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It was the first time she'd heard him be sarcastic. “All right,” she said quietly. “Let me tell them first.”

“When?”

“I don't know. Soon.”

She expected—
wanted
—him to pin her down further. Instead he seemed to trust her, which made her feel worse.

“Some clown was shot on our corner yesterday,” he said.

“Really?”

“A drive-by.”

“Jesus.” She put her arm around him, scooting closer. “Why do you say he's a clown?”

“That's what he was. An actual clown. Makeup and everything. He was on his way to a birthday party—this little girl that lives down the block.”

“Jesus. Who would shoot a clown?”

“Lots of people, I guess.” He shrugged. “The weird thing is, they still had the party. One of those big inflatable moonwalk things? You could see all the kids bouncing inside of it, screeching like crazy. It was shaped like a castle.”

He was a lousy poet, but there was something sad and perplexing about him that reminded Lyle of a poem written maybe by someone else. She looked at Hector's truck in the floodlight, the word
KAMELION
spelled out on the back. Suddenly, it seemed impossibly touching.

“My mom's freaking out,” he went on. “She wants to sell the house and move to the country.”

“Why doesn't she?”

“She's been talking about it, like, for years.
El campo, el campo.
She's convinced she can't afford it.”

“She can?” Lyle said.

“There's money in the bank. She's been saving up for it. It's why she won't put my grandmother in a nursing home. She wants
to make sure there's enough for a house, too. Meanwhile, Abuelita keeps sneaking out and getting glass in her feet.” He flexed one arm like a bodybuilder, tapping his elbow with the palm of his hand. “Mexican for ‘cheap.' It's what my dad used to do, whenever Mom bitched about money.”

Lyle didn't have problems like this. Her problems were all related to wishing people dead, not worrying about getting killed herself. She had an idea, suddenly, that she would help Hector's family. It wasn't a thought-out plan but a hazy impulse to actually
do
something randomly kind rather than just drive around with a stupid bumper sticker on your car. She reached into her jeans and took out the business card her dad had given her, which was still tucked into her front pocket. “My father has these houses. You know, that he built. He told me he's selling them really cheaply.” She handed Hector the card. “Here. You could give him a call if you want. At his office.”

Hector laughed. “What? Houses around here?”

“No.” She tried to remember what her dad had said. “They're out in the desert somewhere.”

“They're really that cheap?”

“He said they're, like, way below what they should be.”

Hector stared at the card. He grew quiet, holding it between his thumb and finger like a slide. Lyle felt a misty pride, as though someone were watching her from an audience. The someone looked like her mother but was smoking a cigarette and wearing tall zippered boots. Lyle flipped the little switch on the boom box to
RADIO
: a staticky pop, then the gooey strains of “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”

“God, I hate this song,” she said.

Hector wasn't listening. “I think I'm in love with you,” he said softly.

“From the bottom of your heart?” she joked, lolling her head like Stevie Wonder. She was making fun of a blind person.

“No,” he said. “More than that.”

Lyle's heart was pounding. “Don't be stupid. How can it be more than that?”

“I don't know. From the underness of my heart.”

“The underness?”

“You know. Below the bottom.”

She wrinkled her nose, showing how moronic he was. Secretly,
though, she imagined a hole under the earth, dark as a bomb shelter, his love hunkered down there in case the world got blown to pieces. A devotion that would survive anything. Lyle liked the idea of this. She touched Hector's hand, picturing Shannon Jarrell's face when she told her.

Camille watered the agapanthus, trying to figure out why Warren's shirts were spread out across the rosebushes. They'd been put out to dry, six of them in a row, like a chain of paper dolls. Evidently he'd washed them himself. It wouldn't have upset her so much, except that he'd been taking his shirts to the cleaner's for fifteen years. It was a beautiful day, clear and breezy, eddies of darker green moving through the lawn. Camille dragged the hose farther through the grass and watered the shirts, one after another, watching them darken under her spray.

