This Is Where I Leave You

the fact that Wade Boulanger is all cock and no sperm. He may have destroyed my marriage and unseated me in my own home, but I’d unwittingly left behind a booby trap that just blew his legs off. So I laugh. Hard.
    “I thought you might like that,” Jen says wryly.
    “You have to admit there’s a certain karmic poetry to it.”
    “I’ll only admit it if you stop laughing.”
    But I can’t. It’s the first time I’ve laughed in months, and it feels strange doing it, but I can’t seem to stop. And soon Jen is laughing with me, while inside of her, cells replicate in an organized frenzy as the seed of our bad timing takes hold.
    “Wade couldn’t have been too happy about this.”
    “It was a blow. But we talked about it. He’s okay with it. He supports me.”
    “Imagine my relief.”
    She closes her eyes, taking the hit, and then looks at me. “That was officially your last shot, okay? This is going to be tricky enough without you constantly punishing me.”
    “How exactly have you been punished? You have the house, you have Wade, and now you have the baby you’ve always wanted. I missed the part where life got so rough for you.”
    “People stare at me. I’m the town whore.”
    “If the shoe fits...”
    “And now I’m a pregnant whore. You think this is easy for me?”
    “I think it’s a lot harder for me.”
    She looks at me for a moment, and then looks away, twirling her hair with her fingers. “Point taken.”
    Jen is allergic to the words “I’m sorry.” She concedes with little expressions like “Point taken” or “Understood,” or, my personal favorite “Okay, let’s drop it, then.” But I know Jen, and I can tell she’s feeling sorry, for me, for her, for the little fetus that will be unwittingly born into our broken lives.
    “Please,” she says. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
    It’s an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don’t share our thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations of those thoughts dumbed down for the PG-13 crowd.
    What am I thinking?
    I’m thinking I’m going to be a father, and I am not excited. I know I should be excited, and maybe at some point in the near future I will be excited, but at this moment, I feel numb, and if you were to peel away the numbness you’d find a thick mucous membrane of trepidation, and if you were to slice through that membrane, you would find a throbbing cluster of outrage and regret. We were supposed to be a family. We fell in love, our parents shook hands, we hired a band and a caterer and uttered vows, and now Jen will live in one place and I will live in another and this child of ours, this inconceivable progeny of our corrupted marriage, will live in a house with no siblings, thanks to his sterile, dipshit stepfather, and will be shuttled sadly between us, subject to the vagaries of our schedules, and he will be lonely and quiet and not quite sure of his place in the world. He will start dressing in black and experimenting with drugs and reading magazines devoted to firearms by the time he’s thirteen. No matter how hard I try, he will prefer Jen to me, which hardly seems fair, given the circumstances. I’ve always wanted to be a father, but not like this, not with the deck already stacked so badly against me. If I marry someone else and we have a child, that will make sense, but this doesn’t, this is a flesh-and-blood shackle that will keep Jen and 138Wade in my life long after I should be free and clear of them. And if I do have children with someone else, this child will feel jealous and discarded and no doubt gravitate toward his sterile, dipshit stepfather, and Wade’s already stolen my wife and home, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him walk off with my unborn child too, but he’ll have the homecourt advantage. Any thoughts of moving somewhere new and starting over will have to be shelved, because I don’t know exactly what kind of father I’ll be, but it won’t be the kind who lives in another state and sends shitty cards with a ten-dollar bill in them. Now, in addition to alimony, I’ll have to pay child support, which will be a neat trick considering the current state of my finances, and I’m going to