This Is Where I Leave You

stands. The house, a large white colonial, stands at the center of the dead end, where the blacktop blossoms into a wide circle, ideal for street hockey and bike riding. West Covington is a major thoroughfare through Elmsbrook, winding its way past strip malls and corporate parks before finally veering off into the residential area, where at the last rotary, it becomes Knob’s End. When people give directions to any home or business on West Covington, they use our house as a negative landmark; if you see the big white house, then you’ve gone too far. Which is precisely what I’m thinking as I pull into the driveway. Dad was obsessive about maintaining the house. He was a handy guy, always painting and staining, cleaning out the gutters, changing out pipes, power-washing the patio. He was an electrician by trade, but he gave it up to go into business, and he missed working with his hands, couldn’t face the weekend without the prospect of manual labor. But now the paint is cracked and flaking off the window frames, there’s an ugly brown water stain just below the roofline, the bluestones on the front walk rattle like loose teeth, and the rose trellises lean away from the house like they’re trying to escape. The lawn hasn’t been watered enough, and it’s brown in patches, but the twin dogwoods we used to climb are in full bloom, their crimson leaves fanned out like an awning over the front walk. Consumed with Dad’s slow death, Mom forgot to cancel the pool service, and so the swimming pool in the yard glistens with blue water, but the grass is starting to come up through the paving stones around it. The house is like a woman you find attractive at a distance. The closer you get, the more you wonder what you were thinking.
    Linda Callen, our neighbor and my mother’s closest friend, opens the door and hugs each one of us as we step into the house. She’s a pear shaped woman with an easy smile, and there’s something vaguely rodent like about her, not in a feral way, but more like a wise mother rat from a Disney cartoon, the sort that will sit in a tiny rocking chair and wear little rat glasses and be voiced by Judi Dench or Hellen Mirren. A kindly, regal, Academy Award–winning rat. She’s known us since birth and looks at us as her own children. Her son, Horry, stands behind her, staring at his feet as he takes our coats.
    “Hey, Judd,” he says to me.
    “Hey, Horry.”
    He stiffens up when I pat his back. “I’m very sorry about Mort.”
    “Thanks.”
    When Horry was a toddler, his father, Ted, got drunk and somehow managed to drown himself in little Horry’s inflatable wading pool while Linda was out shopping. She came home to find Horry shivering in the pool, crying hysterically over his partially submerged dead father. After that it was just the two of them, living up the block from us and, more often than not, in our house. A grade ahead of Paul and behind Wendy, Horry integrated seamlessly into our family. In high school, he fell for Wendy, like everyone else in Elmsbrook did at some point or another, but he had the inside track, and so for a year or so we would walk in on them making out in darkened rooms. Then, in his sophomore year of college, Horry got into a fight in a bar - details are sketchy - and the upshot was that someone took a sawed-off baseball bat to his head and 42now Horry is a thirty-six-year-old man who lives with his mother and cannot drive a car or focus on anything for more than a few seconds. Sometimes he has these mini seizures where he stiffens up and loses the ability to speak. Every day my dad would pick him up and take him with him to the store, where Horry helped out in the stockroom and took everyone’s lunch orders. Now I guess he’ll be working for Paul. When Wendy sees Horry, she throws her arms around him without taking off her raincoat, and he drops the coats he’s gathered to hug her back.
    “Hey, Sunflower.”
    “Horry,” she whispers into his neck.
    His shirt is speckled with raindrops from her coat. He kisses her wet scalp, and when she pulls back, her eyes are red.
    “Don’t cry,” he says.
    “I’m not,” she says, and then bursts into tears.
    “Okay, okay,” Horry says, blinking nervously as he bends down to pick up the coats he dropped.

    2:07 p.m.
    Serena, Wendy’s baby girl, screams like she’s been stabbed. We can all hear her in amplified stereo as we eat lunch, thanks to the high-tech baby monitor Wendy has set up on the