Eric Puchner: Model Home

Dustin didn’t laugh. Still, the fact that Warren could make a crack like this at all — without incurring his wrath — seemed like progress. To be honest, he was surprised that Dustin had wanted to live with him instead of his mother. He’ll sit around watching movies all day, Camille had warned. If Warren were a better man, perhaps, he would have insisted Dustin move out and face the world, but he was too grateful to make him leave.

Dustin slipped a different tape into the VCR, another French film with the same riveting, boxer-faced actor who had blown himself up. The owner had put Dustin in charge of stocking the foreign film section, and he was doing his best to fill it with movies no one would rent. For the first time, it occurred to Warren that his son liked working in a video store. The place was cool and peaceful, the buzz of a trapped fly mixing with the melodious breeze of French from the TV. What was wrong with watching movies all day? As a man you were so conditioned to believe that ambition was important, that without it you were lost — but what did it matter in the end? Certainly there was little evidence that it made you happy.

“This reminds me a bit of your mom’s videos,” Warren said. “The same sort of non sequiturs.”

“He smokes about as much as Mom did, too.”

Warren nodded, pretending to watch the movie. “What do you want for dinner tonight? I was thinking of making veal parmigiana.”

“I might go out with Osman,” Dustin said. “There’s a movie he wants to see. I haven’t decided.”

“Who’s Osmond?”

“ Osman. He works the weekend shift with me.”

“I’ll make dinner anyway,” Warren said, trying to hide his disappointment. “You can eat it tomorrow, if you decide to go out.”

At home, Warren stripped off his coat and tie and filled the bathtub with steaming water. He’d never taken baths when Camille lived here, not wanting to hog the bathroom. Now that she’d left, he had the freedom to do other things as well. He could leave his shoes in the bathroom overnight. He could play the stereo as loud as Dustin’s. He could call tank tops “wife beaters” without being scolded. He could leave the newspaper any way he wanted, sections folded this way and that, not having to reassemble each one primly like a gift. Generally, though, these freedoms paled in comparison to what he’d lost. The loneliness mired everything, like a swamp. It was huge and unnavigable. Sometimes he missed Camille so much he felt like he couldn’t walk. Though they hadn’t shared a bed in months, he’d gravitated back to his old side of the mattress, perched at the edge as if making room for her restless limbs, the only way he could sleep.

He tried not to think about Dustin moving out. He knew the boy would eventually find his own place, perhaps even make a life for himself. The idea of living in an empty house, waiting for the bank to kick him out, filled Warren with dread.

He got out of the bath and changed into sweats. On his way to the kitchen, he heard a car outside the house, pulling up to the curb. Warren’s heart leapt. He rushed to the window but it was only the mailman, brown and sun-wizened, his pith helmet slipping forward as he leaned out of the truck. Surprisingly, the man failed to flip off the house or even glower in its direction. He seemed to have accepted his mail route at last, resigned to a fate he couldn’t control.

Warren went out to get the mail after he’d gone, the evening sun on his shoulders gentle as a hand. The smell of the dump still had the power to turn his stomach, though there was something consoling, too, about its unwavering stink, a feeling he’d come to associate with home. Curled inside the mailbox, sandwiched between the phone bill and a Sharper Image catalog, was an eleven-by-fourteen envelope. Warren opened the envelope and pulled out a glossy photograph of Jesus Christ in a hooded robe, clutching a shepherd’s staff and staring majestically into the distance, presumably at His flock. It took Warren a second to recognize the face. At the bottom, just above Christ’s bold and splashy signature, were the words Keep on keepin’ on. Warren laughed. He started to throw the picture in the trash can, but some unnegotiable force caused him to hold on to it.

Back inside, he began to get dinner on, pulling The Joy of Cooking down from the shelf and flipping to the recipe for veal parmigiana. It was Dustin’s favorite dish; he’d loved it since he was a little boy, four or five, ordering veal pajama at restaurants because he couldn’t pronounce the name. Warren took the cutlets from the fridge and began to pound them thin as pancakes. He didn’t know when he’d begun to like cooking; it had happened after Camille left, a way to fill the hour before dark. It wasn’t the cooking itself he liked so much as the idea that Dustin would eat it. Up until now, everything Warren had done for his son — buying him beer, breaking into the Shackneys’ house, even saving his life on the lawn — had failed to make Dustin happy. In his own peculiar way, Warren had devoted his life to helping him. But perhaps he’d needed something else, a devotion strong enough to refuse him.

Warren would do what he could to let Dustin live. Surely, though, it was still his duty — a father’s one true job — to feed him.

He mixed up some bread crumbs and Parmesan and then began the sauce, chopping an onion on the counter. He’d become so expert at the task that it annoyed him when his eyes burned. He opened the window. The air was turning cold and breezy, hoarse with insects, the desert beginning to take on the otherworldly glow that happened before dusk. The Joshua trees, dwarfed by their own shadows, moved him strangely. Lately, the smallest things had the power to crush or elate him. Except for the freeway in the distance, there was no one for miles. Warren had the shivery, unsettling feeling that he was the last person on earth. Millions of years ago, this was the bottom of the sea, a place of gigantic sharks and four-legged fish.

He set the table for dinner, inspecting the knives for stray bits of food. The clock over the sink said 6:43. Dustin would be home in a few minutes or not at all.

The tomato sauce simmered on the stove, fogging Warren’s glasses when he bent down to stir it. He set the timer for ten minutes and then sat down to wait. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, people liked to say. In truth there was not much time, a blip, and most of what you did was a mistake. You were lucky to find a safe and proper home. In the end, even the world cast you out, withdrawing its welcome.

The kitchen darkened slowly, dimming imperceptibly as a cave. Warren remembered being sick as a boy, too flu-ridden to go to school, how he used to lie in bed as the windows grew dark and wait for his mother to get home from her interminable shift at the gas station, the walls of his room disappearing bit by bit before his eyes. The boredom would merge with his sickness until he couldn’t tell them apart. How desperate he’d felt! He could have switched on the light but out of some childish perversity refused to get out of bed. Lying there in the dark, damp with sweat, Warren would imagine his mother’s face with the studious precision of a dream, perfecting every last detail in his mind, from the tiny pores in her nose to the mysterious, slept-on crease of her earlobe. Only a perfect likeness would bring her to his door. And somehow it worked: she would show up after what seemed like years and flip on the lights of his room and touch his forehead with a rough, slender, gas-smelling hand, which wouldn’t shame him in the privacy of their own home but feel like all he’d been waiting for, the purest of joys. It startled Warren now to think of it. Was that really all there was to love? Darkness undone, a hand on your forehead. In the meantime all you could do was wait — tired, alone, the minutes as long or short as a lifetime — for the face in your dream to appear.