Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon

said Mr. Hogue, returning from the family room.
    “We’re just coming now,” Daniel said. “Sorry. It’s just—man, this kitchen is incredible.”
    Hogue gave a sour nod, lips pressed together. There was an obvious bulge in his right hip pocket now, and what appeared to be a table-tennis paddle protruding from the left one.
    “Incredible,” he agreed.
    In the family room, when they joined him there, Hogue stole a well-thumbed paperback copy of Donald Trump’s autobiography which was lying out on the coffee table, and in the small, tobacco-stained den off the foyer he took a little brass paperweight in the shape of a reclining pasha with curled slippers. When they went out to the garage, where, along with a long, slender automobile hidden under a canvas cover, there was a well-stocked workbench, he filched a box of nails, a Lufkin tape measure, and something else that Daniel couldn’t quite determine the nature of. The thefts were blatant and apparently unself-conscious, and by the time they got upstairs to the second guest bedroom, Christy, too, was watching in a kind of jolly dread as Mr. Hogue worked the place over. He took a souvenir Space Needle, and a rubber coin purse, and a package of deodorizing shoe inserts. When he led the young couple at last into the master bedroom, his pockets were jangling.
    He stopped short as he entered the room, so that Daniel and Christy nearly collided with him. He looked around at the big four-poster bed, the heavy Eastlake dresser and wardrobe, the walls covered in an unusual dark paper the red of old leather books. Once again Hogue marveled, in the same openmouthed, oddly crestfallen manner, as if the bedroom’s decor, like the living room’s, came to him, somehow, as a blow. As in the living room, there was no indication that the sellers had been expecting anyone to come through. The bed was unmade, and there were some ruffled white blouses and several bras and pairs of women’s underpants heaped on the floor by the door. Hogue crossed the dark red room to a door opposite, which appeared to give onto a screened-in sleeping porch. Windows on either side of the door let in some of the bright September light pouring through the outer windows of the porch.
    “I’d sure like to lie down in that hammock out there,” Hogue said, with surprising wistfulness. He gave the knob an experimental twist. It was locked. He pressed his face to the glass. “God, I’m tired.”
    He reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette and found nothing there. He looked back and smiled thinly at Daniel and Christy, as if they had played a cruel trick on him, hiding the only solace of a weary and overworked man. Then he patted down all his clattering pockets until he came up with a tattered Pall Mall. He went over to a marble-topped nightstand beside the bed and pulled open its drawer. He scrabbled around inside until he found a book of matches. His hands were shaking so badly now that he dropped the cigarette. Then he dropped the burning match. At last he succeeded in getting the thing lit. He blew a plume of smoke toward the pillows of the big, disorderly bed.
    “You’ll get the sun almost all day long in this room,” he said, dreamily. “It’s a shame to paper it over so dark.” Then he flicked ashes onto the polished fir floor.
    “All right, Mr. Hogue,” said Christy, with all the sharpness of tone she was capable of mustering. “I guess we’ve seen enough.”
    “All right,” said Hogue, though he didn’t move. He just stood there, looking out at the canvas hammock that was hung between two pillars of the sleeping porch.
    “We’ll meet you downstairs, how about?” Daniel said. “How about you just give us a minute to talk things over between ourselves. You know. Look around one more time. You can’t rush into something like this, right?”
    Hogue swallowed, and some of the old flush of anger seemed to return now to the tips of his ears and to the skin at the back of his neck.