Eric Puchner - Model Home

Warren almost laughed. Using Kenny’s back, he signed the petition and wrote his address in. The man in the La-Z-Boy was still fiddling with his Rubik’s Cube, wearing an enormous sombrero to protect himself from the sun. Warren wanted to ask Kenny how his father had come to feel at home in such a place.

“What happened to the neighbor’s pig?” he said instead. He pointed at the empty pen, raked clean as a baseball diamond.

“Bacon.”

“What?”

Kenny dragged his finger across his throat. “You can smell it in the morning.”

Lyle sat in the backseat of Taz’s car with Hector, who looked as miserable as you could look while eating a bag of Funyuns. In Hector’s case, this was profoundly miserable. He hadn’t said a word since they’d left the house. He’d insisted on coming along and helping them look for Jonas — there was no convincing him otherwise.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Lyle asked Dustin.

“Why not?”

“I guess because you still flinch when I unwrap a hamburger.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Taz said from the driver’s seat. She was wearing a Dead Kennedys T-shirt, which seemed — given that she was driving a BMW — a contradiction at best. Lyle wanted to say, He’s my brother, what the fuck do you know about him? But she didn’t. For one thing, they needed Taz’s car to get inside Herradura Estates. For another, she might have been right: Lyle hadn’t been out to eat with him since the beginning of the summer.

“It’s the only place we haven’t checked,” Dustin said. “For all we know, he might be camping in the backyard.”

They were going to their old house in search of Jonas. Or rather, the place where their house used to be. The idea — Dustin’s — was that Jonas might have gravitated there instinctively, like a sea turtle. It seemed like a desperate hope. Frankly, Lyle had not wanted to come at all, but her mom and dad were at the police station again and she hadn’t wanted to stay home alone. The idea of waiting around helplessly for Jonas to show up made her sick with dread.

Taz put her hand on Dustin’s leg, resting it there while she drove. When she’d met them at a pay phone down the road, pulling up in her car with little windshield wipers on the headlights, Dustin’s face had actually brightened. Something had happened between them, a shift. Lyle did not want to begrudge her brother his little bit of daylight — you couldn’t call it happiness — but she didn’t like Taz’s face when they were together. There was a touch of pride in it, as if she were showing off a tattoo. She was younger than Lyle, a spoiled little girl, which made it all the more irritating. Before summer started, Lyle used to see her hanging out sometimes at school, talking to her new tenth-grade friends — girls in lip gloss and stirrup pants — but Lyle had never approached to say hi. Anyway, what would she have said? I heard my older brother was fucking you.

At the gate, Taz stopped at the guardhouse and waved at Bud, who’d lost the “male pattern” from his baldness and was now more or less without hair. He peered into the car and seemed to recognize Hector, his face going slack with amazement. Lyle was amazed as well — less that she’d lost her virginity in this glorified closet and more by the fact that the deflowerer was sitting beside her, holding a half-eaten U of Funyun, a flying rodent asleep in his pocket. They had held each other while the trees outside swooned in the wind. The fact that you could know someone almost intimately and then a year later not know him at all seemed to be at the heart of everything sad and fucked-up in the world. Bud opened the gate and let them pass.

“They replaced the clock,” she whispered to Hector. She felt strangely desperate.

“What?”

“The clock,” she said. “The one that fell on the floor.”

Hector seemed to have no idea what she was talking about. Since Jonas had disappeared he’d been at the house every day, arriving unannounced, a look of irritating exhaustion on his face. It was as though he’d lost his own brother. Even Dustin was beginning to dislike him. The more irritated Lyle or Dustin got, ignoring his stricken-looking silence, the more Hector insisted on helping them.

They drove along John’s Canyon Road, past old stables and flowering bougainvillea and trees cotton-candied by webworms, skirting the horse trail where Lyle’s mother used to honk people into the bushes. Nothing had changed. The lawns were green as golf courses and smelled of rain. Wands of water moved across them in lazy arcs, silent under the chk chk chk of sprinklers.

“I can’t believe we used to live here,” Lyle said.

“Why not?” Dustin said.

“I just mean, it smells so nice. Like spring.”

Dustin glanced at the backseat. “You used to call it Hairy Turd Estates.”

“Personally, I like it where you guys live,” Taz said. “It doesn’t feel like Never Never Land.”

Lyle waited for Dustin to pounce; if Lyle had said such a ridiculous thing, there would have been little mercy. Instead he took his sunglasses off and squeezed some drops into his eye. She remembered Cats vs. Dogs, the game they used to play when they were kids, choosing one thing or another to zap into extinction. Lyle wondered who Dustin would pick now, her or Taz. They drove by the Wongs’ and the Dunkirks’ and the Starchilds’, the houses as intimately remote to her as the faces in a dream.

“Remember at the Starchilds’ barbecue, when Mr. Leonard ate their Amazon parrot? It cost Mom and Dad seven hundred dollars.”

“He wouldn’t even eat his kibbles this morning,” Dustin said. “I think he’s dying.”

Lyle frowned. “He’s not dying. He’s just arthritic.”

“He hasn’t moved from his bed in two days.” Dustin put his sunglasses back on. “Ask Hector. He’s the animal expert.”

Hector glanced over uncomfortably, prepared to answer, but Lyle didn’t want to hear his opinion. They’d been through enough. Somehow, if Mr. Leonard was dying, it meant that Jonas might actually have disappeared. They turned onto High Street and then followed the snaking, tree-tunneled road until they reached their old driveway, where Taz parked at the curb like a chauffeur. Remarkably, their old mailbox was still there: THE ZILLER FAMILY, a cardinal sitting atop the words as if perched on a branch. They had not bothered — or perhaps not had the courage — to take it with them. Facing them from the other side of the driveway was a backhoe, its hood carpeted in red berries.

“Our home on High,” Lyle said.

Dustin didn’t respond. She got out of the car by herself and walked up the driveway to where she could see the construction. The remains of their old house were gone, replaced by a half-built frame. A mansion, flowering into a corolla of rooms. Birds flitted in the joists, chirping like crazy. Lyle wondered where the workers were until she remembered it was Sunday. The yard itself, where they’d played torturous, Dad-driven rounds of croquet and boccie and horseshoes — where Dustin had rolled across the grass, coiled in flames — was gone as well, turned into dirt.

When she was little, Lyle used to think that the frames of houses being built were models. You practiced with the model first and then put up the real thing. The idea that a pile of sticks could shelter anyone, could protect them from the dangers of the world, seemed preposterous.

She glanced behind her, but there was no one in sight. Lyle went back down the driveway to where the BMW was parked. Taz and Hector were standing by the open door of the passenger seat, peering inside at Dustin, who sat in the car without moving. His back was hunched like an old lady’s.