This Is Where I Leave You

virginity to Alice back in high school, and she to me, which isn’t as creepy as it sounds. Alice was my year in high school, not even on Paul’s radar until many years later, when she cleaned his teeth and he picked her up with the always reliable “Didn’t you used to go out with my kid brother?” By then I was long gone from Elmsbrook, already engaged to Jen, so if anyone is to blame for that one, it’s Paul and not me. He knew going in that I’d been there first. For all I know, he may have even started sleeping with her to somehow get back at me for the dog attack, which would have been twisted and stupid and so very Paul. So now, every time Paul sees me, it’s there in the back of his mind, that I deflowered his wife, that I’ve seen Alice naked, that I’ve kissed the wine-colored birthmark in the shape of a question mark that starts below her navel and ends at the junction of her legs. It was seventeen years ago, but men don’t let go of things like that. And every time Alice and I see each other, we can’t help but flash back to those four months we spent having sex in cars, basements, shrubs, and once, late at night, in the plastic tunnel above the slide in the elementary school playground. You never forget your first time, no matter how much you’d like to.
    “How are things at the store?” I ask him.
    He looks at me, considering the question. “Same old same old.”
    “Any plans to expand to any more locations?”
    “Nope. No plans to expand. We’re in a recession, or don’t you read the paper?”
    “I was just asking.”
    “Although I guess a recession is the least of your problems, huh, Judd?”
    “What do you mean by that, Paul?” We are ending our sentences 62with names, which is the equivalent of fighters circling, looking to throw the first punch.
    “Paul,” Mom says.
    “It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “We’re just catching up.”
    “Forget it,” Paul says.
    “No. It’s fine,” I say. “What you meant was, between being unemployed and my wife screwing around, I have bigger things to worry about than the economic state of the country. Right?”
    “That’s certainly one way of looking at it.”
    “I was surprised I didn’t hear from you when it happened,” I say. “I moved out almost eight weeks ago. I mean, none of you called me. That’s par for the course, I guess. If you didn’t call when we lost the baby, I wouldn’t expect you to call over something as trivial as the end of my marriage. But I figured you’d have called, Paul, just to rub it in a little. It’s lucky Dad died when he did, or who knows when you may have gotten around to it?”
    “I’m not happy about it. I always liked Jen.”
    “Thanks, Paul.” I wait an extra beat for emphasis. “And I always liked Alice.”
    “What did you just say?” Paul says, clenching teeth, fists, and bowels.
    “Which part didn’t you hear?”
    “All the young girls love Alice.” Phillip sings out the Elton John lyrics, loud and off -key. “Tender young Alice they say...”
    “So, Phillip,” Wendy says. “How did you go about seducing your therapist?”
    “Later,” Phillip says. “It’s just getting interesting.”
    “Oh, for crying out loud!” my mother says.
    I look at the Rolex Jen bought for me with my own money that I haven’t gotten around to selling on eBay yet. We’ve been sitting shiva for exactly one half hour. The doorbell rings, and God only knows to what depths of passive-aggressive sniping we might have descended if it hadn’t. And as the room starts to fill with the first somber-faced neighbors coming to pay their respects, it becomes clear to me that the reason for filling the shiva house with visitors is most likely to prevent the mourners from tearing each other limb from limb. When we were little kids, Dad took Paul and me fishing at a wide, shallow creek in the shadow of an overpass near some back roads a few miles north of the town limits. Paul and I pulled water-smoothed rocks from the creek bed and Dad knotted them into our fishing lines to serve as weights. Then, after slicing some inchworms with his pocket knife to bait our hooks, he taught us how to cast our lines out across the creek. For Paul and me, the casting was more fun than the fishing. We would reel our lines in, stretch the rods out behind us, and try to cast as far across the creek as we could. About an hour into this, Paul slung his rod back and managed to hook my ear just before he launched his rod