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“What's eating
him
?” Lyle asked.

“He left his loafers somewhere,” Camille said mysteriously, missing the joke. She picked up her knife and fork and began to saw ineptly at a cube of pork.

“Mom, you're still wearing your oven mitts.”

“Just once,” Warren said, “I'd like to have a normal dinner. One time in the history of this family. Is that too much to ask, just to sit down and talk about our day for once?” They were all
looking at him. Perhaps he was shouting. He lowered his voice. “I mean, something could happen to us.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know,” Warren mumbled.

Camille glared at him, close to tears again. “Yes. Why don't you tell us.”

“We could get crushed by an earthquake.”

“Our whole bodies?” Jonas asked. “Or just, like, our limbs?”

“If there's an earthquake, can we live in a hotel?” Lyle said.

Camille snorted. “Your father would like that.”

“How about a nuclear winter?” Jonas said excitedly. “We might freeze to death and get eaten by rats.”

“Dad, are you all right?” Lyle asked. “That's, like, your third glass of water.”

Warren dropped his fork. Mr. Leonard jerked upright, sitting on two legs like a gopher. “I just want to have
one normal conversation
!
Please!
” Warren's family stared at him, mouths stuffed with food. The clock in the kitchen caroled like a rose-breasted grosbeak. He turned to Lyle. “How was school today?”

“It's summer, Dad. Vacation.”

Dustin waved his hand near Warren's face. “Traditionally falling in the months between May and September?”

Warren knew it was summer. It was simply that the words “summer” and “vacation” had momentarily uncoupled in his brain. The stress was making him senile. He reached up to loosen his collar before remembering that he'd already unbuttoned his shirt. He'd vowed not to involve his family in Auburn Fields, it was the one promise to himself he hadn't broken, but he saw now that this was a luxury he couldn't afford and pulled out the wad of business cards he kept in his suit pocket.
AUBURN FIELDS
, they said, then below it:
LIVE WELL . . . FEEL INSPIRED
. He rolled off the rubber band and handed a stack of cards to each of his children.

“What are we supposed to do with these?” Dustin asked.

“Since it's
summer
and everything, I thought you might like to help me out. With work.”

“Help you out?”

“For instance, Lyle, if you see anyone at the ice cream parlor. You know, who looks old enough to retire.” Warren frowned. “Or Dustin. When you're at the beach.”

“You're building a retirement community?”

“No. I mean, it could be. Like Palm Springs, but for unrich people.”

His children studied the cards skeptically, as though this was further proof of his craziness. Perhaps it was. If he was crazy, he would no longer be responsible for his behavior.

After dinner, they all gathered on the rug in the living room for a screening of Camille's new movie, crowding onto the faint, coffin-shaped shadow where the couch used to be. Jonas was in the film, his first role, and for a moment—watching his children joke about agents and paparazzi—Warren almost forgot his troubles. Lyle brought out the popcorn and a moldering box of Milk Duds. It was a family tradition, to watch Camille's latest opus before it went out to schools across the county. Historically, the children were a receptive audience, hissing at the sight of a joint in
Drugs: Get Lost!
or cheering when Peggy, the criminally shy misfit in
Square Peg,
got a date. It was rowdy and affectionate, and made Camille happy. Now, crowded around the TV, the cozy nest of children reminded Warren of happier times. The days of warmth and furniture. Camille used to sit between his legs, feeding him popcorn over her head.

He reached out to touch Camille's hand on the floor, but she flinched and scooted away from him. He recalled, vaguely, that she'd had some trouble with the movie—something to do with the advisory committee, maybe—but to be honest he didn't remember what it was she'd told him. Nor had he remembered the title:
Earth to My Body: What's Happening?
Like all Camille's movies, it was a frantic pastiche of styles. There was a brief scene from
Rebel Without a Cause,
which cut to a still of Bugs Bunny dressed up in drag, which cut to an animated illustration of a young girl's breasts growing larger, shown in stages like a balloon. The voiceover proclaimed, “The areola enlarges and becomes darker.”