Sometimes she doubted it—her suspicion that he was having an affair—but then Warren would come home from work with his sneakers on, flashing her those exhausted, frightened, shame-ridden looks, rushing to the phone before she could answer it. Last Sunday at dinner he'd drunk five glasses of water. Whatever he was hiding, he could barely look her in the eye. He'd ordered new furniture for her, but if this was meant to soothe his conscience it didn't seem to be working.

Inside again, she took off her cashmere shawl and hung it on the peg in the kitchen. She'd begun wearing the thing defiantly, even when it was warm out. Let the kids make fun of her: What the hell did they know about fashion? They could whistle like moronic cowboys, but the girl at Nordstrom had called it “gorgeous.” When Camille had gone back, days later, the girl had remembered her, wrapping her in the shawl and showing her off to the other salesclerks as if she were a vision of glamour.

Camille went to the bathroom and changed her tampon, drop
ping it in the trash. Stress must have messed up her cycle. She should have been ecstatic, or at least wonderfully relieved. Hadn't she spent the last few weeks puffing cigarettes, praying that the problem would go away, gulping smoke like poison? Or at least, isn't that what she'd been doing unconsciously? And lo and behold, she wasn't pregnant after all, her problems on the embryo front were solved.

She was mysteriously, savagely disappointed.

She wandered into the kitchen, where the kids were sitting at the table. It seemed like they were always in the kitchen. Didn't they ever use the other rooms? Camille stepped over Mr. Leonard, who was staring miserably at the bag of Cool Ranch Doritos being demolished by her children.

“Why were you watering Dad's shirts?” Lyle asked her.

“Because he left them in the garden.”

Lyle seemed to accept this. They all did, in fact. Since she'd cursed that night in the living room, they'd regarded Camille with a leery sort of awe. She pointed at the bag on the table. “What does that mean exactly? Cool Ranch?”

“Means delicious,” Dustin said.

“Means they can't call them Powdery Gunk,” Lyle said.

Dustin closed his eyes. “There's a ranch, and it's cool, and you're, like, kicking back with all the other Doritos.”

Camille nodded and began to wash out the pot to the coffeemaker.

“Hey,” Dustin said. “Aren't you going to tell us about the food pyramid?”

“You're old enough to make your own decisions.”

They seemed disappointed. Camille wondered if she'd been wrong about them, if maybe on some level—deep down—they actually looked forward to her nagging. Jonas seemed particularly forlorn. He was dressed head to toe in orange again, the third time this week. She'd forgotten to buy him more orange socks at Nordstrom. Perhaps this was why he seemed angry, refusing to catch her eye or even look up from the table.

Lyle got up, as if annoyed by her presence, and Camille made up an excuse to follow her, trailing her into her room. She had an overwhelming desire to confide in her daughter, not only about Warren's being in love with another woman, but about her quaky, unexpected grief over not being pregnant. Lyle ignored her, lean
ing into the bathroom mirror to put on some lipstick. Camille was amazed to see that it was pink.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

Camille nodded. The bathroom smelled like a fashion magazine. Makeup was strange enough—had she begun wearing perfume? “What's the matter with Jonas? Is he upset for some reason?”

Lyle shrugged. “Maybe his feet hurt.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were supposed to pick him up from fencing today. At two. He waited for an hour and then walked home by himself, all the way from the rec center.”

“Oh shit.” Camille shut her eyes. “I've had a lot on my mind. I'm rewriting
Earth to My Body,
the voiceover. It's been a bad week.”

“Don't you mean
summer
?”

She opened her eyes, trying to dispel the image of her son trudging up Portuguese Bend Road in his fencing jacket. “Does Jonas feel that way?”

“Why do you think he dresses in orange?”

“I haven't the faintest idea,” Camille said.

“God, Mom, wake up. He's sending up a flare. The other day I dropped him off at the mall, and he kept talking about how he might get abducted like Mandy Rogers. He sounded
excited.
”

“Why would he want to be Mandy Rogers?”

“Are you kidding? It's like a lovefest. Have you driven by her house lately?”

