Eric Puchner - Model Home

Dustin asked for another Budweiser. He decided to get drunk. Being drunk was almost as good as being asleep. For one thing, it helped out with the itching. Also, other people stopped hav ing much significance. They went from being agents of pain or pleasure to harmless Hollywood props. If you were at Taco Bell, for example, chauffeured there by your sister’s ex-boyfriend, you could bow to the couple in the next booth and say, Grateful to the hospitality of your rocking chair, ma’am, before sitting down. You could ask the cashier with a cold sore how he got an STD on his face.

“It’s pretty dark in here,” Dustin complained when Hector returned with a can of beer.

“Probably because you’re wearing sunglasses.”

“That’s why I wear them. You can pretend it’s night. Like you aren’t one of those losers who gets fucked up in the afternoon.”

Hector began to say something but then seemed to think better of it. He switched on the light — a flip of the finger, easy as pie — and the world exploded. A noise like a popped balloon. Something snowed on Dustin’s face.

“Shhhh,” Hector said. “It’s all right.” He grabbed the beer can from Dustin’s hand. “The lightbulb exploded. Luckily you were wearing sunglasses.”

“I wet my pants,” Dustin mumbled, stiff with terror.

“No, you didn’t. Just soaked yourself with beer.”

He began to pick the glass bits from Dustin’s face, one by one. His fingers were gentle as bugs. Dustin felt like a bomb being skillfully defused. In the middle of cleaning his face, as if remembering something, Hector reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out Ginger, who seemed to be trembling. He stroked her fur with his thumb until she’d calmed down and closed her eyes. How wonderful it would be to crawl up into his pocket and fall asleep.

Hector put the sugar glider to his ear. He let go and the animal clung there, like an earmuff. “Her only trick.”

Dustin laughed. Hector grinned stupidly, the furry creature stuck to his ear, which made Dustin break up even harder. It was perilous laughter, shards of glass trickling from his Jobst shirt.

“You’re my only friend,” he said.

Hector stopped grinning and tucked Ginger back to bed in his pocket, his face as miserable as can be.

Camille sat on the back deck, smoking a cigarette while the sun peeked over the desert. It was her favorite time of day, a moment’s peace before she joined the endless caravan of traffic, before the smell of the dump had ripened in the heat. Below her, Mr. Leonard snooped around the dirt. The poor dog could barely walk. He could no longer climb the stairs to the deck; Camille had to carry him herself, his ribs pressing against her fingers like the springs of a mattress. Sometimes she felt closer to him than her own children. It was hard to explain, except that he preferred her arms and didn’t want to be set down.

Now the old dog stopped at a creosote bush and stood there shivering, as though in pain. Camille realized that he couldn’t lift his leg. Barefoot, she climbed off the porch and walked to his side, her toes turning brown as the desert. She knelt down in the dirt and lifted Mr. Leonard’s leg as tenderly as she could. He wagged his tail, slow as a hymn. He’d long since given up marking his territory: the pee came out all at once, less of a hiss than a dribble. Camille held his leg while he finished, strangely moved. When he was done, she lowered his leg and watched him scratch confusedly at the dirt.

She wondered if they should put him to sleep. If possible, she would discuss the situation with Warren. They hadn’t exchanged more than two sentences all week. At least when she’d suspected him of having an affair, there’d been something she could point to, a definable source. Now there was no beginning or end: Dustin’s accident had robbed them of whys. Warren had turned old and strange and aimless, skittering around the house like a leaf. Dev astation. The word sounded like a place. A station for dried-up things. Camille imagined a deserted depot, rickety with breezes, the man she’d married abandoned there like a husk.

She was so angry sometimes she couldn’t bear to look at him. He’d uprooted them all to pursue his idiotic dream and now here they were, in the middle of nowhere, prisoners of his folly. If it wasn’t for him, they’d still be on the lake in Nashotah, worrying about acorns clogging the rain gutter. Dustin would still be a beautiful, music-crazed boy, sneaking girls down to the boathouse. How many times had she fantasized about quitting her job and returning to Wisconsin with the kids, leaving Warren out here to fend for himself? But of course she couldn’t: they needed her insurance, needed to keep Dustin here for his surgeries.

Now she wondered if she could leave Warren for real. So much time had passed, nearly a year since the accident, that the idea had begun to seem possible. Wisconsin wasn’t an option, but she could find an apartment somewhere near her office — Torrance, maybe, or San Pedro. Scrape by on her meager salary. She would of course take Jonas with her; Lyle could decide for herself. What terrified her more than anything was Dustin. No matter how miserable he was, Camille knew that he’d never consent to leave with her: it was too safe an island, this house in the desert. A refuge from the world. If Camille moved out, he would see it only as betrayal.

She did not know if she had the courage to do this, to leave behind her disfigured, frightened, TV-addicted son.

Inside, Camille washed her hands for a long time, letting the hot water scorch her fingers. Her feet were filthy, and she washed these awkwardly in the sink as well, using the little sprayer that had started working again for no reason. She remembered when Dustin was in the hospital, still drifting in and out of shock, the way the nurse had washed his feet with a spray bottle to keep them clean. Because she couldn’t hold his hand, Camille would sit at the end of his bed and clutch his bare foot instead. Sometimes Warren or Lyle or even Jonas would hold the other foot as well, trying to soothe him in his panic, explaining where he was or why he was in pain. In some ways, that first endless month in the hospital, they’d never felt more like a family. They’d slept with their heads in each other’s laps. They’d huddled together, choked with tears. They’d made a list of Dustin’s favorite restaurants and driven miles across town for meals he wouldn’t touch. They’d combed a record store at Old Towne Mall for the posters Dustin used to have at home, curating the walls around his bed. Exhausted, giddy with grief, the stench of charred flesh and silver nitrate steamed into their clothes, they’d even had bouts of laughter, hysterical, table-pounding fits, making scenes at Denny’s or Pizza Hut while Lyle did impressions of the nursing staff. What had happened? How had they unraveled again, worse than before? The mystery of life was not how it started, Camille thought. It was how people with every excuse to be close could grow distant as satellites.

Heating some oatmeal in the microwave, Camille turned on the portable TV over the sink and watched a commercial about a boy shaped like a cigarette. “Don’t be a butthead,” a man’s voice intoned at the end. The commercial had the unintended effect of making her crave another smoke. She was pulling the pack out of her pocket when some footsteps behind her made her jump. Hector Granillo. He was cradling something in his shirt: a heap of beer cans, crushed into hockey pucks.

“You startled me,” Camille said. She checked the clock: six-thirty in the morning. “You spent the night with Dustin?”

“On his floor. I’m just cleaning up a bit.”