“Nice buds,” Lyle said.

“Hubba hubba,” Dustin said. He frowned. “I'm just joking.”

Eventually—after a caption titled “Where's the Stork?”—the narrator began to speak of bolder subjects, such as the man inserting his penis into the vagina. Jonas appeared on-screen with some other kids. Dustin and Lyle cheered and stamped their feet, throwing popcorn at the TV. The kids were all wearing same-colored shirts, standing in front of some goalposts. It seemed to
be some sort of soccer team. Could they really be named
The Sperm
? As the narrator intoned about “the long journey to fertilization,” the soccer players began to run toward the camera, perhaps responding to a goal kick. The camera pulled back and Warren could see a second team as well: a group of girls with
THE EGG
printed on the back of their T-shirts, clasping hands in a circle. It wasn't soccer at all. It was a coed game of rugby. The Sperm's offense battered the Egg, trying to get at the ball. Jonas fought his way inside the circle while some kids from a third team—the Electrical Signal—began to beat up on Jonas's teammates. One of the boys fell to the ground, clutching his shin. The sequence ended, mystically, with the winning team holding up a victory banner on which someone had stenciled the words
THE MIRACLE OF LIFE
.

The room was uncharacteristically silent. Jonas, the star of the sequence, seemed as nonplussed as everyone. Warren glanced at his wife, who seemed to be waiting for some kind of affirmation.

“Where did you learn to play rugby?” he asked.

“Rugby?”

“It was football, right, Mom?” Lyle said. “That's why they were in a huddle.”

Camille turned red. “Those were the egg!”

“I get it,” Dustin said. “Like they were trying to protect it from getting smashed.”

“
Trying
to,” Jonas said proudly. Dustin held up his hand, and they high-fived.

“You didn't smash anything,” Camille whispered.

“The football was the egg?” Warren suggested, trying to help out.

“It's metaphorical! Weren't you listening to the voiceover?”

“I was confused by the Cervical Mucus,” Lyle said.

“I like that he actually had mucus,” Dustin said. “Nasal, I mean.”

Camille stood up. Her face was strange and ugly, lips tucked in as though she were trying to whistle through her teeth. “It would have made perfect sense, but you were too busy fucking cheering.”

She stomped out of the room. Warren sat there, unable to speak. He looked at his kids: they were speechless as well, Lyle's hand clamped over her mouth as though she were the one who'd said a bad word.

Warren got up and followed his wife down the hall. He found her in the bedroom, standing by the window so he couldn't see her face. There was something erotic about her that he couldn't place. He looked closer and realized—to his astonishment—that she was smoking a cigarette. He'd only seen her smoke once before, on the day of their wedding. She'd disappeared in the middle of the reception and he'd found her outside near the Dumpster, dragging on a cigarette and watching a plane blink slowly across the sky, a look of inscrutable sadness on her face. Then, too, he'd been bitten with lust. He'd asked her what was wrong and she'd thrown her arms around him before he could see her face—overcome, she'd told him later, by the force of her love.

It seemed unlikely now that she was having similar thoughts. The windows were open and a breeze ruffled the curtains, sending bright ribbons of sunlight over the bed. Camille turned around. Her eyes were smeared with mascara, and for a moment he didn't recognize her, so distant were her thoughts from him.

“It's a good movie,” Warren said, as gently as he could. “Very original.”

“Please,” she said. “How dumb do you think I am?”

Later, unable to sleep, Warren lay in bed counting his heartbeats. Camille was curled into a cannonball on the left side of the bed; she'd inched to the edge of the mattress, as though she'd rather imperil herself than accidentally touch him in the middle of the night. Listening to his wife's breathing, as familiar to him as his own heart, Warren thought again of their wedding. He'd been so nervous getting ready that he'd forgotten to snip the price tag from his tie. Calmly, in front of everyone, Camille had reached down and bitten through the plastic fastener with her teeth. She hadn't wanted to spit on the floor of the church and had kept the plastic twig in her mouth, tucked under her lip, for the duration of the ceremony. Afterward, glowing with triumph, she'd pulled it out of her mouth like a salmon bone.

