Model Home by Eric Puchner

Author:Eric Puchner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

PART II

Summer 1986

CHAPTER 25

Lyle rolled down the window of the Renault, the desert air scorching her face. Her T-shirt stuck to her chest. Why the fuck hadn’t she gotten the air-conditioning fixed? She’d replaced the muffler with her own money but had decided to skimp on the extras, forgetting that they lived in the Mojave desert. With coyotes and jackrabbits. Animals that dashed into the highway, hoping to be put out of their misery. Feeling faint, Lyle glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a hungry-looking vulture seesawing behind her, its red head hanging down like a trigger.

She hadn’t been home in a month. It was a major topic of conversation, how little she visited. Last fall, when her parents had agreed to let her live with Bethany so she wouldn’t have to commute four hours a day, they’d made it clear that they expected her to drive home every weekend. It hadn’t occurred to Lyle that she wouldn’t. At that point, Dustin was still wearing his pressure mask around and couldn’t take a bath without someone’s help. She’d actually wanted to come home. Bethany was her best friend, her parents very nice and generous, but she was also a person who equated combing the tangles from her hair with suffering. All she talked about was France and how much she missed the tarte tatin. The tarte tatin would make you cream your pants. If she wasn’t talking about tarte tatin, she was cooing into the phone to her French boyfriend with the Dickensian teeth. It was a relief for Lyle to go home and face the gravity of her life, the irrefutable suffering of a crippled brother.

By spring, though, Lyle had stopped making the drive every weekend. There was the column she was writing for the newspaper—“Severely Yours”—which took up a lot of time. There was all the work for her AP classes, and then studying for her achievement tests, and then of course finals, not to mention that she was working twenty hours a week at The Perfect Scoop. Did her parents think being manager was a walk in the park?

Now she’d quit her job and was returning home for summer vacation, the back of the Renault crammed with her things. “Vacation” implied some kind of holiday, but the thought of spending three months in the middle of the Mojave with her family alarmed Lyle deeply. As she exited the freeway, turning up the dirt road to Auburn Fields, the air began to take on the smell of rotten eggs and stewed cabbage, the putrid stench of home. It was like an enormous fart that never went away. She rolled up the window. To the left of her, dug into the earth and protected by a very tall fence, like a humongous footprint filled with rain, shone the dump. Its azure pool shimmered in the sun. A “sludge pond,” they called it; what toxic things it retained, and why it was such a gorgeous, heartbreaking blue, Lyle could only imagine.

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