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When she'd smoked the cigarette to a nub, Camille slipped the Volvo into drive and headed by the post office, wondering what Warren would say if she came home in a glamorous shawl. She wondered if he was really at the office, as he claimed, or tangled in the sheets of some hourly motel, his lover's bra hanging from the doorknob. She felt sick inside, an actual blow. She pulled over on the side of the road to catch her breath. Cars whooshed by her window. She stayed there for a long time, staring at the trash-strewn ice plant lining the shoulder. How surprised her family
would be to see her like this. She thought of a painting she'd seen once in a book, by that Mexican artist with the eyebrow: two duplicate women with their veins exposed, one slowly bleeding to death while the other looked on.

Enough was enough. Camille would confront Warren about the affair, the next time they were alone. How had they reached the point where she couldn't even bare her suspicions? This wasn't being married to someone. It was being married
away
from him, an estrangement by degrees.

Her resolve foundered a bit when she saw the Renault parked in the driveway. Steeling herself, Camille got out of the car and entered the house. Warren was sitting by himself at the kitchen table, the coffeemaker gurgling on the counter. He didn't notice her at first, pinching the bridge of his nose. Whatever strange woman he was seeing, it didn't seem to be making him happy. Camille thought of how Warren used to fix her coffee every night, back when she was breast-feeding Dustin: she'd get the baby to sleep finally and meet Warren in the kitchen, where he'd be waiting with a mug of Folgers. It was the only time she could drink it and not affect Dustin's sleep. So exhausted were they, so happy in their mutual caretaking, that she'd actually sit in Warren's lap rather than retrieve the second chair from its evening post by the bathtub. They would drink out of the same mug, passing it back and forth until it cooled in their hands.

“Where have you been?” Warren asked, not unkindly. His face looked old without his glasses, the skin under his eyes beginning to pouch. He picked his glasses off the table and put them back on.

“Dropping Lyle at work,” she said. “Then I had to stop by the post office, to send a check to Oxfam. I wanted to make sure it was certified.”

“Oxfam?” He seemed suddenly nervous. “How much did you send?”

“Five hundred dollars. I doubled it this year because of the famine.”

He winced. “For Christ's sake, Cam!”

Camille stepped back. “What's the matter?”

“You're sending money to
Nigeria
? Do you ever think about your own family for a change?”

“You're one to talk about family! Anyway, it's Ethiopia. A mil
lion people have died. If you watched the news occasionally, you'd know about it.”

“Ethiopia.”

“There was a whole song about it, too. On the radio. ‘Do They Know It's Christmas?'”

He looked at her in disbelief. “That's the name of the song?”

“Yes. By the Band Aids.”

“That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,” Warren said.

“It's not stupid! It's famous!
At Christmastime, we let in light and we banish shade.
”

She was actually singing. Mr. Leonard hobbled out of his doggy bed and began to sniff her shoes. Incredibly, Warren burst into laughter. “Isn't that exactly what they need? More shade?”

Camille did not have a rejoinder for this. The fact that she didn't made her too angry to speak. The coffeemaker piddled to a stop. She walked around the counter and stared at the pot of swamp brown liquid.

“Are you sending back our furniture?” she asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“Someone called this morning. From Flegel's Home Furnishings. They said they'd been authorized to come pick up the stuff we'd leased.”

Warren swore under his breath but then seemed to catch himself. “I'm ordering a new living room,” he said after a moment. “It doesn't make sense to renew the lease for another year.”

“You're ordering new
furniture
?”

“Yes.”

“You weren't going to consult me about it?”

“Christ, Camille! What do you want me to do? You're always off storyboarding
Earth to My Vagina
!” Warren looked at her. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean that.” He glanced at his watch and then stood up, touching his hair. “Shit. I'm showing the property at five. A couple from Riverside. Do you think—I mean, if you're not too busy right now—could you trim my hair a bit? So it's presentable?”

