This Is Where I Leave You

yourself. If I were you, I’d quit beating around the bush. You like Penny, admit you like her and go for it. Maybe you get somewhere with her, or maybe you get rejected. Either way, you get something.”
    “I’ve been married for almost ten years. I’m out of practice.”
    “No offense, little brother, but you didn’t exactly have mad skills back in the day.”
    “Thanks for the confidence boost.”
    “I’m just being honest.”
    Horry emerges at the back door, sucking on an apple core. “Your uncle Stan is here. Your mom wants you back in your little chairs.”
    “Kill me now,” Wendy says. “Please.” She tries to stand up, but her foot slides on the magazine, and she lets out a startled shriek as she loses her balance and falls into the pool. I jump to my feet, but before I can get moving, Horry comes tearing down the lawn and, after just a few long strides, executes a long racing dive into the pool. He resurfaces and swims over to where Wendy is coughing and sputtering, her sundress pooling around her like a tent. Ryan stands on the side of the pool, terrified. Cole floats and sings to himself in the shallow end, oblivious.
    “You okay?” Horry says.
    “Yeah,” Wendy says, somewhat nonplussed as he pulls her into a lifesaver’s hold. He swims her over to the side so she can grab on to the ladder. “Oh, Horry, you jumped in with all your clothes.”
    “So did you,” he says. “You okay?”
    “Yeah. I can’t believe I did that. I’m such a cow.”
    “You’re not a cow,” Horry says, pulling the hair off her face. “You’re my sunflower.”
    She smiles tenderly at him and briefly touches his face. “I remember.”
    “You’re not a cow,” he says again, treading water slowly away from her. “And he should be better to you.”
    “Thank you,” she says softly as Horry turns and swims toward the shallow end.
    “You all wet,” Cole says to him as he arrives at the stairs.
    “That’s right, little man.”
    “You play with me now?”
    “Sure,” Horry says, floating on his back. “I’ll play.”
    The thing is that Wendy’s in the pool, so it’s impossible to tell if those are tears or just water that she’s brushing off her cheeks.

Chapter 26
    8:45 p.m.
    The show goes on. We are all back in our shiva chairs, except for Paul, who has begged off, claiming some kind of retail emergency at the store. Alice has not been seen since the fit she threw this morning, but Tracy has reappeared, sitting off to the side, smiling graciously. The rest of us face the crowd like a rock band on tour, same set list, different town. We perform our sad little shiva smiles on cue and repeat the same inane conversations over and over again. He just slipped away, Mom says. Three kids now, Wendy says. I’m a photojournalist. I just got back from a year in Iraq, embedded with a marine unit, Phillip says. We’re separated, I say.
    What happens is this. Every half hour or so, someone will ask me where Jen is. And I will say that we are separated. Then, like a game of telephone, word will quietly spread through the room, so that everyone present will know not to ask. And then, invariably, new visitors will arrive, and someone uninformed will ask me again, and the cycle will repeat. I feel bad for the ones who ask, who bear the awkwardness for the rest of the crowd.
    My mother’s closer friends have known for weeks. Millie Rosen brings her daughter, Rochelle, who is twenty-seven, unmarried, and pretty in a forgettable way. She positions her right in front of me and makes painfully obvious attempts at engaging us in conversation. What 166pretty much every person in Elmsbrook except Millie knows is that I am not Rochelle’s type, being that I don’t have breasts and a vagina. Mom’s older brother, Uncle Stan, has arrived with his latest senior citizen tramp, Trish, who wears her makeup like a drag queen, coloring way outside the lines with her lipstick and eyebrow pencils. Stan was an appellate court judge and married to my aunt Esther, a broad, sexless slab of a woman, for forty years. After Esther died of emphysema, Stan waited what he considered to be an appropriate mourning period, two weeks or so, and then began sleeping his way through all the willing widows in his retirement village down in Miami Beach. He’s closing in on eighty and has his pick of the litter, being that he can still drive and screw. I know this because he’s supremely gifted at working it into every conversation. Uncle