Free This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper Page A

certainly one way of looking at it.”
    “I was surprised I didn’t hear from you when it happened,” I say. “I moved out almost eight weeks ago. I mean, none of you called me. That’s par for the course, I guess. If you didn’t call when we lost the baby, I wouldn’t expect you to call over something as trivial as the end of my marriage. But I figured you’d have called, Paul, just to rub it in a little. It’s lucky Dad died when he did, or who knows when you may have gotten around to it?”
    “I’m not happy about it. I always liked Jen.”
    “Thanks, Paul.” I wait an extra beat for emphasis. “And I always liked Alice.”
    “What did you just say?” Paul says, clenching teeth, fists, and bowels.
    “Which part didn’t you hear?”
    “All the young girls love Alice.” Phillip sings out the Elton John lyrics, loud and off-key. “Tender young Alice they say . . .”
    “So, Phillip,” Wendy says. “How did you go about seducing your therapist?”
    “Later,” Phillip says. “It’s just getting interesting.”
    “Oh, for crying out loud!” my mother says.
    I look at the Rolex Jen bought for me with my own money that I haven’t gotten around to selling on eBay yet. We’ve been sitting shiva for exactly one half hour. The doorbell rings, and God only knows to what depths of passive-aggressive sniping we might have descended if it hadn’t. And as the room starts to fill with the first somber-faced neighbors coming to pay their respects, it becomes clear to me that the reason for filling the shiva house with visitors is most likely to prevent the mourners from tearing each other limb from limb.
     
     
     
     
    When we were little kids, Dad took Paul and me fishing at a wide, shallow creek in the shadow of an overpass near some back roads a few miles north of the town limits. Paul and I pulled water-smoothed rocks from the creek bed and Dad knotted them into our fishing lines to serve as weights. Then, after slicing some inchworms with his pocket knife to bait our hooks, he taught us how to cast our lines out across the creek. For Paul and me, the casting was more fun than the fishing. We would reel our lines in, stretch the rods out behind us, and try to cast as far across the creek as we could. About an hour into this, Paul slung his rod back and managed to hook my ear just before he launched his rod forward. I felt a sudden, hot pain as my ear cartilage tore, the rock in his line flying back to slap my skull, and suddenly I was on my back in the dirt, looking up at a cloudless sky. Dad had to take off his T-shirt to stanch the flow of blood. Paul stood over me apologizing, but angrily, like it was all my fault. Flecks of my blood clung to Dad’s curly chest hairs. I didn’t feel a lot of pain, I just remember being amazed at how Dad’s crumpled T-shirt went from white to completely red in a matter of minutes. The damage to my ear turned out to be minimal, but there’s still the faint depression in the bone behind my ear where the rock hit me, like a fingerprint in hardened clay.

Chapter 8
    7:45 p.m.
     
    W e’ve been at it for a few hours already, and the visitors keep coming, pouring through the door in an endless stream, as if busloads are being dropped off at the front door every half hour. Knob’s End has become a parking lot, and my face is sore from smiling politely as my mother introduces and reintroduces everyone, my ass numb from the cheap foam underneath the crappy vinyl of the shiva chair. The plastic tips of the flimsy catering chairs set up around the room scrape the oak floor as the guests jockey for position, gradually working their way from the back of the room to the front, where they can ask the same questions as the guests who came before them, invoke the same platitudes, and squeeze my mother’s forearm with theatrically pursed lips. We should have a handout at the door to speed things along, a brief summary of Dad’s illness and all that transpired in the final days,