One Door From Heaven

strictly true.
        He didn't chase women, ogle them, or seem to have any interest in the secondary sex characteristics that preoccupied most men and made them such endearingly manipulable creatures. If a total babe in a thong bikini walked past Preston, he wouldn't notice her unless she happened to be a UFO abductee who also carried an alien-human hybrid baby spawned during a steamy weekend of extraterrestrial lust aboard the mother ship.
        Under certain circumstances, however, the doom doctor did have a passion for Sinsemilla that he-and these were the perfect words for the act-visited upon her. In a motor home, even in a large one, when a family lives on the road all year, an inevitable intimacy arises that would be stressful even if every member of the family were a saint; and the Maddoc family currently fell three saints short of that ideal composition. Even if you could avoid seeing things that you didn't want to see, you couldn't always avoid hearing them, and even if you clamped pillows over your ears at night and created an acceptable deafness, you couldn't escape knowing all sorts of things that you didn't want to know, including that Preston Maddoc could get romantically inspired only when Sinsemilla was so deeply unconscious that she might as well have been dead.
        Leilani had shared a hundred nightmares' worth of creepy stuff with Micky and Mrs. D, but she hadn't been able to bring herself to mention this creepiness. Sure, old Preston qualified as a nutball's nut-ball. But he was tall, good-looking, well groomed, and financially independent, which was exactly three qualities more than required to attract women younger and even prettier than Sinsemilla; financial independence alone ought to have ensured that he would never have to settle for a drug-gobbling, electroshocked, road-kill-obsessed, moon-dancing freak who had simultaneously too much past and none at all, and who came with two disabled children. Clearly one thing that won Preston's heart was old Sinsemilla's frequent drug-induced near-comas and her willingness to allow him to use her while she lay inert and insensate and as unaware as mud-which was an arrangement you didn't want to think too much about, considering his fascination with death.
        Something else also attracted Preston to Sinsemilla, a quality that no other woman could-or might want to-offer, but Leilani was not quite able to put a name to it. In truth, though she sensed the existence of this mystery at the heart of their strange relationship, she didn't often wonder about it, because she already knew too much of what bonded them and was afraid of knowing more.
        So while Sinsemilla read In Watermelon Sugar, while Dr. Doom surfed the Net for the latest saucer news, while all three of them ate breakfast, and while no one mentioned the snake, Leilani made notes in her journal, using a modified form of shorthand that she'd invented and that only she could read. She wanted to complete her account of the incident with the snake while the details were still fresh in memory, but at the same time, she recorded observations about their family breakfast, including most of what Preston said.
        Recently she'd been thinking about being a writer when she grew up, assuming that on the eve of her upcoming tenth birthday she was able to avoid the gift of eternal life as a nine-year-old. She hadn't given up on her plan to grow or purchase a set of fabulous hooters with which to bedazzle a nice man, but a girl couldn't rely entirely on her chest, her face, and one pretty leg. Writing fiction remained reputable work, in spite of some of the peculiar people who practiced the art. She'd read that one of the difficulties of being a writer was finding fresh material, and she'd realized that her mother and her stepfather might be a writer's gold mine if you were fortunate enough to survive them.
        "This situation in Utah," Preston said, scowling at the screen of his laptop, "is highly suspicious."
        On and off, he'd been talking about the blockades on all highways leading into southern Utah and the manhunt for the band of drug lords who were said to be armed like sovereign states.
        "Let's never forget how in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the government kept people away from the alien-contact zone with a false story about a nerve-gas spill."
        To Preston, Close Encounters of the Third Kind wasn't a science-fiction film, but a thinly