This Is Where I Leave You

kids?”
    “Believe me, I’d rather not. But seven days is just too long to leave them alone with the nanny.”
    The kids are Ryan and Cole, six and three, towheaded, cherub cheeked boys who never met a room they couldn’t trash in two minutes flat, and Serena, Wendy’s seven-month-old baby girl.
    “Seven days?”
    “That’s how long it takes to sit shiva.”
    “We’re not really going to do this, are we?”
    “It was his dying wish,” Wendy says, and in that single instant I think maybe I can hear the raw grief in the back of her throat.
    “Paul’s going along with this?”
    “Paul’s the one who told me about it.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He said Dad wants us to sit shiva.”
    Paul is my older brother by sixteen months. Mom insisted I hadn’t been a mistake, that she’d fully intended to get pregnant again just seven months after giving birth to Paul. But I never really bought it, especially after my father, buzzed on peach schnapps at Friday-night dinner, had acknowledged somberly that back then they believed you couldn’t get pregnant when you were breast-feeding. As for Paul and me, we get along fine as long as we don’t spend any time together.
    “Has anyone spoken to Phillip?” I say.
    “I’ve left messages at all his last known numbers. On the off chance he plays them, and he’s not in jail, or stoned, or dead in a ditch, there’s every reason to believe that there’s a small possibility he’ll show up.”
    Phillip is our youngest brother, born nine years after me. It’s hard to understand my parents’ pro creational logic. Wendy, Paul, and me, all within four years, and then Phillip, almost a decade later, slapped on like an awkward coda. He is the Paul McCartney of our family: better looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead. As the baby, he was alternately coddled and ignored, which may have been a significant factor in his becoming such a terminally screwed-up adult. He is currently living in Manhattan, where you’d have to wake up pretty early in the morning to find a drug he hasn’t done or a model he hasn’t fucked. He will drop off the radar for months at a time and then show up unannounced at your house for dinner, where he might or might not casually mention that he’s been in jail, or Tibet, or has just broken up with a quasi-famous actress. I haven’t seen him in over a year.
    “I hope he makes it,” I say. “He’ll be devastated if he doesn’t.”
    “And speaking of screwed-up little brothers, how’s your own Greek tragedy coming along?”
    Wendy can be funny, almost charming in her pointed tactlessness, but if there is a line between crass and cruel, she’s never noticed it. Usually I can stomach her, but the last few months have left me ragged and raw, and my defenses have been depleted.
    “I have to go now,” I say, trying my best to sound like a guy not in the midst of an ongoing meltdown.
    “Jesus, Judd. I was just expressing concern.”
    “I’m sure you thought so.”
    “Oh, don’t get all passive-aggressive. I get enough of that from Barry.”
    “I’ll see you at the house.”
    “Fine, be that way,” she says, disgusted. “Good-bye.”
    I wait her out.
    “Are you still there?” she fi nally says.
    “No.” I hang up and imagine her slamming her phone down while the expletives fly in a m achine-gun spray from her lips.

Chapter 2
    Wednesday
    I’m packing up my car for the two-hour drive to Elmsbrook when Jen pulls up in her marshmallow-colored SUV. She gets out quickly, before I can escape. I haven’t seen her in a while, haven’t returned her calls or stopped thinking about her. And here she is looking immaculate as ever in her clinging gym clothes, her hair an expensive shade of honey blond, the corners of her mouth inching up ever so slightly into the tentative smile of a little girl. I know every one of Jen’s smiles, what they mean and where they lead.
    The problem is that every time I see Jen, it instantly reminds me of the first time I ever saw her, riding that crappy red bike across the quad, long legs pumping, hair flying out behind her, face flushed with excitement, and that’s exactly what you don’t want to think about when confronted with your soon-to-be ex-wife. Ex-wife in waiting. Ex-wife elect. The self-help books and websites haven’t come up with a proper title for spouses living in the purgatory that exists before the courts have