This Is Where I Leave You

drive.”
    “Thanks, buddy,” Paul says, smacking Boner’s shoulder.
    “Just go.”
    “Thanks for everything,” I say, shaking his hand. “Good shabbos.”
    “Yeah, thanks, Boner,” Phillip says.
    Boner gives Phillip a withering look. “That was the last time you call me Boner, you hear me?”
    Phillip looks at me, and I shake my head. Don’t do it.
    “I’m sorry, Boner.”
    Boner lunges at Phillip, but Paul catches him and turns him around, whispering in his ear, while I drag Phillip toward Mom’s Jeep. “Jesus, Phillip. Grow up, would you?”
    “I gotta be me,” he says, snickering.
    Wendy looks over the roof of Mom’s car and smiles cheerfully at us.
    “ You guys are so going to hell.”

Chapter 31
    1:05 p.m.
    I wake up in the basement with a start to find Alice lying on her back beside me, looking up at the ceiling. “He stirs,” she says. I am momentarily disoriented. The last thing I can remember was coming downstairs to peel off my soaked suit. I haven’t smoked weed in years, and my nap felt as deep as a night’s sleep. “What time is it?”
    “It’s just after one.” She turns onto her side to face me, resting her face on her hand. “You’ve been sleeping for almost two hours.”
    “Where is everyone?”
    “Paul went to work. Everyone else is out at the pool.”
    “You’re not.”
    “Neither are you.” She stretches a bit, the tops of her breasts rising and spilling out of her low-cut dress.
    “What’s going on, Alice?”
    “You seem to be staring at my breasts.”
    “Your breasts are in my face.”
    Alice props herself up on one elbow and pulls slowly at the neckline of her dress, stretching it down until her naked breasts emerge, round and whole. “You always liked my breasts.”
    “What’s not to like?” I’m thinking that this is a dream, a strange, twisted, but not altogether unpleasant dream.
    “I feel bad about how I reacted when I found out Jen was expecting. I should have been happy for you, and instead I just felt bad for me.”
    “A simple apology would have been fine,” I say.
    “There’s nothing in the world I want more than to have a baby,” she says. “You know that, right?”
    “Yes.”
    She moves closer, so that her breasts are now dangerously close. The room starts to spin a little bit. What was in that joint, Dad? “Um, can you put those away?”
    “In a minute,” she says. “First I want you to listen to me.”
    “Okay.”
    Alice takes a deep breath and looks me dead in the eye. “I’ve been trying to get pregnant for almost two years. I don’t ovulate regularly. My cycle never returned to normal when I came off the pill. I take a drug to make me ovulate, and my eggs have tested fine, but Paul won’t get his sperm tested. I was thinking, maybe I would increase the odds and you’d give me some of yours.”
    “You want my sperm?”
    “Yours seems to have what it takes.”
    “What does Paul think about that?”
    “Paul will never know. It will be our secret. And you and I will never know if it was yours or Paul’s sperm that did the trick. It’s perfect, really. Any baby that resembles you will resemble Paul.”
    “There are so many things wrong with that idea, I don’t even know where to start.”
    Alice rolls over, almost onto me, her face hovering inches above mine. “Won’t you help me, Judd? Please? Forget Paul, forget everyone and everything else. We liked each other a lot once; we used to come to this basement and have sex right here where we’re lying now. And maybe we were what we were then so you could help Paul and me with this now.”
    “If you and Paul need my sperm, you can have it. But not like this. We can go to a doctor. I mean, Jesus, Alice, look at what you’re doing here.”
    She sits up on the bed, flushed and angry. “I’ve been going to doctors for two years, Judd. That’s two years of needles and hormones and specialist after specialist. Do you have any idea how exhausting that is? I’ve been peeing on sticks and crying myself to sleep for two years. All Paul has to do is come home and screw me when I’m ovulating, and half the time he can’t be bothered to do that. He actually smoked weed today.”
    She starts to cry. “He knew I was ovulating and he came home stoned.”
    “Hey, it’ll be okay.” I could never resist a crying girl. I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s probably not something good. I reach out to touch her shoulder, and she takes my hand, cradling it