A. Homes - Things You Should Know

“He can’t have gotten far,” Soledad says.

She has never told anyone, not even herself, but there are times lately when she just wishes it was over. As there is less and less of him, it becomes more painful, and she wishes it would end before he is no longer a man, but a thing, like a potted plant. She imagines making it happen, hastening the process, putting him out of her misery — she can’t go on like this forever.

The cell phone rings. It’s a conference call from the agents.

“Mike and Jeff are at the circle by the Beverly Hills Hotel. They believe they see Francine. She’s out there in the middle of the circle directing traffic and apparently doing a pretty good job of it. They’re waving at him — I mean her — and she’s waving back. They’re parking now and walking over. Yes, we have Francine. Francine has been found.”

She is back at the house when the white van pulls through the gate.

He gets out, wearing an orange reflective safety vest.

“Where’d he get that?”

“We don’t know.”

She puts her hand in his pockets; there’s money — singles and a five.

“Did someone take you away? Did someone give you a ride?”

“I got tips,” he says.

The Bel Air police pull up with Philip in the back of the car. “Sorry to bother you,” one of the cops says.

The agents grab the President, like a mannequin, and protectively pull him behind the van for cover.

“Do you know this man?” the cop asks.

“Has he done something wrong?” she asks.

“He was out, walking and singing, and he has a glossy photo of your husband and, well, we thought he looked a little like John Hinckley.”

“He’s our trainer,” she says.

“That’s what he said. And you’re sure about that?”

“Quite.”

“All right then, I’m sorry.” The cop gets out, lets Philip out of the back of the car, and unlocks the handcuffs. “You can never be too careful.”

“Of course you can’t. Thank you.”

“How did he get all the way to Beverly Hills?” Philip asks, when he finds out where they found him.

“I don’t think he walked,” she says.

She is livid. She wants to take him and shake him and tell him that if he ever does that again she’s sending him away, putting him in a home under lock and key.

Instead she goes inside, picks up the phone, and calls Washington. “Head of the Secret Service, please, this is Nancy Reagan on the line.”

“Can I have him return?” his secretary says.

“No.”

“One moment, please.”

The head of the service comes on the line. She reads him the riot act, starting calmly and working her way up. “I don’t know what kind of agency you’re running…” By the time she’s finished she is screaming and the man on the other end is blithering. “How many men have you got there? We’ll do a full investigation. I’ll replace the whole crew. I don’t know what to say. Maybe they weren’t thinking. Maybe they’re burned out.”

“Burned out…You’re supposed to be the best in the world and the man wandered away from his own home.” She slams the phone down.

Philip helps him take a shower and change into clean clothing — jeans and a cowboy shirt. Philip has a cowboy hat for him, a toy guitar, and a piece of rope. They are in the backyard doing rope tricks.

“I’ve upset Mother,” he says.

“It’s all right, Chief, you gave us all quite a scare.”

She is brittle, flash-frozen. And she has a backache. She takes a couple of aspirin and tries to catch her breath.

Later, he is in the bedroom, sitting on the floor playing with his toy guitar.

She goes to the padlock, starts spinning the numbers, one to the right, two to the left. She takes a sharp breath, makes an odd sound, turns around, gives him a surprised look — and falls face down on the floor. The sound is like a plank of light wood; there’s a distinct snap — her nose breaking, her beak bending to the side.

“The hummingbird is down, the hummingbird is down.” The call goes out when Philip finds her.

He rolls her over and attempts CPR. “Someone dial 911—dial 911,” he shouts.

“That man is kissing Mother,” he says, strumming his guitar.

Philip’s breath, his compressions are useless. The paramedics arrive and try to jump-start her. Her body bounces off the floor, ribs snap. They are about to call for backup when Soledad steps forward, living will in hand, and tells them to stop. “No heroic measures,” she says. “It’s enough.”

Soledad calls Dr. Sibley, who arranges for someone to meet them at Saint Johns, and they slide her into a garment bag, and discreetly tuck her into the back of Jorge’s gardening truck under a pile of grass clippings. The ambulance stays out front while she is taken out the back. Jorge’s Ever Green Gardening Service pulls away just as the news trucks pull up, raising their satellite dishes into the sky.

And he still sits on the bedroom floor strumming the guitar and singing an old cowboy song—“Yippee-ti-yi-yay, get along little dogies, you know that Wyoming will be your new home.”

Collections of stories build over time. With this in mind, I have many people to thank for their support and inspiration.

Andrea Barrett, Bill Buford, Joel Connaroe, Gregory Crewdson, Larry Dark, Lisa Dennison, Anthony d’Offay, Dave Eggers, Marc H. Glick, Jeanne Greenberg, Sophie Harrison, Amy Hempel, Erika Ineson, Ian Jack, Alane Mason, Brad Morrow, Alice Quinn, Marie V. Sanford, Laurie Simmons, Betsy Sussler, Deborah Triesman, Rob Weisbach, and Rachel Whiteread.

At HarperCollins: Jane Friedman, Susan Weinberg, Dan Menaker, Deirdre Faughey, and Alison Callahan. My agents: Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfant, and Sonesh Chainani. Andre Balazs, Philip Pavel, and everyone at the Chateau Marmont, Michael and Nina Sundel, Elaina Richardson, and the staff at Yaddo. The Writing Program at Columbia University. The Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. And always my family.

A. M. HOMES is the author of the novels Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, Jack, and a collection of stories, The Safety of Objects . Among her many awards are Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships. Homes is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and has published fiction and essays in The New Yorker, Granta, McSweeney’s, Art Forum , and the New York Times . She lives in New York City.

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“Here Homes approaches the art of the great absurdists. Strangeness becomes a revealing back entrance into the human condition of our day.”

— RICHARD EDER , New York Times Book Review

“A lavishly imaginative story collection…with high drama and killer comic dialogue…. Twelve years after the release of The Safety of Objects, Homes’ return to short fiction is a gift.”

— Entertainment Weekly

“Perversely hilarious yet also poignant, this collection finds Homes at her creepiest, but most chilling is how much one begins to identify with her characters’ sense of alienation.”

— Vogue

“As in her previous books ( Music for Torching, The Safety of Objects ), Homes is interested in the ways families fail and the ways our expectations of some of life’s most ineluctable aspects — family, home — doom us to feelings of incompleteness.”

— JENNIE YABROFF, San Francisco Chronicle

“In several of the stories, Homes creates characters whose conflicts are believable and affecting, whose progress toward limited resolution engages our attention, whose emotions intensify as the story progresses, and who do not live in airless self-absorption but have some connection to the world…. These tales are realistic and psychologically astute.”