One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper Read Free Book Online Page A

waste to his apartment and he didn’t know what else to do.
    “This could be the day that Sad Todd finally snaps,” Jack says, his voice conveying that unique mixture of sympathy and contempt they all feel for one another here.
    “Someone should buy that man a coke habit,” Oliver says, nodding sadly.
    It’s Sunday evening, and they are on their way out to have dinner and too many drinks at the Blitz, a rundown sports bar on Route 9 famous for its overstuffed burgers and its absurdly attractive waitresses. Sunday nights are particularly depressing; you either didn’t have your kids for the weekend and you feel lost and alone, or you had your kids and now they’re gone and you feel exhausted and inadequate. Either way, drinks and ogling are called for and, this being America, both are within walking distance. Jack, as usual, is overdressed, in a black blazer and dress shirt, taking his cues from whatever he last saw George Clooney wearing. Oliver is wearing inadvisable cargo pants and a baseball cap. Silver would like to think he falls somewhere in between, in jeans and a dark knit polo shirt, but next to Jack, he just fades into the background like a passing extra.
    Out in the driveway, Jack and Oliver sit down at the edge of the fountain to smoke cigars, which is more complicated than it sounds. First, Oliver takes two tin tubes out off his shirt pocket and cracks the seals. Then Jack pulls out a little guillotine and studies the cigars, under Oliver’s watchful eye, making sure to circumcise them properly. All the while, Oliver prattles on about where he got these particular cigars, about their relative superiority to certain other cigar brands, about their overall relevance in the cigar world, if you will. This never fails to prompt Jack to tell one of his Best-Cigars-I-Ever-Smoked stories, complete with names, dates, and locations that mean nothing to anyone else, while Oliver lights up with the blue jet from his monogrammed butane lighter and Silver tears his hair out, going quietly insane with boredom.
    Cigars are all the rage these days, on both sides of the marital divide. The married men smoke them to somehow feel less fenced in by their lives, the divorced men smoke them to stave off the encroaching desolation on sad Sunday evenings, and neither group can shut up about it. Because of a tossed salad of latent Freudian inadequacy issues, middle-aged men will perform fellatio on a clump of cured leaves and somehow feel more like men because of it, which, if nothing else, is a colossal triumph of marketing. And you would think that, phallic or not, a habit that involves plugging your mouth would be a quieter affair, but you would be wrong.
    Great works are written and empires crumble in the time it takes for these two to finish with the cigar bullshit, so they are all still there in the driveway to witness the arrival of Sad Todd’s ex-wife, who pulls up in a silver minivan. She is a drab sliver of a woman, with paper-thin lips and the harried expression of someone who has long since resigned herself to being the only competent person on the planet. She inspects the twins while haranguing Todd at the same time.
    Look at them! They’re a wreck! How can you let them out of your apartment like this? Is that powder on their faces? You gave them doughnuts? Did it occur to you to bathe them, even once in three days? Jesus Christ, Todd, I could leave them at a kennel and they’d be better cared for!
    Sad Todd does not respond. He stands there with his head bowed, absorbing the abuse like a tree in a storm. When she finishes chewing him out, she shakes her head for a moment, then leans in and straightens his folded collar, and, to Silver’s great surprise, gives him a quick peck on the cheek before getting back into her minivan and driving off. Love, Silver thinks. The twins wave to their father from the back window of the van, and Sad Todd stands in the middle of the driveway, waving back absently until they turn a