At one point, this had been an anecdote they'd shared at parties, acting it out to make people laugh.

Warren went into the kitchen for a glass of water and flipped on the lights. Mr. Leonard was sitting on his doggy mat, still as a statue, staring at the wall ahead of him. He looked like he might jump out of his skin. Warren said the dog's name, but his eyes
didn't blink. They began to frighten him. Could he be asleep? Treading softly, Warren walked over and put his hand on Mr. Leonard's head, which barely filled his palm. The poor mutt was trembling. Warren knelt in Mr. Leonard's bed and put his arms around him, trying to soothe the shaking from his bony ribs, holding him like a child.

“Don't look at me,” Lyle said, pulling up her jeans. “I hate my ass.”

“I think it's beautiful,” Hector said.

“It looks like a turnip.”

He shrugged. “Some vegetables are very attractive.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“I like the way you look.” He grew serious, the way she preferred him. “You're like . . . I don't know. An angel or something.”

They were in the guardhouse, listening to Hector's dopey, doom-smitten music. Lyle watched him straighten the name pin on his uniform, which had tipped up-and-down so that the little horseshoe insignia was spilling its luck. They'd had sex against the wall again: less frantic this time, but still briskly navigational. There was the sense of wanting to get home after a long day of hiking.
That was amazing,
Hector had said afterward, though she'd barely moved a muscle. It seemed to her there were some pretty low standards at work. It was like the Presidential Fitness Test she'd had to take in fifth grade: she hadn't done well, in fact had managed only a single pull-up, and they'd given her a certificate anyway. As for the craving itself, the one Hector's poem had aroused so torturously, they might as well have been doing actual pull-ups.

What she'd come to look forward to was this: the time afterward, when they sat together in the warm guardhouse and listened to the slow whoosh of the wind and watched the trees shiver in the floodlight. Sometimes they gave each other back rubs; Lyle would rub the soreness from his skinny shoulders, feeling the Braille
of pimples on his skin. The street was deserted at 3 a.m., and it seemed to her that they were the last ones on earth. The clock was still broken from before, stuck permanently at 3:37 a.m. She punched the stop button on the boom box.

“Hey,” he said. “That's a good song.”

“I like it,” she lied. “I just have a headache. From last night, I guess.”

“You're hungover?”

“Shannon Jarrell and I got drunk again. After work.”

He turned and looked at her. “Shannon? I thought you hated her.”

“She's not so bad.”

“This is the one who almost got you fired? Who's always staring at her legs?”

“We waited till closing this time. There wasn't anyone there.” Lyle sat down on the floor, pulling her
LIKE A STURGEON
T-shirt over her knees. “She's smarter than she seems. She's got this list of words she keeps to improve her vocabulary. If you look like her, everyone just assumes you're stupid.”

Hector smiled, his mouth pinned up at both corners. There was something about this smile that annoyed her. A smugness.
No matter how hard you try,
it seemed to say,
you'll always be rich.
He sat down beside her, the dank, walnuty smell of sex rising from his uniform.

“How come you haven't told your parents about us?” he asked casually.

“They'd shit a brick.”

“I'm only nineteen.”

“In California, that's statutory rape.”

Hector frowned. “It's just weird seeing your mom at the gate. Like she has no idea. Yesterday we were talking in Spanish, and she told me you were pregnant.”

“What?”

“
Embarazada.
I think she meant embarrassed.” He looked at the silent street outside. “You've been to my place twice.”

It was the first time Lyle suspected there was some hidden motive there, that he hadn't just invited her over for the hell of it. It was some kind of competition. She wondered if it was partly this that attracted her.

“Anyway,” he said, “I thought you didn't care what your parents thought.”

“I don't.”

“So what's the big deal?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“You could start by letting me see your house.” He laughed. “Or how about the garage? I hear it's really nice.”