Eric Puchner - Model Home

“There’s an owl living in that hollow pine,” he’d said.

“A spotted owl ?”

“A barn owl. I watch him all night. Oscar. He hunts for mice in the canyon.”

Lyle looked at him. “You named it Oscar?”

“Oscar Valentino,” he said. “Like Valentine. His face looks like a heart.”

Besides that, what she remembered most was Hector opening the condom wrapper with his teeth, like a McDonald’s ketchup.

Of course, Lyle wasn’t about to tell all this to Shannon Jarrell, and certainly not the part about Hector’s befriending a bird. She tried to read Adam Bede, which she’d just started, no longer caring if Shannon thought she was a nerd, but every time she picked it up Shannon sighed and fidgeted and asked her some stupid question about what kind of tattoo she should get on her ass. The choice was a rose or a scorpion. Lyle suggested the words STORE IN A COOL DRY PLACE, which was met with a look of such profound and humorless disgust that Lyle figured her opinion wasn’t exactly in high demand. But each time she returned to her book, Shannon would somehow forget about Lyle’s irrelevance and ask her something else.

Finally, Lyle gave up and dropped Adam Bede on the counter. Though she hated that it was true, some secret part of her was flattered by Shannon’s attention. For the hundredth time, she tried to pinpoint the cryptic arrangement of features that made her coworker beautiful. The face itself was thin and elflike, tapering into a perfect triangle. Lyle had seen a chart somewhere depicting the ten different shapes a person’s face could come in; she’d identified her own, depressingly, as “oblong.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Shannon said.

“What?”

“There’s a bottle of tequila in the cupboard. From when Charlie and I spent the night.”

“You left one here?”

“Jared’s down with it.” She shrugged. “Probably thinks I want to party on his cock.”

Lyle glanced behind her. “What if a customer comes in?”

“We’ll just have a shot or two.”

Shannon got up and opened one of the cabinets over the sink, rummaging behind the boxes of straws and plastic spoons to find a half bottle of Jose Cuervo. She placed it on the floor in front of them. Lyle didn’t feel like drinking on the job, at least not with Shannon Jarrell, but she didn’t want to seem like a pussy for refusing either. That was the thing about the Shannons of the world: if you didn’t feel like doing what they did, it was never because you didn’t secretly want to.

“I wish we had some limes,” Shannon said.

“There’s lemon sorbet.”

“Gross,” she said. Nevertheless, she went into the front and came back with a cone topped with a lopsided scoop of sorbet. Shannon took a swig from the bottle, scrunching her face into a failed impersonation of ugliness. She licked the sorbet, careful not to smear her lipstick. “Nasty.”

She handed the bottle to Lyle, who glanced toward the front of the store and then took a sip that made her throat burn. She bit into the sorbet, and the burn moved to her head.

“What do you think?” Shannon asked.

“Hard to say exactly.” Lyle sniffed the bottle, like one of those wine creeps on TV. “It’s delightfully complex.”

To Lyle’s surprise, Shannon laughed. A goofy giggle, almost human. Shannon wiped the mouth of the bottle with the end of her Perfect Scoop shirt and then took another swig, closing her eyes this time and chugging a few gulps. When it was Lyle’s turn, she watched carefully to make sure Lyle drank the same amount.

“A hint of, um, cat piss, don’t you think?”

Lyle sniffed the bottle again. “With a bouquet of jockstrap.”

“Bouquet. Ha.”

“Its opulent nose recalls a men’s urinal.”

Shannon giggled again. “Jesus. Is that one of your book words?”

“Urinal?”

“Fuck you, too.” She scowled at the floor. There was some thing in her face, a softness, that resembled shyness. “‘Opulent.’ Does that mean big?”

Lyle shrugged. “Like lavish, I guess.”

Shannon rummaged through her purse and took out a lab notebook. A long list of words, coupled with their definitions, ran down the inside cover. Shannon printed the word “OPULINT” under “STULTIFYING,” following it with Lyle’s definition.

“I’m trying to improve my vocabulary,” she explained. “Any word I don’t know.”

“It’s an e, ” Lyle said, pointing.

Maybe she’d misjudged Shannon after all. They took turns on the tequila, taking longer and longer glugs. Lyle noticed that Shannon had stopped bothering to wipe off the bottle with her shirt. The door bee-bong ed and they stayed where they were, covering their mouths to avoid laughing, until the customer had left. Thoughtfully, Shannon asked Lyle if she had a boyfriend.

“From school? Is it Dudley Silverberg?”

“No. God.” Lyle felt her heart beat faster. “He’s older.”

Shannon leaned forward. “What? How old?”

“Nineteen.”

“Man,” she said, leaning back again. Lyle couldn’t tell if she believed her or not. “What does he do? I mean for a living?”

“He’s a writer. A poet.”

“Wow. I bet he’s all intellectual, right? You read to each other from books?” She seemed impressed. “Do you fool around at his apartment?”

“He’s got a house.”

“Fuck. I’d kill for that. With Charlie, it’s like planning a major event.”

Shannon handed the bottle back to Lyle, who closed her eyes before taking a swig. The tequila seemed to have lost its flavor; or rather, it tasted bad as ever, but her throat was no longer interested in her mouth’s opinion. When Lyle opened her eyes, she was shocked to see there wasn’t any left.

Shannon appeared to be rummaging through the cabinet. Her contours, vague already, had become even fuzzier. Laughing, she pulled something out: a box of hairnets. She stretched one over her head so that Lyle was confronted with the visual oxymoron of Shannon Jarrell in a hairnet. Remarkably, she still looked beautiful.

“My cousin found one of these in his burrito once. Can you believe that? He was cutting into it and pulled out an entire hairnet with his fork.” She stuck out her tongue, which made her look like a ravishing turtle. “Someone must have, like, wanted to sabotage the place.”

“Could have been an accident,” Lyle said.

“No, sir. How could it be an accident?”

“One cook’s folding up a burrito? And another’s leaving at the same time? Juan and Carlos? Carlos whips off his hairnet and tosses it at the trash, adios, and it lands in the burrito right when Juan’s looking up. To say good-bye, I mean.” She mimed Juan’s oblivious folding of the tortilla. “Boom. I mean, bam. Folds it right in.”

Shannon liked this apparently. Loved it. Was maybe even getting a hernia from laughing so hard. The hairnet had slipped to one side of her head, perched jauntily like a beret. Lyle laughed, too, amazed at herself: Had she really just said Juan and Carlos?

“You’re fucking funny, you know that?” Shannon said, catching her breath. She wiped her eye with one knuckle. “Why are you always, like, hanging out by yourself?”

“Maybe I’m a leper.”

Shannon closed her eyes. “Shit, I’m wasted. Bugfuck.”

The door chimed again. Shannon burst out laughing and pointed at her hairnet. Lyle stood up, lurching to one side before finding her balance. When she turned her head, she was aware of the wall needing to catch up with her eyes, wobbling into focus like a slide. She emerged from the back room to find a middle-aged couple huddled over the display of ice cream tubs. The woman was wearing a sweatshirt that could only be described as “deciduous”: an embroidered tree covered the front of her chest, its branches drooping suggestively down her breasts and shedding a blizzard of rainbow-colored leaves.