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Into the lore of Dad’s legendary stoicism would be added the fact that he spent a year treating metastatic stomach cancer with Tums.
If he was at all aware, he had to be pissed at how long it was taking him to do something as simple as die. Dad didn’t believe in God, but he was a lifelong member of the Church of Shit or Get Off the Can.
You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I’m heading into the trenches alone.
I’ve never been shot, but this is probably what it feels like, that split second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.
And maybe it’s the complicated grief over my father that has finally begun plucking at my nerves, or maybe it’s simply the way Jen draws back as if slapped, but either way, the intense hurt that flashes behind the wide pools of her eyes for that one unguarded instant is almost enough to make me love her again.
headed downstairs to smash her grandmother’s china to smithereens,
asshole
I wanted to throttle Jen, to feel her windpipe collapse under my thumbs.
um
I feel the familiar wave of loss and regret that always seems to accompany our infrequent reunions. I’d give anything for him to be five again, happy and unbroken.
And here we stand at our father’s grave, the three Foxman men, all roughed from the same template but put through different finishing processes.
At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues.
Childhood feels so permanent, like it’s the entire world, and then one day it’s over and you’re shoveling wet dirt onto your father’s coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.
The closer you get, the more you wonder what you were thinking.
sexist
Alice comes from a nice family, where the siblings and siblings-in-law kiss each other hello and good-bye and remember each other’s birthdays and anniversaries and call their parents just to say hi, calls that end with breezy I-love-yous that are effortless and true. To her, we Foxmans are a savage race, brutish aliens who don’t express affection and shamelessly watch our baby brother grope the ass of a stranger through the kitchen window.
“It just happened” was Phillip’s go-to explanation for pretty much everything, the perfect epitaph for a man who always seemed to be an innocent bystander to his own life.
It’s entirely possible, though highly unlikely, that Barry is no longer an ass.”
philip is an icon
“I’m not happy about it. I always liked Jen.” “Thanks, Paul.” I wait an extra beat for emphasis. “And I always liked Alice.”
oooooooooo
One day you just wake up and discover that you got old while you were sleeping.
I just never imagined a girl like that would want someone like me, and I had this idea that if I applied all of my energy toward keeping her happy, the future would sort itself out.
“I missed him while he was still alive.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have dressed her down like that, in front of your family,” Linda says. “She’s still a guest here.”
linda ily
“I feel like I’m watching the opening scene of an AARP porno,”
And I’m dying to tell her that I’m a nice guy. I’m the last nice guy.
BOOOOOOOOO
I say hi back and try to decide which one I would most want to sleep with. The answer is, all of them. Line them up and I’ll knock them down.
icky
“And what’s your story?” She shrugs. “I don’t have one. No great traumatic event to blame my small life on. No catastrophes, no divorce. Plenty of bad men, but plenty of good ones too, that simply didn’t want me in the end. I tried to make something of myself and I failed. That happens every day too.”
“And what is it you’d like to do for the company, Phillip?” “I want to help you grow it.” “The only thing you’ve ever grown was hemp.” “And I made a profit.”
“I always suspected there might be something of the heartless slut in you.” “Takes one to know one, I guess.”
You never know when it will be the last time you’ll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the night we broke, and in the years to follow, the jagged pieces of us would continue to drift further and further apart, small vital bits getting lost here and there, until there was no hope of ever putting us back together.
A ray of sunlight comes through the window, passing through the thick cloud of ganja smoke in a way that makes you think of God and heaven, and we sit there getting baked in our skullcaps and prayer shawls, three lost brothers in mourning, the full impact of their loss only now beginning to dawn on them.
“Alice. No.” And then she slides me into her,
thats assault babez
I am not real to him. This is his wedding day, and nothing is real to him. And I am in mourning, and in shock, and he is not real to me. We are ghosts, passing each other in a haunted house, and it’s hard to say who pities whom more.
Even under the best of circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.
That’s love in real life: messy and corrupt and completely unreliable. I like Penny, and I still love Jen, and I hate Jen and I couldn’t leave Penny’s sad little apartment fast enough. I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don’t know.
It’s a brutal business, being a woman.
A lump forms in my throat and lodges there. You can kind of see who they were back then, innocent and in love; long before kids and a mortgage and rottweilers and cancer and possible (probable) lesbianism.