Camille's heart lodged in her chest. The thought of Mandy Rogers's lawn, covered in prayers and toy cowboy hats and
WE LOVE YOU
spelled out in flowers, made her want to cry. She couldn't drive by the place without thinking of Lyle. What would she ever do if she disappeared? Camille tried to pretend that her sons meant just as much to her, that losing them would be exactly the same, but deep in her heart she knew this wasn't true. Once, when Lyle was a baby, Camille had locked her in the car by accident. She'd been utterly undone, trapped outside the window as Lyle screamed and flailed and kicked, trying to escape the plastic prison of her car seat. It was like watching someone drown. Camille had no choice but to leave Lyle where she was and run to
find a phone. She still remembered them vividly, the worst fifteen minutes of her life: waiting for the police to arrive, Lyle wailing so hard she'd begun to claw at her face, Camille weeping hysterically outside and trying to pry bricks from a wall to smash the window.

She wanted a cigarette—a deep, ferocious craving—and then was ashamed of thinking of it. There was a radio sitting on the shelf, plugged into the wall near the bathtub. Noticing the stupidity of this arrangement made her feel slightly less awful. “Lyle, for heaven's sake. Please don't put the radio there.”

“I like to listen to it in the shower.”

“You'll electrocute yourself.” Camille squinted at the radio, which had a sticker on it that said
PANTERA
. “Where did you get this anyway?”

“Someone gave it to me.”

“Who?”

“Hector,” she said quietly.

A boy. Camille felt happy for her—also strangely bereft. “Someone from your class?”

“No. He's older.” Lyle fiddled with her belt. “Actually, you know him.”

“I do?”

She turned to Camille, as though craving her approval. A pale, awkward girl in lipstick. Was it possible that all her hostility, her inscrutable annoyance, was actually fear? “Hector?” Lyle said. “The guy who works at the gate?”

Camille laughed. “The one with the mustache?”

Lyle's face turned red. It was an awful face, her lips sucked in like an old woman's. Camille stared at her daughter's lipstick.

“He doesn't speak English.”

“He speaks perfect English,” Lyle said, slamming the door to the medicine cabinet. “They came here when he was four. Anyway, what difference would it make?”

“There's a Spanish sticker on his radio,” Camille said lamely.

“That's a
band.
Jesus. Why am I even talking to you?” Lyle narrowed her eyes, her face red now but not from embarrassment. “We're having sex, Mom. I'd know if he spoke English, wouldn't I?”

“You're having
sex
? With a man you barely know?”

“I know him perfectly well.”

“Is he here legally?”

“Oh Jesus. Wow. I knew you were full of shit with your acts of kindness, but I didn't know you were racist.”

“I'm not racist. Please don't say that. I just don't think you should be having sex with some strange man.”

“You mean a
Mexican
man,” Lyle said. “Who works in a guardhouse.”

Camille ignored this. “Do you even know where he lives?”

“Jesus. I've been to his house.”

“He owns a
house
?”

“Mexican-Americans can't own houses?”

“That's not what I said. I'm just wondering how he can afford one.”

“He lives with some roommates. They own it together.” Lyle looked at Camille, her pink mouth pressed into a smile. “We go there to fuck.”

Camille couldn't speak. She left Lyle in the bathroom and went into the kitchen and turned on the sink, picturing some men with grubby baseball caps watching her daughter through a peephole. She shook this racist, disturbing image from her head. Who did the bastard think he was? Maybe he'd preyed on other girls as well. It would be a good job to have, if you wanted to sleep with people's daughters. Trembling, Camille flipped through her Rolodex and found the number for Herradura Estates management. She picked up the phone, wondering if she could control her voice, but couldn't bring herself to dial. It was too much—the thought of Lyle despising her for the rest of her life. Perhaps Warren would know what to do. He'd said he'd be at the office all day, working on some elevations. A twang of love went through her. She dialed his office, longing to hear his voice.

Music thudded up the driveway. Pantera? Camille peered out the window, poised for attack, but it was only a beautiful blond girl slouched behind the wheel of a convertible Bug. She was wearing a tank top and sunglasses. Lyle came out of the house in one of her gigantic T-shirts, sweatshirt wrapped around her waist, laughing at something Camille couldn't hear. Her face in its garish lipstick looked like a woman's. Camille started to cry. She stood there while the convertible backed down the driveway, listening to the phone ring and ring and ring.