This Is Where I Leave You

wide-eyed and vulnerable. Because even now, even after all that she’s done to me, there’s still something in her eyes that makes me want to shelter her at any cost, even though I know it’s really me who needs the protection. It would be so much easier if she wasn’t Jen. But she is, and where there was once the purest kind of love, there is now a snake pit of fury and resentment and a new dark and twisted love that hurts more than all the rest of it put together.
    “Judd.”
    “I have to go,” I say, opening my car door.
    “I’m pregnant.”
    I’ve never been shot, but this is probably what it feels like, that split second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet. She was pregnant once before. She cried and kissed me and we danced like idiots in the bathroom. But our baby died before it could be born, strangled by the umbilical cord three weeks before Jen’s due date.
    “Congratulations. I’m sure Wade will be a wonderful father.”
    “I know this is hard for you. I just thought you should hear it from me.”
    “And now I have.”
    I climb into the car. She steps in front of it, so I can’t pull out.
    “Say something. Please.”
    “Okay. Fuck you, Jen. Fuck you very much. I hope Wade’s kid has better luck in there than mine did. Can I go now?”
    “Judd,” she says, her voice low and unsteady. “You can’t really hate me that much, can you?”
    I look directly at her with all the sincerity I can muster. “Yes. I can.”
    And maybe it’s the complicated grief over my father that has fi nally begun plucking at my nerves, or maybe it’s simply the way Jen draws back as if slapped, but either way, the intense hurt that fl ashes behind the wide pools of her eyes for that one unguarded instant is almost enough to make me love her again.

Chapter 3
    My marriage ended the way these things do: with paramedics and cheesecake.
    Marriages fall apart. Everyone has reasons, but no one really knows why. We got married young. Maybe that was our mistake. In New York State, you can legally get married before you can do a shot of tequila. We knew marriage could be difficult in the same way that we knew there were starving children in Africa. It was a tragic fact but worlds away from our reality. We were going to be different. We would keep the fi re stoked; best friends who fucked each other senseless every night. We would avoid the pitfalls of complacency; stay young at heart and in shape, keep our kisses long and deep and our bellies flat, hold hands when we walked, conduct whispered conversations deep into the night, make out in movie theaters, and go down on each other with undimmed enthusiasm until the arthritic limitations of old age made it inadvisable.
    “Will you still love me when I’m old?” Jen would say, usually when we were in bed in her dorm room, lying drowsily on her dented mattress in the thick musk of our evaporating sex. She’d be lying on her belly and I’d be on my side, running a lazy finger down the shallow canyon of her spine to where it met the rising curves of her outstanding ass. I was stupidly proud of her ass when we were dating. I would hold open doors for her just to watch it bounce ahead of me, high and tight and perfectly proportioned in her jeans, and I would think to myself, That is an ass to grow old with. I looked at Jen’s ass as my own personal achievement, wanted to take her ass home to meet my parents.
    “When my breasts sag and my teeth fall out, and I’m all dried up and wrinkled like a prune?” Jen would say.
    “Of course I will.”
    “You won’t trade me in for a younger woman?”
    “Of course I will. But I’ll feel bad about it.”
    And we would laugh at the impossibility of it all. Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right. We were that couple for a while, nauseatingly impervious assholes, busy staring into each other’s eyes while everyone else was trying to have a good time. When I think about how stupid we were, how obstinately clueless about the realities that awaited us, I just want to go back to that skinny, cocksure kid with his bloated heart and perennial erection, and kick his teeth in. I want to tell him how he and the love of his life will slowly fall into a routine, how the sex, while still perfectly fi ne, will become commonplace enough that it won’t be unheard of