Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Remember the Chrysler?” he said slowly, unable to look at them. A spark popped off the fire, and he batted his hair. Possibly he was a little drunk.

“Do you have a drinking problem?” Lyle asked.

“It wasn’t stolen.” Warren went on to explain about the Chrysler. He told them about the furniture, the empty accounts, the snipped-up credit cards. The toxic waste dump and doomed investment of Auburn Fields. The fact that Camille’s salary, $20,000 a year, wouldn’t so much as cover their mortgage. Once he’d begun, he couldn’t stop. It was like sledding down a hill. He spared them nothing. He told them, to make sure there was no confusion, no false hope on anyone’s part — including his own — that it was only a matter of weeks before the house was foreclosed.

When he was finished, Warren felt hungry. Dustin’s and Lyle’s marshmallows had caught fire and bubbled away to nothing. Insects chirred all around them, as unmoved as the rocks and trees.

“Where will we move?” Jonas asked.

“I don’t know. Somewhere less expensive.”

“How about Torrance?” Dustin said.

Warren couldn’t speak. Perhaps his son didn’t understand.

“I haven’t had a very good summer either,” Lyle said.

Warren blinked at her. “You haven’t?”

“I saw Hector at the beach and pretended not to know him. My boyfriend. Hector Granillo, who works at the gate. I was ashamed of him, I think.” She nudged the fire with her stick. “So I drove him away on purpose.”

There was a respectful silence.

“Is that the guy with the walker?” Dustin asked.

“No!”

“I thought his name was Hector.”

“Herman, I think,” Camille said. “He’s got rheumatoid arthritis.”

“Yeah, well, I slept with Kira’s sister,” Dustin said. “Taz Shackney.”

“You did ?” Lyle said. “The one who’s Jonas’s age?”

Dustin scowled. “She’s not Jonas’s age. She’s almost sixteen. The Shackneys found out and now Kira hates my guts.”

Camille looked at Warren. “Is that true?”

“I left it on the answering machine,” Dustin explained. “That’s why Dad got arrested.”

Warren threw some more kindling on the fire. He was too overwhelmed to react. Everyone looked at Camille, whose fingers were white with marshmallow.

“Mom,” Lyle said, “what about you?”

“Besides making a video no one understands?” She frowned, scratching the dirt with her stick. “I thought I was pregnant for a while, and then I thought your father was having an affair when he wasn’t. I put some urine in his coffee.”

“You peed in it?”

“No. It was a urine sample.”

“Holy shit,” Dustin said, laughing.

“Wow, Mom. That takes the prize.”

“It’s not funny,” Camille said to the kids, dabbing her eyes with her sweater. Whether she was laughing, too, or crying, Warren couldn’t tell. Drinking his wife’s urine seemed like small punishment.

“Mahatma Gandhi drank his own urine,” Jonas said. “I saw it on PBS.”

“You thought I was having an affair?” Warren said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve got nothing to worry about, Mom,” Lyle said. “So long as he keeps wearing that hat.”

Warren uncinched the chin cord of his hat. He hadn’t realized he still had it on. Like Camille’s shawl, it had been the cause of gleeful derision when he brought it home from the store.

“What about Jonas?” Lyle said.

“Let me guess,” Dustin said. “You forgot to return to your home planet.”

“Ha-ha,” Jonas said.

“If you’re part of this family, you’re going to have to learn to fuck up.”

Later, they unrolled their sleeping bags and slept outdoors, deciding to forgo the tents. Warren knew that his children’s reaction was purely of the moment, that once the reality of their bankruptcy sank in there would be anger and blame, there would be fights and new schools and unthought-of losses — but nonetheless he decided to bask in the reprieve he’d been granted. Camille laid her bag next to Warren’s, which surprised him. It was bright enough to see their children’s faces. Stuffed peacefully in their bags, they looked like mummies. He thought of all the camping trips he’d taken them on when they lived in Wisconsin, a chronicle of suffering. The trips to Hidden Lakes. The “vacations” in St. Croix State Park. Quetico in Canada, when they’d put a hole in their canoe and hadn’t caught a single fish, finally forced to survive on tapioca pudding for three days straight. Even on the disastrous trips, there were the skies at night, a wonderment of stars. The stillness of one another’s company. It was his favorite time ever: to be outdoors with his children, the sky’s dwarfing hugeness making them seem closer than they were at home. Warren inched toward his wife, waiting for her to stiffen or roll over to face the other direction.

“Left or right?” Camille asked.

“What?”

“Which side is your zipper on? Mine’s left.”

Warren’s was right. They climbed out of their bags and zipped them together, taking care not to snag the material. There was some extra space at the foot of each bag where the zippers didn’t reach; the results looked like a pulled tooth. They climbed inside and wriggled down, sharing the warmth of their bodies. Camille’s hair smelled like wood smoke. The beer drinkers next to them had yet to return. Warren slipped his hand under Camille’s thermal underwear and felt the lovely shoal of her spine, overwhelmed with gratitude and relief, waiting for their children’s breathing to settle into sleep.

Hector lay in bed, shivering for no reason. Something was happening to him. He was freezing to death, despite being fully dressed in jeans and a sweater. He’d climbed into bed that way, stumbling in from the truck at two-thirty in the morning, feeling too drunk and lazy to feed Raoul. Now he was shaking so hard he thought he might puke. More than hungover: he was actually sick. His body felt weak and feverish, an achy junkyard of limbs.

He got up finally to check on Raoul, head throbbing, and padded over to the mesh cage in the corner. The branches where Raoul usually perched were empty. Hector crouched down to get a better look. Scattered all over the floor of the cage, like a toddler’s mess, were Cheerios and broken-up cookies and random bits of food from the kitchen. Hector closed his eyes for a second, thinking maybe he was seeing things, but when he opened them the mess looked worse than before. He found Raoul lying in the corner atop a snowy bed of Quaker Oats. He was gray as a seal, legs splayed out in front of him. His tail, furled at the very tip like a musical note, had unraveled halfway across the cage.

Hector picked him up gingerly with two hands and lifted him out. He was cold and stiff and toylike. Hector went into the living room, where his grandmother was watching two women in fur coats scream at each other on TV. She seemed amused by their fury.

“You killed him,” he said, showing her Raoul.

“ Sí? ” she said, smiling.

“ Lo mataste! Está muerto! What were you doing, trying to feed him?”

She grabbed at the dead chameleon as if it were a gift. Hector pulled his hands away, and his grandmother searched the room.

“Almost dead,” Hector said mockingly, in English. “Why don’t you die for real?”

He went into the kitchen and found a shoe box under the sink and laid Raoul inside of it, curling his tail gently so it wouldn’t break, too sick at heart to feel ashamed. He sat down at the table, cradling the shoe box in his lap. Beneath his venomous sadness for Raoul, simmering with his fever, was a self-pitying desire that Lyle could see what she’d turned him into. He still couldn’t quite believe she was in on her father’s scam. Honestly, I wouldn’t live ten miles from this place unless you like the smell of shit. That was what one of the construction workers had said, after telling him what they were digging in the middle of the desert. It had not occurred to Hector that Lyle knew about her father’s treachery, but then he’d seen her at the beach and she hadn’t even waved. She’d stared down at the sand, too guilty to face him.