This Is Where I Leave You

is staying. Or was staying. She is no doubt gone by now, hightailing it back to Kingston, with Wade grumbling about revenge scenarios as he drives. Sticky Fingers. Famous for its spicy buffalo wings and nubile waitresses in their tight black T-shirts with the V-necks cut out jaggedly by scissors. The place is filled with women in short skirts or jeans, and tight sleeveless shirts. These women, with their hair and their bodies, their smiling lips, glossed to a shine. I am acutely conscious of every one of them, of every smooth thigh and creamy neck. I am dealing with major life issues here, death, divorce, fatherhood, and yet here, in this bar, I am all cock. I don’t know why this is, what makes it so, but I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I sit with my brothers at a high round table, licking hot sauce off my fingers, trying to moderate my roving eye. There’s a brunette with the kind of bee-stung lips you want to suck like candy. There’s a blond girl in a short skirt with smooth, perfect legs and the kind of smile you feel in your chest. There’s another blonde, a real one this time, with laughing eyes, and you just know she’d be fun and tender in bed. I want them all, slowly and softly, want to kiss them in the rain, save them from bad men, win their hearts, build a life. I’m probably too old for most of them. Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t been single in over ten years; I can’t tell how old anyone is anymore, including me. I would kill to be in love again. I loved being in love - the deep kisses, the urgent sex, the passionate declarations, the late-night phone calls, the private language and inside jokes, the way her fingers rest possessively on your forearm during dinner with her friends.
    “Boys’ night out,” Phillip says appreciatively. “Why don’t we do this more?”
    “Because we don’t like each other very much,” Paul says.
    “That’s crap, Paul. You’re too angry at the world to know who you like and who you don’t. I like you, Paul. I love you. Both of you. I was always too young to go anywhere with you guys. I always wished we’d hung out more as brothers.”
    “Well then, this must be a big moment for you.”
    “The boys are back in town,” Phillip sings.
    A waitress comes to bring us our drinks. “Hey, Philly,” she says.
    “How’ve you been?”
    “Hey, Tammy. Looking good.”
    We cannot help but watch her as she leaves. God himself stops what he’s doing to watch her ass as she crosses the crowded room. It’s that kind of ass. The kind of ass that fills you with equal parts lust and regret, and then, almost instantly, chagrin, because, for Christ’s sake, it’s just an ass.
    “Is there anyone in this town you haven’t fucked?” Paul grumbles.
    “Just because she was glad to see me doesn’t mean I fucked her.”
    “So you didn’t?”
    Phillip shrugs. “It’s not a fair test case. Everyone fucked Tammy Burns.”
    “I didn’t,” I say sadly.
    “The night’s young. Just be charming and tip well.”
    Someone has selected “Sweet Home Alabama” on the jukebox. Phillip sings along, tapping his hands on the table to the little piano riff between verses. Take a hundred jukeboxes from a hundred bars in a hundred cities and they’ll all have “Sweet Home Alabama” in them. I don’t know why that should be the case, but it is. And every one of those bars has two or three assholes who will sing along at the top of their lungs, especially when they get to the part that trashes Neil Young, and then look around like they should get a prize for knowing the words, like everyone doesn’t know the words, like everyone didn’t have that classic rock friend who put it on every mix he ever made, like everyone isn’t sick to death already of “Sweet Home Alabama.”
    Lately, I get inexplicably angry around pretty girls. The girls around the bar shake themselves lightly in time to the music, pouting the way girls do when they dance, like they’re experts in something we’ll never understand. I need to stop looking at these girls. No good will come from it. You keep looking at girls like this and then one day you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror behind the bar, and if you’re not yet too old, you’re on the borderline, and the last thing you ever want to be is the old guy in the bar. There’s no dignity in it.
    “Isn’t that Horry?” I say, looking over to a corner table. Horry is there, chatting up some hot young thing. I catch his eye and