This Is Where I Leave You

once made a pact, Penny and I. I wonder if she still remembers.
    “She’d be happy to see you, I bet.”
    “Maybe some other time,” I say, starting the car.
    “I say something wrong?”
    I shake my head. “It’s just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.”
    Horry nods sagely. “Welcome to my world.” He fishes around in his pockets for a moment, spilling some loose change onto his seat before pulling out a sloppily rolled joint, which he lights from the dying embers of his cigarette. He inhales deeply and then offers me the joint, still holding his breath.
    “None for me, thanks,” I say.
    He shrugs and lets the smoke dance around his open mouth. “Helps me keep my head right,” he says. “Sometimes, when I feel a seizure coming on, this kind of heads it off at the pass.”
    “Won’t your mom smell that?”
    “What’s she going to do, ground me?”
    His voice is suddenly, uncharacteristically belligerent, and I get the sense that Linda asking me to pick him up was a salvo in a long-standing battle between mother and son.
    “Everything okay with you, Horry?”
    “Everything is swell.”
    He swings the blunt my way.
    “I have to drive,” I say.
    He shrugs and takes another long drag. “More for me.”

Chapter 9
    9:05 p.m.
    The shiva is still in full swing when I return to the living room.
    “Judd!” my mother shouts as I’m trying to slink quietly back to my seat. Every eye in the room finds me. “Where were you?”
    “I just needed to get some air,” I mutter, sliding back down into my shiva chair.
    “You remember Betty Allison?” she says, indicating the birdlike woman sitting on the chair directly in front of me. The shiva chairs, by design, are lower than the chairs of the visitors, and so my view tends to be up the nostrils and skirts of the people seated directly in front of me.
    “Sure,” I say. “How are you, Mrs. Allison?”
    “I’m so sorry about your father.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Betty’s daughter Hannah was divorced last year,” my mother says brightly, like she’s delivering a nugget of particularly good news.
    “I’m sorry to hear that,” I say.
    Betty nods. “He was addicted to Internet porn.”
    “It happens,” I say.
    “Judd’s wife was cheating on him.”
    “Jesus Christ, Mom!”
    “What? There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
    There are about twenty other people in the room, talking to my siblings or each other, and I can feel all their heads turning to us like a stadium wave. In the third grade, I briefly suffered from the paranoid delusion that when I went to the bathroom during class, the blackboard became a television screen and my entire class watched me piss. That’s what this feels like.
    “Hannah and her son are here visiting for the summer,” Mom says, undeterred. “I thought it might be nice for you two to catch up, that’s all.”
    In the first grade, Hannah Allison was immortalized in an inane jump-rope song the girls sang during recess to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”
    Hannah Allison, Hannah Allison / Two first names, two first names / You can call her Hannah / You can call her Allison / What a shame, two first names. Hannah cried about the song, there was a meeting between her parents and the principal, and the song was banned from the schoolyard. Like all banned songs, it became an instant underground classic and continued to haunt Hannah until her peers outgrew jump rope in favor of Run-Catch-Kiss. Beyond that, I remembered a small, mousy girl with bushy eyebrows and glasses.
    “I’m sure Hannah has her own problems,” I say, hoping my mother will see the murder in my eyes.
    “Nonsense,” Betty says. “I’m sure she’d love to hear from an old friend.”
    Betty and my mother smile conspiratorially at each other and I can hear the telepathy buzzing between them. Her husband was addicted to porn, his wife screwed around ...it’s perfect!
    “I’m not ready to start dating anytime soon,” I say.
    “No one said anything about dating,” my mother says.
    “That’s right,” Betty agrees. “Just a friendly phone call. Maybe a cup of coffee.”
    They both look at me expectantly. I am conscious of Phillip’s elbow in my ribs, his low, steady chuckle. I’ve got six more days of this, and if I don’t nip it in the bud, my mother will be trumpeting my situation to the entire community.
    “The thing is, I enjoy some good Internet porn myself, every now and then,” I