This Is Where I Leave You

Right?”
    “I feel like I’ll never be able to have sex with someone new without thinking the whole time about the fact that I’m having sex with someone new.”
    Wendy shrugs. “You’ll get over it.”
    From below comes the sound of the front door closing, and a moment later Linda crosses the front yard. She stops on the sidewalk and turns her face up to the sky, letting the morning breeze kiss her face, before heading down the block toward her house.
    “She’s here early,” Wendy muses.
    “She’s here late,” I say.
    “Oh,” Wendy says. Then, “Oh! No!”
    “Exactly.”
    “No way! You think?”
    “Nothing surprises me anymore.”
    A quiet moment while Wendy processes the new information.
    “It kind of makes sense, a little,” she says.
    “Kind of.”
    “If so, how do we feel about it?”
    “We are numb.”
    Wendy considers that for a moment, tapping her lip with the end of her cigarette. “Yes. That’s a perfect description of what we are.”
    The bird that may or may not be a cardinal or a robin takes flight, swooping down toward the backyard to catch the air pocket that will take her to the next tree. It would be nice to be able to do that, I think. To just pick up from wherever you were that wasn’t working out for you and ride the winds to a better place. I’d be in Australia by now.
    “You slept with Horry.”
    “He told you?”
    “I was up here yesterday morning too. Saw you do the walk of shame.”
    She shrugs. “It’s no big deal.”
    “It’s adultery.”
    Wendy raises her eyebrows at me, biting back whatever it was she was prepared to say, a rare display of restraint. We are perched on a roof and you can’t be too careful.
    “Horry is grandfathered in.”
    “Is that how it works?”
    “That’s how it works.”
    “That makes half of your graduating class eligible.”
    She laughs and stubs out her cigarette on a roof shingle. “In an alternate universe where Horry didn’t get his brains bashed in, he and I are married. Once in a blue moon I get to visit that universe.”
    “And it’s really that simple.”
    “My alternate universe, my rules.”
    Behind and below us, the back door slams. We turn around to look down into the backyard. Tracy is standing at the head of the pool in a black one-piece bathing suit. Her dive is flawless, her stroke strong and graceful. She swims back and forth with machinelike precision, doing those little somersaults against the wall at each end like she’s in the Olympics. I get tired just looking at her.
    “Poor thing,” Wendy says.
    Tracy slices through the water like a shark, and Wendy and I watch her from our perch above the world, unaccustomed to such grace and discipline. I think, not for the first time, that she deserves better than Phillip, better than this family of ours. Someone should save her fr om us while there’s still time.

Chapter 34
    10:13 a.m.
    There are tricks to paying a shiva call. You don’t want to come during off-peak hours, or you risk being the only one there, face-to-face with five surly mourners who, but for your presence, would be off their low chairs, stretching their legs and their compressed spines, taking a bathroom break, or having a snack. Evenings are your safest bet, after seven, when everyone’s eaten and the room is full. Weekday afternoons are a dead zone. Sunday is a crapshoot. Do a drive-by and count the parked cars before you stop. If you’re lucky, there will already be a conversation going on when you come in, so you won’t have to sit there trying to start one of your own. It’s hard to talk to the bereft. You never know what’s off -limits.
    And speaking of limits, there apparently aren’t any when it comes to Mom’s slinky wardrobe. The old expression goes, a good speech is like a woman’s skirt: short enough to hold your attention, long enough to cover the subject. Mom’s short denim skirt isn’t a speech, it’s more like a quick, dirty joke, the kind people are always e-mailing to you. And she’s wearing a tight black camisole with spaghetti straps. She looks like a retired stripper.
    You would think everyone we know has already been over, but apparently not. The shiva calls start bright and early, people wanting to get their obligations over with in time to enjoy one of the last warm Sundays of the season. They sit visiting with us like they’ve got all the time in the world, while their golf clubs, tennis rackets, and swimsuits lie waiting for them in the trunks of