This Is Where I Leave You

No, that’s great! Perfect timing.” He flips the phone closed and looks at all of us meaningfully. “She’s here,” he says, like we’ve all been waiting. Like we have any idea what he’s talking about. Then he strides out of the dining room and hits the front door running. We all run into the kitchen to peer out the bay window to the street, where a woman has just stepped out of the backseat of a dark Lincoln Town Car. The mystery woman has no visible tattoos, no obvious breast implants, no fuck-me pumps, no “bubble butt” - as Phillip generally refers to his ass of choice - straining against a short skirt under which no underwear is being worn. Even at a distance it’s clear that this woman, in her well-tailored pantsuit, with her blond hair tied back in a neat, Grace Kelly bun, is someone who wears underwear. Expensive underwear, I should think, maybe even sexy underwear, from Victoria’s Secret or La Perla. She’s definitely attractive, but sleek and finished, like brushed chrome. In other words, she is exactly the kind of woman you would expect not to have any association with Phillip. Sophisticated, refined, and, from what I can see, significantly older than him.
    “Who is that?” my mother says.
    “Maybe his lawyer,” Wendy guesses.
    “Phillip has a lawyer?” Alice says.
    “Only when he’s in trouble.”
    “Is he in trouble?”
    “Odds are.”
    By now Phillip has reached her. They don’t shake hands or kiss chastely, but attack each other with ravenous mouths and sloppy tongues.
    “Well, I guess she’s not his lawyer,” Alice says, maybe just a tad snidely. You can never tell with Alice. She doesn’t like Wendy. She’s not crazy about any of us. Alice comes from a nice family, where the siblings and siblings-in-law kiss each other hello and good-bye and remember each other’s birthdays and anniversaries and call their parents just to say hi, calls that end with breezy I-love-you that are effortless and true. To 46her, we Foxmans are a savage race, brutish aliens who don’t express affection and shamelessly watch our baby brother grope the ass of a stranger through the kitchen window.
    “I’ll e-mail you the ratios,” Barry says behind us. “We’ve inverted them twice already.”
    Having traded enough spit for the time being, Phillip and his mystery guest head up the front walk, and we move away from the window, Wendy, as always, getting in the last word: “It would be so like Phillip to be doing his lawyer.”

    2:30 p.m.
    “This is Tracy,” Phillip announces proudly, standing at the head of the table, where we are all once again seated, having scrambled back when he finished tonguing and groping her and led her up the bluestone path.
    “My fiancée.” We are probably not all sitting there with our jaws on our plates, but that’s how it feels. Up close, it’s clear she’s a good fifteen or so years older than him, a very well-preserved mid-fortysomething.
    “Engaged to be engaged,” Tracy corrects him fondly, in a manner that suggests a long-standing familiarity with correcting Phillip. The women Phillip usually dates aren’t the sort to correct him. They are strippers, actresses, waitresses, hairstylists, bridesmaids who hike up their crinoline for him in the parking lot during the reception, and once, memorably, the bride herself. “I couldn’t help it,” he told me through cracked, swollen lips, from the hospital bed he’d subsequently landed in when the groomsmen tracked him down. “It just happened.” “It just happened” was Phillip’s go-to explanation for pretty much everything, the perfect epitaph for a man who always seemed to be an innocent bystander to his own life.
    “Hello, everyone,” Tracy says, confident and composed. “I’m sorry we’re meeting under such sad circumstances.” She doesn’t giggle or crack her gum. Phillip throws his arm around her, grinning like he’s just pulled off a great practical joke. No one says anything for a long moment, so Phillip performs a roll call.
    “That’s my sister, Wendy,” he says, pointing.
    “Great suit,” Wendy says.
    “Thank you.”
    “The guy talking to himself is her husband, Barry.”
    Barry looks right at Tracy and says, “I can maybe sell another eighth of a point to them. Maybe. But they’ll want some pretty solid assurances. We’ve plowed this field before.”
    “Barry is something of an ass.”
    “Phillip!”
    “It’s okay, baby. He can’t hear us. That’s my