This Is Where I Leave You

can respond, Tracy abruptly pulls out of her yoga pose and kicks Phillip’s leg out from under him, causing him to fall on his ass.
    “Prick!”
    She yanks her mat up and storms disgustedly back toward the house while Phillip calls after her. “What the fuck, honey?!” Then, still sprawled on his ass, he turns to us. “She’s usually very congenial. I don’t know what bug crawled up her ass today.”
    “That remark about ripe young honeys,” Jen says. “She may have taken that a bit personally.”
    “Huh,” Phillip says, considering it. “In retrospect, that was probably insensitive of me.”
    “I mean, what is she, fifty?”
    “She’s forty-three and that was a cheap shot. I’d expect more, even from an adulteress.” He rolls to his feet. “On the plus side, no yoga this morning.” He reaches into his sock and pulls out a cigarette and lighter.
    “You’re not going to go after her?” I say.
    “I’m gathering my wits about me,” he says, flipping the cigarette into his mouth. “So, what were you guys talking about?”
    “Nothing,” I say.
    “I’m pregnant,” Jen says.
    Phillip looks at Jen, then looks down at his freshly lit cigarette and pinches it out. “Mazel tov,” he says, smiling widely. I am going to be a father, just when I’ve lost my own. There are some who would see a certain divine balance in that, one soul departing to make room for another, but I’m not that guy. I don’t believe in God when I’m in trouble, the way so many people do. But at times like this, when the irony seems too cruel and well crafted to be a coincidence, I can see God in the details. Due to some mental hiccup I can’t explain, when I think of God, I picture Hugh Hefner: a thin, angular man with a prominent chin in a maroon smoking jacket. I don’t know where that image came from or why it stuck the way it did. Maybe when I was a kid I was thinking about God and I happened upon a picture of Hef in a magazine and some neurons fired and a permanent association was made. But when your vision of God is America’s horniest senior citizen in his pajamas, it’s probably fair to say that you’re not the kind of guy who sees miracles in the mundane coincidences fate lobs at your unsuspecting head like wate r balloons from a high terrace.

Chapter 21
    I always imagined I’d be one of those cool dads, the ones you see with long hair and trendy clothing and a leather wrist cuff. One of those guys who change diapers and never yell and buy all the overpriced snacks at the ballpark and carry the kid on their shoulders all the way home. I spent a good deal more time picturing myself as a father than as a husband. I figured I’d be a husband first, and certainly, I imagined what sort of woman I might marry - a smart, sensitive, good-natured lingerie model - but I didn’t picture myself as any particular type of husband. Just me, married, basically. A smarter man might have seen that as cause for concern, a big red flag flapping noisily in the wind. Looking back, which is what you do when your life goes to shit, often and obsessively - I can’t really say if Jen and I would have made it if we hadn’t lost the baby. I know it’s the zenith of stupidity to count on a baby to save a failing marriage. The kid can’t even burp on his own, and you want him to repair a relationship that you’ve spent years twisting and tying into hard, salt-crusted sailor’s knots. But still, I can’t help wondering if that baby might have saved us, the same way that losing it accelerated our downward spiral into the thorny underbrush of marital decay. Losing him. Not it. “Losing it” is how you’d refer to your virginity or your wallet, but not your baby; even if you never did get to hold him, and smell his scalp, and wipe his white spittle off your shoulder. Yes, it was a boy. Baby Boy Foxman, it said, on his death certificate. He would have had untamable curly hair like me, and maybe Jen’s luminous green eyes, and he and I would have gone to ball games and to the park, and I would have taught him to ride his bike and throw a curveball. I don’t know how to throw a curveball, but you’d better believe I would have learned. And when he got older I’d have taught him to drive, and he wouldn’t have felt the need to rebel, to do hard drugs or mutilate his smooth, handsome face (Jen’s graceful cheekbones, my prominent chin) with studs and bolts, because there’d be nothing to rebel against, but if he had I