.
    “Daddy!” he cries, while the rest of us watch him unravel, standing by silently horrified and, probably, ever so slightly envious.

Chapter 5
    1:55 p.m.
    We all reconvene at Knob’s End, the cul-de-sac where my parents’ house