Eric Puchner - Model Home

One of these days, perhaps, he wouldn’t get off the curb at all. He’d collapse out here in the desert. How long would it be before anyone found him?

He got up from the curb and walked through the sun to the Tremors’ house. A young woman in a headband answered the door, her red hair crimped like a rag doll’s. Warren asked her if her mother was home.

“I’m Mindy Tremor,” the woman said. “We talked on the phone. I was just on the Exercycle.”

Warren apologized and followed the woman into the kitchen, surprised to find a boy only a few years younger than Jonas sitting at the table. A girl was there, too, bony and beautiful, peeling some cellophane from a Fruit Roll-Up. She looked about fourteen. Warren felt impossibly old. Mindy Tremor drifted over to the corner of the room, where an Exercycle stood in perhaps symbolic proximity to the refrigerator.

“You don’t mind if I hop on while you talk? I was just finishing my miles.”

Warren had done whole demonstrations to people who were drunk, senile, terminally ill; he could make his pitch to someone on a bicycle. He opened his case on the table and began humbly, inquiringly, as if he were skeptical himself. Why does a knife go dull? Any guesses? He was careful to make eye contact, to treat the boy’s dim-witted answers with respect. Once he’d earned the family’s trust — he was a father himself, not some weirdo off the street — he turned to Mindy Tremor atop her Exercycle and preyed gently on her maternal fears, talking about the danger inherent in a dull blade, citing statistics he made up on the spot, asking how long it had been since she’d sharpened her favorite knife. When she objected to the idea of a metal spatula because it would scratch her nonstick pans, he pulled an article from his pocket — Xeroxed from The New England Journal of Medicine —which claimed that Teflon might cause Alzheimer’s. Mindy Tremor stopped pedaling to look at the article. Patiently, Warren moved on to the conve nient features unique to BladeCo, touching on the lifetime guarantee, the patented ergonomic handle, the notch on the top of the tomato knife that prevented juice from running down your arm. He asked the boy to get a tomato from the fridge and then sliced it speedily into disks, pretending that Jonas and Lyle and Camille were watching him. He was making a pitch to them as well, the family he’d lost. It was not the words themselves that mattered but the fact that he was making them. He was doing something for a change. In the end, if it was a good-enough pitch, his family might even buy what he had to offer. They would say, It’s not too late, you’ve actually learned something, your life hasn’t been entirely hapless and for naught .

“And I don’t know if you’re like me, sick of wimpy scissors that won’t cut anything but hair, but we’ve got a special offer right now if you order any BladeCo set and knife block. I’ll throw in these sixty-dollar Super Shears, guaranteed to be the sharpest on the planet. Would you have a penny on you, by any chance?”

Mindy Tremor got off her Exercycle and fished one from her purse. Brandishing it between two fingers, like a magician, Warren slipped the penny into the hinge of the scissors and then snipped it effortlessly in half. Mindy Tremor actually gasped. Her daughter smirked, but oddly he did not feel humiliated. He had not felt humiliated for some time. All the shame he’d felt over his failure — losing his money, letting down his family — seemed ridiculous to him now. Or not ridiculous: immaterial. It was as if it had happened to someone else.

“That’s what I mean when I say BladeCo products speak for themselves.”

“Hey, that’s pretty awesome,” the boy said.

“Not just awe some, ” Warren said, handing him a new penny from his pocket. “Awe- much. ”

Later, driving home, Warren passed the exit that led to Melody’s trailer park. The sign for Mahogany Views was still there, advertising annual ease only. A couple weeks ago, he’d stopped by on his way back from an appointment in Rosamond, not knowing what he would say if Melody was home. He hadn’t wanted to seem overly pitiful; nor, if it turned out that her husband had moved back in, did he want to cause trouble. He wasn’t sure if he’d be greeted with a kiss or a punch. In any case, the problem failed to present itself. The trailer park was gone. Vanished. Instead of rows of tidy, sun-bleached trailers, Warren was confronted with a bulldozer sending up a great pillar of dust, digging up some broken concrete and shoveling the giant slabs into a dump truck. They were breaking ground for a subdivision.

Warren sat there in his car for a long time, watching them work. He wanted to laugh at the developer’s hubris but did not feel at all confident that the project would fail. There were developments springing up all around them, from Palmdale to the 405, dotting the Mojave with miraculous three-story homes.

Except in the vicinity of the dump, of course. Cancer Corridor, they called it on the news. That was a wasteland, Warren’s own.

Today, instead of heading right home, he stopped by Mojave Video. He’d gotten into the habit of doing this; it was right off the freeway, and he enjoyed having Dustin pick out a video for him to watch at home. Now that they were the only ones there, he had nothing else to do at night.

“You look like a Mormon,” Dustin said, glancing at Warren’s name tag, which he’d forgotten to take off. As always, the inside of the store — its aisles of dusty tapes, TV flickering in the corner — made him comfortably depressed. A woman in fatigues opened the door, looked at the two of them, and then left, checking her watch as if she’d forgotten something. “See there? You’re driving away customers.”

“That was a coincidence,” Warren said.

Dustin began sorting through some videotapes by the register, logging their titles into a notebook. “Actually, she’s a pain in the ass. I don’t even know her name. Rents The Deer Hunter like three times a week, just so she can hang around and talk.”

“Maybe she’s attracted to you.”

Dustin looked away without saying anything. Even Warren had to admit this was unlikely. Last week, Warren had seen a mother — a woman with flabby, sunburned arms — whisper to her toddler before approaching the counter. Dustin had either given up caring or was too distracted to notice. Since he’d stopped seeing Taz, he’d been more out of it than usual. Warren felt bad for him, of course, but, selfishly, he couldn’t help thinking of it as a blessing, too: without Taz, he and Dustin had been spending more time together, sometimes even driving into town to grab lunch.

He started to ask for a recommendation but Dustin hushed him, turning his attention to the TV. On the screen, a man with a blue-painted face was wrapping himself in dynamite; he lit the fuse but then changed his mind at the last minute, saying, “Merde!” and trying to put the flame out with his hand. The dynamite exploded anyway. Unconcerned, the camera panned out to the ocean, the word FIN appearing divinely in the sky. It was so awful Warren had to laugh.

“What on earth was that?” he asked.

“Godard. The New Wave.”

“I thought you hated New Wave.”

“That’s music . Jesus.” Dustin turned around, fiddling with the VCR behind the register. “Two completely different things.”

Somehow they’d come full circle: Warren staring at his son’s back, facing the brunt of his disdain. At least they were talking, though. He asked Dustin if he could rent the New Wave movie.

“They talk to the camera and stuff. It’s weird. I don’t think you’ll like it.”

“I like weird,” Warren said. “Plus I’m into explosions.”