This Is Where I Leave You

his one real eye. He’s a retired boxer. There are framed clippings of his fights behind the bar. It’s anyone’s guess what kind of punch the guy might pack today, but he’s got presence, and his expression carries a certain tired wisdom unique to people who have known violence intimately. He places a hand like a meat hook on Paul’s shoulder. “Paul,” he says in a hoarse, surprisingly gentle voice. “You either need to sit down or take this outside.”
    Paul nods, still looking at me, and then pats the bouncer’s belly. “It’s fine, Rod. I’m leaving anyway.”
    Rod the prizefighter looks pointedly at Phil and then me, visualizing the cataclysmic damage he’ll do to us if it comes to that, before heading back across the bar. Paul throws a few bills down on the table.
    “Paul,” I say, feeling remorseful. “I’ve always felt bad about what happened.”
    “Just tell me this,” he says, his voice low, his anger spent. “How many surgeries have I had?”
    “What?”
    “I don’t mean when it happened. I mean since you moved out. How many operations?”
    I think about it for a moment. “Three, I guess. Or four if you count the one you had right after I got married. The skin graft thing.”
    Paul shakes his head slowly. “Eight.”
    “What?”
    “I’ve had eight surgeries. Skin and nerve grafts, tissue grafts, surgical pins. And how many times did you visit me in the hospital, or even call the house to see how I was doing?”
    “I don’t know. A bunch?”
    He holds up two fingers. “Twice. You came to see me twice. That’s it.”
    “That can’t be right.”
    “It’s not right, but it’s the truth.” He starts heading for the door.
    “Paul,” I say. “Wait a minute.”
    He turns to face me, and I’m shocked to see a tear running down his cheek. “Going to Rusco’s house was stupid,” he says. “Believe me, I spend time every day wishing I could go back there and stop myself, picturing the world I’d be living in now if I hadn’t gone. But stupid or not, I went there for you. You want to call me a lousy brother? I guess maybe I am. I’ll own up to it. But maybe you are too.”
    I sit back on my stool, watching him leave. I should call out to him, stop him, now that we’re finally talking. But we are not a family of communicators. It took five shots and a decade’s worth of repressed anger just to say this much tonight. I’m tapped out, and so is he.
    “Well, I think you two had a real breakthrough there,” Phillip says.
    “Yeah? Then why do I feel so shitty?”
    Phillip pats my back and messes up my hair. “Emotional growth hurts. It’s nothing a few more shots won’t fi x.”
    He disappears into the crowd at the bar. I am left alone at the table to lick the bottom of my shot glasses and assimilate the new information. You think you have all the time in the world, and then your father dies. You think you’re happily married, and then your wife fucks your boss. You think your brother is an asshole, and then you discover that it’s been you all along. If nothing else, it’s been educational. 10:30 p.m.
    Phillip returns with eight shot glasses jammed between every finger of both hands, another of his worthless skills. Somehow we do them all. The night takes on a kind of kaleidoscopic translucence, and I lose my sense of time and, occasionally, balance. When I come back from a trip to the bathroom, we’ve been joined by Phillip’s old girlfriend, Chelsea. “Look who I bumped into,” Phillip says. Chelsea is dressed for the hunt in a short denim skirt and a tank top that grants a generous view of her lightly freckled cleavage as she leans forward to kiss my cheek.
    “Fancy running into you guys here,” she says, in case I haven’t properly registered the complete randomness of this encounter from Phillip’s remark. Chelsea’s fingers dance up Phillip’s arms like he’s an instrument she’s playing. I try to catch his eye, but he looks away every time. I want to tell him that he can’t behave like this on my watch, but the shots have warmed my blood and toasted my veins, and someone has turned up the music, and to be heard I’d have to put my mouth close to his ear, like Chelsea is doing right now.
    On my next bathroom trip, I see Horry making out with a skinny girl in the little nook between the men’s room and the kitchen. She’s a sloppy kisser, her tongue sliding out of her mouth to lick his lips when they separate, but he doesn’t seem to mind.