Eric Puchner - Model Home

Lyle didn’t have problems like this. Her problems were all related to wishing people dead, not worrying about getting killed herself. She had an idea, suddenly, that she would help Hector’s family. It wasn’t a thought-out plan but a hazy impulse to actually do something randomly kind rather than just drive around with a stupid bumper sticker on your car. She reached into her jeans and took out the business card her dad had given her, which was still tucked into her front pocket. “My father has these houses. You know, that he built. He told me he’s selling them really cheaply.” She handed Hector the card. “Here. You could give him a call if you want. At his office.”

Hector laughed. “What? Houses around here?”

“No.” She tried to remember what her dad had said. “They’re out in the desert somewhere.”

“They’re really that cheap?”

“He said they’re, like, way below what they should be.”

Hector stared at the card. He grew quiet, holding it between his thumb and finger like a slide. Lyle felt a misty pride, as though someone were watching her from an audience. The someone looked like her mother but was smoking a cigarette and wearing tall zippered boots. Lyle flipped the little switch on the boom box to RADIO: a staticky pop, then the gooey strains of “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”

“God, I hate this song,” she said.

Hector wasn’t listening. “I think I’m in love with you,” he said softly.

“From the bottom of your heart?” she joked, lolling her head like Stevie Wonder. She was making fun of a blind person.

“No,” he said. “More than that.”

Lyle’s heart was pounding. “Don’t be stupid. How can it be more than that?”

“I don’t know. From the underness of my heart.”

“The underness?”

“You know. Below the bottom.”

She wrinkled her nose, showing how moronic he was. Secretly, though, she imagined a hole under the earth, dark as a bomb shelter, his love hunkered down there in case the world got blown to pieces. A devotion that would survive anything. Lyle liked the idea of this. She touched Hector’s hand, picturing Shannon Jarrell’s face when she told her.

Camille watered the agapanthus, trying to figure out why Warren’s shirts were spread out across the rosebushes. They’d been put out to dry, six of them in a row, like a chain of paper dolls. Evidently he’d washed them himself. It wouldn’t have upset her so much, except that he’d been taking his shirts to the cleaner’s for fifteen years. It was a beautiful day, clear and breezy, eddies of darker green moving through the lawn. Camille dragged the hose farther through the grass and watered the shirts, one after another, watching them darken under her spray.

Sometimes she doubted it — her suspicion that he was having an affair — but then Warren would come home from work with his sneakers on, flashing her those exhausted, frightened, shame-ridden looks, rushing to the phone before she could answer it. Last Sunday at dinner he’d drunk five glasses of water. Whatever he was hiding, he could barely look her in the eye. He’d ordered new furniture for her, but if this was meant to soothe his conscience it didn’t seem to be working.

Inside again, she took off her cashmere shawl and hung it on the peg in the kitchen. She’d begun wearing the thing defiantly, even when it was warm out. Let the kids make fun of her: What the hell did they know about fashion? They could whistle like moronic cowboys, but the girl at Nordstrom had called it “gorgeous.” When Camille had gone back, days later, the girl had remembered her, wrapping her in the shawl and showing her off to the other salesclerks as if she were a vision of glamour.

Camille went to the bathroom and changed her tampon, drop ping it in the trash. Stress must have messed up her cycle. She should have been ecstatic, or at least wonderfully relieved. Hadn’t she spent the last few weeks puffing cigarettes, praying that the problem would go away, gulping smoke like poison? Or at least, isn’t that what she’d been doing unconsciously? And lo and behold, she wasn’t pregnant after all, her problems on the embryo front were solved.

She was mysteriously, savagely disappointed.

She wandered into the kitchen, where the kids were sitting at the table. It seemed like they were always in the kitchen. Didn’t they ever use the other rooms? Camille stepped over Mr. Leonard, who was staring miserably at the bag of Cool Ranch Doritos being demolished by her children.

“Why were you watering Dad’s shirts?” Lyle asked her.

“Because he left them in the garden.”

Lyle seemed to accept this. They all did, in fact. Since she’d cursed that night in the living room, they’d regarded Camille with a leery sort of awe. She pointed at the bag on the table. “What does that mean exactly? Cool Ranch?”

“Means delicious,” Dustin said.

“Means they can’t call them Powdery Gunk,” Lyle said.

Dustin closed his eyes. “There’s a ranch, and it’s cool, and you’re, like, kicking back with all the other Doritos.”

Camille nodded and began to wash out the pot to the coffeemaker.

“Hey,” Dustin said. “Aren’t you going to tell us about the food pyramid?”

“You’re old enough to make your own decisions.”

They seemed disappointed. Camille wondered if she’d been wrong about them, if maybe on some level — deep down — they actually looked forward to her nagging. Jonas seemed particularly forlorn. He was dressed head to toe in orange again, the third time this week. She’d forgotten to buy him more orange socks at Nordstrom. Perhaps this was why he seemed angry, refusing to catch her eye or even look up from the table.

Lyle got up, as if annoyed by her presence, and Camille made up an excuse to follow her, trailing her into her room. She had an overwhelming desire to confide in her daughter, not only about Warren’s being in love with another woman, but about her quaky, unexpected grief over not being pregnant. Lyle ignored her, lean ing into the bathroom mirror to put on some lipstick. Camille was amazed to see that it was pink.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

Camille nodded. The bathroom smelled like a fashion magazine. Makeup was strange enough — had she begun wearing perfume? “What’s the matter with Jonas? Is he upset for some reason?”

Lyle shrugged. “Maybe his feet hurt.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were supposed to pick him up from fencing today. At two. He waited for an hour and then walked home by himself, all the way from the rec center.”

“Oh shit.” Camille shut her eyes. “I’ve had a lot on my mind. I’m rewriting Earth to My Body, the voiceover. It’s been a bad week.”

“Don’t you mean summer ?”

She opened her eyes, trying to dispel the image of her son trudging up Portuguese Bend Road in his fencing jacket. “Does Jonas feel that way?”

“Why do you think he dresses in orange?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Camille said.

“God, Mom, wake up. He’s sending up a flare. The other day I dropped him off at the mall, and he kept talking about how he might get abducted like Mandy Rogers. He sounded excited. ”

“Why would he want to be Mandy Rogers?”

“Are you kidding? It’s like a lovefest. Have you driven by her house lately?”

Camille’s heart lodged in her chest. The thought of Mandy Rogers’s lawn, covered in prayers and toy cowboy hats and WE LOVE YOU spelled out in flowers, made her want to cry. She couldn’t drive by the place without thinking of Lyle. What would she ever do if she disappeared? Camille tried to pretend that her sons meant just as much to her, that losing them would be exactly the same, but deep in her heart she knew this wasn’t true. Once, when Lyle was a baby, Camille had locked her in the car by accident. She’d been utterly undone, trapped outside the window as Lyle screamed and flailed and kicked, trying to escape the plastic prison of her car seat. It was like watching someone drown. Camille had no choice but to leave Lyle where she was and run to find a phone. She still remembered them vividly, the worst fifteen minutes of her life: waiting for the police to arrive, Lyle wailing so hard she’d begun to claw at her face, Camille weeping hysterically outside and trying to pry bricks from a wall to smash the window.