This Is Where I Leave You

boyfriends she had, if only she weren’t so driven in her career. Lucy is now a vice president at PepsiCo, makes more money than she knows what to do with, and is finally ready to consider appropriate suitors. And for all I know, Lucy Braun might be my soul mate, or at least a bright, attractive woman with the body of a centerfold. But Lois’s hair is dyed a different shade of blond than her eyebrows, and her skin hangs off her jaw in loose jowls with the texture of an orange peel, and when she speaks of Lucy in her hoarse smoker’s voice, she sucks all traces of potential sexuality right out of her. Right out of the world, actually. Barbara Lang’s ex-husband has a stepdaughter who is a catalog model. She is divorced once and widowed once, but you’d never know it from her great attitude. She’s currently writing a book on what to do when you’re beautiful but your life sucks anyway, and she lives in Boston, but the world is so much smaller these days. Renee Harper is a certified matchmaker and she wants me to avoid 250the dangerous pitfalls of online dating by hiring her to find and screen potential dates. I wonder what organization certifies matchmakers, what the criteria are, and, more immediately, how a sixty something woman who wears leopard-print spandex pants and bubblegum-pink lipstick to a Sunday-afternoon shiva call can possibly expect to be taken seriously as an arbiter of good taste.
    “So, you’ll call me?” Renee says, pressing her card into my palm.
    “Sure.”
    “Really?”
    “No. Not really.”
    Renee looks at me uncertainly.
    “He’s kidding.” Mom.
    “No, I’m not.”
    “He’s not.” Wendy.
    “He’s serious as a heart attack.” Phillip.
    “I’m sorry,” Renee says, sounding more pissed than contrite. “I was just trying to help.”
    I look at Renee Harper, and Barbara Lang, and Lois Braun. They are smug and clueless and riding my last nerve. “I am still legally married,” I say, raising my voice to the point that all the other hushed conversations going on around the room die instantly. “I’m still married and I have a baby on the way and I’m dealing with the death of my father, and this pathological need you all have to throw every sad lonely woman you know at me is not helping.”
    “Okay, Judd,” Mom says.
    “Do I really look so pathetic to all of you? Like I couldn’t possibly meet someone on my own? Half the people in the world are women. Odds are that at least a few of them would be willing to go out with me.”
    “Damn right,” Phillip chimes in. “And it’s not like he’s been celibate since he moved out. He had sex last night, FYI.”
    “Don’t help me, Phillip.”
    “Right. Sorry.”
    Lois, Barbara, and Renee rise to their feet as one, lips pursed, faces burning with humiliation. They offer a chorus of mortified apologies in low, strained voices as they make their way out of the room. I estimate it will take them roughly three minutes to convert their shame to indignation. They’ll blame the whole thing on my bad manners, benevolently excuse me on the grounds of my grief, and live to meddle another day. They couldn’t have made it this far without developing some fairly foolproof defense mechanisms.
    “Don’t worry about it, girls,” Mom calls after them. “You were just being kind. It’s not you he’s angry at.”
    “No, I’m pretty sure it is them.”
    Mom fixes me with a hard look, then leans back in her chair. “Well, I can see you’re beginning to vent all that anger you have locked up in you, and that’s healthy. I just think you could be a little more judicious in choosing your venue. There are a lot of innocent bystanders here.”
    “You always encouraged us to express ourselves in the moment. To let it out.”
    “That’s right, honey. I also encouraged you to move your bowels twice a day. That doesn’t mean I want to be there when you do.” She nods to herself for a moment. “That was good, the whole venting-your-waste metaphor. I need to write that down.” She pulls herself up off the chair, making a quick apology to what’s left of her audience, and exits stage left, thr ough the kitchen to her office.

Chapter 37
    1:45 p.m.
    After my little outburst, I am deemed unfit for shiva, so I load Ryan and Cole into Wendy’s rented minivan to drive them over to Wonderland, a second-rate amusement park a few miles down the interstate. I figure Wendy could use the break, as she’s been off handedly remarking, more