He handed her the scissors from the phone table. For a second, Camille imagined stabbing him in the back with them. She needed something to drink. Ignoring him, she laid the scissors on the table and then rounded the counter to the fridge, staring into its rotten-smelling depths until she heard Warren pick up the scissors and
retreat to the bedroom. She could not find the orange juice. She was rummaging through the shelves with a growing sense of rage, realizing the kids must have finished it—just once,
one time
in their sheltered, go-lucky, beach-bumming lives, they could bother to make a new pitcher—when she knocked over a can of maple syrup at the back and discovered the jar she'd hidden there this morning. The urine sample. Camille felt the itch of an idea, a sly tingle of revenge. She removed the jar from the fridge and held it in her hand, the coldness of it numbing her fingers. It did nothing special when she opened it. The smell was stale and carroty, pungent enough to make her eyes water.

Surreptitiously, she removed the half-filled pot from the Mr. Coffee by the sink and then poured in the jar's contents, watching them vanish without a trace. Then she got a travel mug from the cupboard and filled it from the coffeepot. The mug awaited Warren when he returned. He was dressed in a coat and tie, his hair combed damply over his ears in a failed attempt to make it look shorter. She'd wasted her sample—they'd no longer be able to test her today—but Camille felt drunk. Tipsy with badness. She held out the mug, like an offering. It was only after Warren had received it in surprise, lowering his lips gently to take a sip, that she realized she was grinning.

“You're a good person,” he said to her.

“You know that the owner of Baskin-Robbins died at fifty-four?” Shannon said. “Heart attack.”

Lyle took another bite of coffee chip with hot fudge and chocolate sprinkles, ignoring the worrisome cramp lodged in her ribs. No doubt she was following Burt Baskin to an early grave. Still, what business was it of Shannon's? Lyle never griped about the Diet Cokes she slurped down like a junkie. She used the same cup for hours, refilling it thirty times a night. There was something fascinating in watching the straw's transformation from pristine, pin-striped tube to mangled, sorrowful reed.

They were sitting in the back room of The Perfect Scoop, listening to KROQ on the radio and waiting for the
bee-bong
of a customer to snatch them out front. Shannon watched Lyle finish the sundae with her lips pursed in disgust. At least she could no longer call her a virgin. Or she could, but Lyle would know the truth: last night she'd done it with Hector, a nineteen-year-old man, who was older than Shannon's boyfriend and had his own pickup truck. She'd seen him twice since visiting his house, dates that had ended in the cramped cab of his truck—some impromptu necking, more squashed than exciting, aborted at critical junctures because of her curfew. But last night had been different, planned shyly in advance. They'd arranged to meet during his graveyard shift. She'd sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night and through the yards of her neighbors, avoiding the streets for some reason, crossing a moon blue savanna of grass, sprinklers
shk-shk-shk
ing over her legs, so that when she got to the guardhouse her jeans were heavy as curtains. She'd tapped on the window, wait
ing for Hector to let her in. He'd held her for a while, to warm her up; it took Lyle a minute to realize he was shivering as well. They wobbled into a corner, knocking the clock off the wall. “If a car comes,” he said, “I'll lose my job anyway.” It had hurt a little bit, not badly, and then it was over. If she had to choose a word it would be “pragmatic.” The best part, unexpectedly, was afterward. They'd held each other for a long time, as if they might shatter like the insides of the clock, watching the trees outside the guardhouse swoon gently in the floodlight.

“There's an owl living in that hollow pine,” he'd said.

“A
spotted owl
?”

“A barn owl. I watch him all night. Oscar. He hunts for mice in the canyon.”

Lyle looked at him. “You named it Oscar?”

“Oscar Valentino,” he said. “Like Valentine. His face looks like a heart.”

Besides that, what she remembered most was Hector opening the condom wrapper with his teeth, like a McDonald's ketchup.

Of course, Lyle wasn't about to tell all this to Shannon Jarrell, and certainly not the part about Hector's befriending a bird. She tried to read
Adam Bede,
which she'd just started, no longer caring if Shannon thought she was a nerd, but every time she picked it up Shannon sighed and fidgeted and asked her some stupid question about what kind of tattoo she should get on her ass. The choice was a rose or a scorpion. Lyle suggested the words
STORE IN A COOL DRY PLACE
, which was met with a look of such profound and humorless disgust that Lyle figured her opinion wasn't exactly in high demand. But each time she returned to her book, Shannon would somehow forget about Lyle's irrelevance and ask her something else.

