Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Those aren’t all Dustin’s, are they?”

“I drank some, too,” Hector said unconvincingly.

A slither of fear moved up Camille’s back. The idea of his sleeping in her son’s room made her oddly jealous. That this stranger had had sex with her daughter and now insinuated himself into Dustin’s life seemed somehow outrageous. “If you’re buying my son beer,” she said angrily, “then I could have you arrested.”

He looked mortified. “It was there already. In the fridge.”

Hector stepped around Mr. Leonard’s snoring body to dump the crushed cans in the trash. Camille felt bad for accusing him. Perhaps Warren was right to buy Dustin beer: anything to feel less helpless.

Timidly, Hector took a bag of cookies out of the cupboard. The bag was labeled HIGH PROTEIN MONKEY BISCUITS. “They’re for lab monkeys,” he explained.

“Oh.”

“Ginger loves them.”

“Ginger?”

“My pet sugar glider.”

Camille, who’d been imagining a homeless girl with terrible breath, was too relieved to care what this was.

“She’s asleep in Dustin’s sock drawer.”

“Wouldn’t it be better off sleeping at home?” Camille asked.

“My mom won’t let me leave any pets there unattended. I was keeping some Madagascar hissing roaches, you know, in a little terrarium, but I left the top off by accident one night and they escaped. Now they’ve bred and they’re all over the house.”

“Oh my God,” Camille said.

“Luckily they only hiss when they’re mad.”

“Mad?”

He nodded. “Or frightened.”

“Are they as big as regular cockroaches?”

“Bigger,” Hector said. “More like mice.”

Camille laughed. Once she got started, she couldn’t stop. She bent over her bowl of oatmeal, eyes blurring with tears. Her nose was running, and she was having trouble catching her breath.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Ziller?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you like some water?”

She nodded. Hector filled a glass in the sink and handed it to her.

“How’s Dustin?” she asked.

“Asleep.”

“No. I mean generally. Is he… okay?”

Hector looked at the floor. “He told me about a dream he had, on Monday night. He was lost somewhere and wandering around. He kept walking into different houses and trying to turn on their TVs, but couldn’t find the on button. Finally one of the TVs woke up — an alien, I guess maybe — and said, ‘This world is not your home.’”

“I’m going to be late for work,” Camille said, glancing at the clock. She pulled the pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, unreasonably dejected to find it empty. “Damn it. I thought I had one left.”

“Hold on,” Hector said.

He went outside to his car and returned with a plastic grocery bag. He reached in and handed her a pack of Camel Lights, her favorite brand.

“I can’t take your cigarettes,” Camille said.

“I don’t smoke,” he said without smiling. “I bought some things for the house yesterday.”

It took her a minute to realize he was talking about this house. He’d bought the cigarettes for her. There was something very strange about it — possibly even creepy. She did not want this twenty-year-old Dr. Dolittle sleeping in her house and buying her cigarettes. But what could she do? He was Dustin’s only friend, the one person who didn’t seem to find visiting a burden. Also, pursuing the matter would mean having to give back the cigarettes.

Camille got her things together for work, treading lightly so as not to wake up her family. Lyle. A husband she didn’t speak to. Her tragically wounded son. She peered inside Jonas’s room on her way to the garage, shocked to see him sleeping in bed with his clothes on. He hadn’t even bothered to take off his shoes. Camille’s throat swelled with guilt: for never being home, for stranding him out here in the desert, for being so stung by Lyle’s hatred those months before the accident she’d all but forgotten he existed. Then there was the slight suspicion she had sometimes — more a tinge of uncertainty, something she worried like a tooth — that he’d burned down the house on purpose. To be noticed. An actual flare, impossible to ignore. Thinking such a thing — and the fact that she could barely look at him sometimes, her own son — made Camille sick to her stomach.

She entered Jonas’s room and gently tugged off his shoes. His face, tan as a gypsy’s, seemed inconceivably young. Camille went to the garage and lit a cigarette before backing the Volvo down the driveway. The glare of the sun made her squint. She shifted into drive and headed away from the house, filled with a mortifying sense of relief.

Warren’s heart sank as soon as he saw it. He’d tried selling knives in condos, apartments, even the army barracks in Lancaster — but never a trailer park. He pulled off the freeway and passed under the Mahogany Views sign, creeping past the ferocious, airborne barks of a rottweiler chained to someone’s pickup. The name’s similarity to Auburn Fields did not escape him. In better spirits, Warren might have savored the irony. The Librojos, the Szelaps, the Medinas — all of his appointments had come to nothing. Not so much as a nibble. This was his last chance, do or die, and so far it didn’t look good.

Warren stopped the Oldsmobile in front of lot 27 and stared at the curtained windows of the trailer. A row of giant sunflowers, bowing under the heat so you couldn’t see their petals, had been planted out front. He did not want to pester these people or enter their tidy, curtained lives. But the idea of returning to the house — where Dustin lay simmering with hatred, where the closed door of the office reminded Warren he no longer slept with his wife — appealed to him even less.

Glumly, he gathered his courage and knocked on the screen door of the trailer, mentally rehearsing his pitch. A woman cracked the door enough to peek out. Her face scowled through the crack, about as welcoming as a gun. Warren asked if Mr. Ingram was in.

“Taking a nap,” she said.

“We’re supposed to have an appointment.”

“What kind of appointment?”

“I have some knives for him to look at.”

“Christ. Last week it was Norman Rockwell plates. Limited edition. He ordered twenty boxes on the phone.” Warren’s face must have betrayed something, because the woman looked at him carefully, opening the door a bit wider. She was wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt that said VIVA LAS VEGAS. “Was it a long drive?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“You look thirsty.”

“I am a bit, um, parched.”

“Would you like some water?”

Warren nodded, following her into the kitchen. The Mr. Coffee had a measuring cup underneath it instead of a pot. The woman filled a glass from the sink and handed it to him, apologizing that the ice maker was broken. Her eyebrows were as thick as caterpillars, so at odds with the daintiness of her face that they seemed like the remnants of a disguise.

“Melody,” she said, introducing herself. “La la la.”

The woman watched him drink, as if she were waiting for him to leave. She was wearing something around her neck: a shard of broken pottery, white as bone. Warren looked closer and saw that it had the texture of bone as well, grainy and rugged. To avoid staring, he looked at a photo on the refrigerator, a shot of Jesus with His right hand poised in the sign of the cross. Someone had signed “Jesus Christ” at the bottom of the picture. Warren had seen all manner of Jesuses in the houses he’d entered, including a holographic one that ascended from the cross — but never a photograph.

“That’s my brother,” Melody explained.