This Is Where I Leave You

to pay her respects. She has Wade’s baby in her belly and our money on her mind. And now the rage is back, along with a healthy measure of self-loathing for being the pathetic cuckold who wants his cheating wife back.
    “I’m so sorry about Mort,” Jen says, hugging my mother.
    “Thank you, dear.”
    And before things can get any more surreal, Phillip, seeing his opening, hauls off from under Paul and sucker punches him right on the chin and Paul goes down hard. Phillip jumps to his feet and stands over Paul, wincing as he shakes off his fingers. Jen looks at me, eyebrows raised in surprise. I look back at her with a light shrug, and for that single instant, we are us again. And then I remember we’re not and look away. Alice is on her knees, pulling up a dazed Paul, while Tracy hustles Phillip out of the room. “Who’s the little whore now, bitch?” Phillip says, cradling his hand.
    We should all just face reality and stop taking our meals together.

Chapter 19
    10:00 a.m.
    I’m so sorry about your father,” Jen says to me once the room has cleared out. She moves to hug me, but I step back like she’s contagious. She lowers her hands and nods sadly. She is wearing a navy dress that hangs effortlessly on her, stopping at mid-thigh. Her perfume reminds me of our bedroom, and it makes me homesick. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “Are you seriously asking me that?”
    “No, I guess not,” she says. “This must be hard for you.”
    “It’s not like he died suddenly. I’ll be fi ne.”
    “When will you be coming home?”
    “I don’t have a home.”
    “I mean, when will you be back in Kingston?”
    “In about a week.”
    She gives me a funny look. “You’re going to spend a week here? Every time you were here with me, you couldn’t wait to be out that front door.”
    “We’re sitting shiva.”
    “Oh. I didn’t think - ”
    “Yeah. Dad wanted it.”
    She is momentarily distracted by a half-trashed platter of smoked salmon on the table. “Wow, that really reeks.”
    “It’s lox. That’s how it’s supposed to smell.”
    “Well, could we go outside for a little bit? I can’t handle the smell of fish ever since ...you know.”
    “I don’t mind it. And you won’t be here for very long anyway.”
    “Judd, please. I know it’s a bad time, but I really need to talk to you.”
    “What, Jen? What could you possibly have left to tell me? Are you and Wade getting married? Is that it?”
    “No. It’s nothing like that.” She is looking around at the discarded food all over the dining room table, the half-eaten bagels and Danishes, the sliced vegetables, the maple syrup and waffle fragments smeared across the tablecloth by Ryan and Cole.
    “Good, because, you know, adultery is probably not the best foundation upon which to build a marriage.”
    “Oh, crap.”
    “What?”
    She looks at me and then covers her mouth and bolts from the room.
    I find her in the powder room, vomiting into the toilet. When she’s done, she flushes the toilet and sits on the floor with her back against the wall, wiping her mouth with a torn strand of toilet paper. “Jesus, I hate this part,” she says.
    She looks up at me, and there’s something in her eyes that I don’t like. When you’ve been married to someone for a while, you occasionally share these brief psychic moments, and right at that instant I know what she’s going to say just before she says it, even while I’m thinking that it can’t possibly be true.
    The last time I had sex with Jen, as near as I can figure, was around three months ago. It was exactly the kind of rote, forgettable sex we’d been having at that time, the kind we’d sworn, back in the day, that we would never have. There was nothing technically wrong with it; tumescence and lubrication were both achieved on cue, his-and-hers orgasms distributed on schedule like party favors. It’s just that after you’ve been married for a while, it becomes much harder to lose yourself in sex the way you used to. For one thing, you’ve become a bit too efficient, you’ve learned what works and what doesn’t, and so foreplay, entry, and orgasm can often be condensed into a five-to-seven-minute span. Good sex requires many different things, but in most cases, efficiency isn’t one of them.
    Also, when you share all of the administrative headaches of life with someone else, small piles of unaddressed, quotidian resentments build up over time like plaque, lingering on the fringes of