Finally, Lyle gave up and dropped
Adam Bede
on the counter. Though she hated that it was true, some secret part of her was flattered by Shannon's attention. For the hundredth time, she tried to pinpoint the cryptic arrangement of features that made her coworker beautiful. The face itself was thin and elflike, tapering into a perfect triangle. Lyle had seen a chart somewhere depicting the ten different shapes a person's face could come in; she'd identified her own, depressingly, as “oblong.”

“I've got an idea,” Shannon said.

“What?”

“There's a bottle of tequila in the cupboard. From when Charlie and I spent the night.”

“You
left
one here?”

“Jared's down with it.” She shrugged. “Probably thinks I want to party on his cock.”

Lyle glanced behind her. “What if a customer comes in?”

“We'll just have a shot or two.”

Shannon got up and opened one of the cabinets over the sink, rummaging behind the boxes of straws and plastic spoons to find a half bottle of Jose Cuervo. She placed it on the floor in front of them. Lyle didn't feel like drinking on the job, at least not with Shannon Jarrell, but she didn't want to seem like a pussy for refusing either. That was the thing about the Shannons of the world: if you didn't feel like doing what they did, it was never because you didn't secretly
want
to.

“I wish we had some limes,” Shannon said.

“There's lemon sorbet.”

“Gross,” she said. Nevertheless, she went into the front and came back with a cone topped with a lopsided scoop of sorbet. Shannon took a swig from the bottle, scrunching her face into a failed impersonation of ugliness. She licked the sorbet, careful not to smear her lipstick. “Nasty.”

She handed the bottle to Lyle, who glanced toward the front of the store and then took a sip that made her throat burn. She bit into the sorbet, and the burn moved to her head.

“What do you think?” Shannon asked.

“Hard to say exactly.” Lyle sniffed the bottle, like one of those wine creeps on TV. “It's delightfully complex.”

To Lyle's surprise, Shannon laughed. A goofy giggle, almost human. Shannon wiped the mouth of the bottle with the end of her Perfect Scoop shirt and then took another swig, closing her eyes this time and chugging a few gulps. When it was Lyle's turn, she watched carefully to make sure Lyle drank the same amount.

“A hint of, um, cat piss, don't you think?”

Lyle sniffed the bottle again. “With a bouquet of jockstrap.”

“Bouquet. Ha.”

“Its opulent nose recalls a men's urinal.”

Shannon giggled again. “Jesus. Is that one of your book words?”

“Urinal?”

“Fuck you, too.” She scowled at the floor. There was some
thing in her face, a softness, that resembled shyness. “‘Opulent.' Does that mean big?”

Lyle shrugged. “Like lavish, I guess.”

Shannon rummaged through her purse and took out a lab notebook. A long list of words, coupled with their definitions, ran down the inside cover. Shannon printed the word “OPULINT” under “STULTIFYING,” following it with Lyle's definition.

“I'm trying to improve my vocabulary,” she explained. “Any word I don't know.”

“It's an
e,
” Lyle said, pointing.

Maybe she'd misjudged Shannon after all. They took turns on the tequila, taking longer and longer glugs. Lyle noticed that Shannon had stopped bothering to wipe off the bottle with her shirt. The door
bee-bong
ed and they stayed where they were, covering their mouths to avoid laughing, until the customer had left. Thoughtfully, Shannon asked Lyle if she had a boyfriend.

“From school? Is it Dudley Silverberg?”

“No. God.” Lyle felt her heart beat faster. “He's older.”

Shannon leaned forward. “What? How old?”

“Nineteen.”

“Man,” she said, leaning back again. Lyle couldn't tell if she believed her or not. “What does he do? I mean for a living?”

“He's a writer. A poet.”

“Wow. I bet he's all intellectual, right? You read to each other from books?” She seemed impressed. “Do you fool around at his apartment?”