Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Can’t,” Lyle said, relieved not to have to lie. The idea of sitting in a dark movie theater with her mom, possibly enduring a sex scene, was more than she could handle. “I’ve got to go to the library and research volunteer opportunities.”

Her mother sighed. “Don’t you think you’ve got enough going on at home?”

“What am I going to write my college essay about? A day in the life of a desert tortoise? Mrs. Silverberg says I need some more extracurricular interests, to distinguish me from the pack.” Mrs. Silverberg was her college adviser.

“Tortoises might be interesting, actually.”

“Right. Just what Columbia’s looking for.”

Her mother stopped a shirt in midfold. It was uncanny: just say “Columbia” and she froze like a statue. “We still need to talk about this. I mean, have you even thought about how much a school like that costs?”

“Dad says I can get a scholarship. Or loans.”

“Loans! Your father isn’t living in the real world, if you haven’t noticed. He still thinks we’ll be able to move back to Palos Verdes.” Lyle’s mother frowned. Annoyingly, you couldn’t dismiss her opinion the way you used to be able to — not like when Lyle’s dad made all the money and she was merely embarrassing. She folded the sleeves she was still holding, crossing them like a dead person’s arms. “Anyway, didn’t Mrs. Silverberg say something about Columbia being a long shot?”

“I signed up for an SAT course. It starts next week.”

“I suppose your dad will take out a loan for that as well?”

Lyle scowled. “I’m a professional waitress,” she said. “I paid for it myself.”

She undid another button of her shirt, belligerently, before backing out of the room. Her mother wanted her to rot out here forever. In fact, it was her mom’s fault that Lyle had screwed up her SATs last spring. She’d insisted she come home for the weekend, for Jonas’s birthday, meaning that Lyle had to get up at 5:00 a.m. and drive an hour and a half to get to the testing center in time. She’d spent the four hours in a daze, filling in bubbles randomly when she ran out of time.

Lyle peeked into Dustin’s room, hoping to gripe about their mother, but he was watching The Searchers for the hundredth time. “That’ll be the day,” he said to the TV. Lyle couldn’t be sure he was reciting a line from the script and not having an actual conversation.

“Why’s Hector repairing our kitchen?” she said, interrupting him.

“Beats me.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird he’s over here all the time?”

Dustin looked at her for the first time, his droopy eye lingering on her shirt. She fumbled at the button she’d undone. “No weirder than your trying to seduce him all the time.”

“Jesus. I’m not trying to seduce him. Is that what he thinks?”

He shrugged and went back to his movie.

“Maybe he wishes,” Lyle said.

Dustin laughed. “He’s been over you for months.”

This was so obviously true that Lyle looked down at her feet. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m just saying it’s weird. He’s always bringing you things.”

“Somebody needs to open my beers,” he said.

“You talk like he’s your personal assistant.”

Dustin frowned, turning up the volume with his remote. “Can I go back to my movie? Or did you come in here for a reason?”

“Maybe I should just kill you and put you out of your misery,” she said.

It was too late to take back. Dustin’s face turned into a hideous smirk. Lyle left the room and went to gather her things for work. She should have known better than to try to talk to him; all they ever did was argue. A year ago, if someone had told her that her handsome older brother would be injured beyond belief, that he’d need to be cared for like an invalid, it would have seemed like a fantasy: a chance to recover what they’d had as kids. She would never have imagined that she’d be applying to a college in New York, more desperate than ever to get away, or that Hector would be the one taking care of him.

Just picturing Dustin in his bed, so bitter and self-pitying and remote, made her want to shake him. It was infuriating. Still, she hadn’t meant to say what she did.

Driving to work, Lyle tried not to let the monotonous brown vistas lull her into a coma. She distracted herself by touching the Columbia bumper sticker on the dashboard. She made an effort to touch it whenever she could, so that its Ivy League juju would enter her fingers and climb upward to her brain, transforming her into the perfect applicant. She liked to fantasize that she was the only one to get a sticker in the mail: so eager was Columbia to have her as a student, they’d slipped it into her application materials like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. Lyle had stuck it on the dashboard to remind herself — while she was driving through the barren, dream-sucking desert — that she wouldn’t be living out here forever.

At The Pumpkin Patch, Lyle’s boredom grew even worse. In retaliation, she sighed murderously and stared out the window while people ordered and gave the general impression that she’d rather be nailing tacks into her eyeballs. It occurred to her, not without shame, that she was behaving like Shannon Jarrell. Of course, Shannon Jarrell would never consent to work at The Pumpkin Patch. You had to actually do something, though it would have been hard to guess that from today’s shift. Lyle had only four tables, all of them female except for a group of old men accompanied by an oxygen tank. She wondered if there was any way to turn her job at a crappy chain restaurant into a college essay. She could call it “Serving Others: Finding Myself in The Pumpkin Patch .” Perhaps someone would come in off the street — a homeless person, say — and dispense some poignant, hard-won advice, teaching her the true meaning of nourishment.

She was hopeful when a girl in a wheelchair came in, pushed by her mother, though these hopes were dashed when she got a good look at the kid’s face. The girl wouldn’t be dispensing any advice. Her head sagged listlessly to one side, her hands curled in like tarantulas. Her mouth gaped open in a permanent yawn. Lyle had never thought of a mouth being “ajar” before, but that seemed like the right word to describe it. In general, she looked like she might be better off dead. With mounting dread, Lyle watched the hostess lead them to a table in her section and prop a menu resourcefully in the girl’s lap.

“You know, it’s not nice to stare,” the woman said when Lyle approached to take their order. She wore heavy mascara that made her eyes seem like they might flap away.

“I wasn’t staring.”

“Yes, you were. You’ve been watching us since we came in.” The woman unfolded her napkin and wiped some drool from the girl’s chin. “How do you think it feels to be stared at all the time?”

“You should ask my brother,” Lyle said softly.

The woman’s face changed. “Does he have CP?”

“He was burned last summer. He almost died.”

The girl in the wheelchair laughed, a wheezy, elaborate production. Why did Lyle care what this woman thought of her? Her daughter, too, made her feel ashamed. She tried to take their orders, but the woman seemed uninterested in letting her escape.

“You’re in high school?”

“College,” Lyle said, not sure why.

“Nearby?”

“Back East. I live in New York.”

“So you came back here to take care of your brother.” Lyle did not deny this. The woman put her hand on Lyle’s elbow. “You won’t regret it,” she said warmly. “He may not always see it, but the real gifts in life aren’t always visible.”

The woman smiled at her daughter, who strained her head in the woman’s direction for a few seconds before collapsing again like a marionette. It was a gesture of such onerous affection that Lyle felt dizzy.