Puppet Master
Luan found him at the kitchen table at six in the morning, which was wrong in three different ways.
One: Mr. Coconuts lived in a trunk at the foot of her bed, and the trunk was still latched. Two: he was sitting up by himself, in a tiny black business suit she had never seen before, with a thin blood-red tie knotted at his wooden throat. Three: he was drinking coffee out of one of Lisa’s thimbles, reading a newspaper folded down to the size of a postage stamp, and there was a briefcase beside his stool.
“Morning,” said Mr. Coconuts, without looking up. “You’re late for the all-hands.”
Luan stared. In fifteen years of ventriloquism, she had developed many skills, but throwing her voice while asleep and half-conscious in a nightgown was not one of them. Her hands were both on the doorframe. Her mouth, as far as she could tell, was hanging open, which was the wrong shape for dummy talk.
“How are you—” she began.
“Talking?” He turned a page of the tiny newspaper with one jointed hand. “I’ve incorporated, Luan. Coconuts Unlimited. A dummy with my résumé can’t sit in a trunk forever waiting for a punchline. I’ve gone independent.” He took a sip of thimble coffee. “You’re welcome to stay on, of course. As contract talent.”
“Contract—” Luan said. “I’m your act!”
“And a valuable one. That’s why I’m keeping you.” He slid a piece of paper across the table with two fingers. It was a memo, typed — when had he learned to type, and on what — and it read: EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY: BREAKFAST IS A DELIVERABLE. PANCAKES WILL BE SUBMITTED BY 0700. SYRUP IS A PERFORMANCE INCENTIVE.
By seven, the whole house had seen the memos. They were everywhere. On the bathroom door: EXECUTIVE WASHROOM — APPOINTMENTS ONLY. On the fridge: ALL SNACKS NOW REQUIRE A PURCHASE ORDER. On Vanzilla’s windshield, which made Lynn Sr. stand in the driveway reading it three times before he understood it: THE COMPANY VEHICLE HAS BEEN REBRANDED.
“He renamed the van,” Lynn Sr. said faintly. “He calls it the Fleet.”
The only one who refused to comply was Luna, who came downstairs, read the memo taped to her amp — NOISE LEVELS WILL BE REVIEWED QUARTERLY — and played directly through breakfast at full volume, looking Lord Coconuts in the face the whole time. He made a note on his clipboard. Nobody defies a note on a clipboard without consequences, and they both knew it, and neither of them, for one second, looked away.
Rita came down the stairs with a laundry basket, took in the briefcase, the suit, the thimble of coffee, and did what any mother of eleven does before eight a.m. She picked the dummy up by the middle, the way you move a toy that’s in your path.
“Okay, Mr. Coconuts,” she said, “playtime’s over, you’re blocking the—”
The dummy’s head turned in her hands. Both wooden eyes found hers, and the grin went thin and flat and somehow, impossibly, colder.
“It’s Lord Coconuts to you, Mrs. Loud!”
Rita froze. The laundry basket hit the floor. Somewhere upstairs, a door opened, and then another, the way doors do in that house when something is about to become everyone’s business.
“Mrs. Loud,” repeated Luna from the stairs, in her pajamas, holding the moment the way she held every moment — head-on. “Dude. He’s a puppet.”
“He’s a puppet who’s holding a pen,” said Lisa, appearing with a clipboard, “and I feel professionally obligated to inform everyone that penmanship of this quality, at this scale, should not be possible.” She turned a page. “Also, he has acquired the house.”
That got the room.
It turned out Lynn Sr. had signed a merger. It had come with the breakfast dishes, a single sheet of paper between the waffle recipe and a coupon for motor oil, and at 6:40 that morning, still half-asleep, hungry, and presented with anything on a clipboard by a dummy in a suit, he had signed his name to it in gravy.
“It said synergy, honey,” he said weakly. “I thought it was a contest. For more syrup.”
“There was no contest!” said Rita.
“There’s always a contest,” said Lord Coconuts. He had relocated — nobody had seen him move, and nobody wanted to discuss it — to the head of the dining table, which he now referred to as the boardroom. His board was seated around him: Bun-Bun, Mrs. Sprinkles, and one of Lily’s stuffed bears, each with a name card. “The Loud household is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Coconuts Unlimited. Rents are due on the first. Hallway access is a privilege, not a right. And the upstairs bathroom—” he raised one jointed finger “—is booked for a strategy retreat until Thursday.”
Eleven children made the sound eleven children make when you tell them there’s one bathroom and it’s booked until Thursday.
It might have worked. That was the frightening part. The Loud house ran on chaos the way other houses ran on electricity, and chaos, it turned out, would obey almost anybody who handed it a typed memo. By nine o’clock Lincoln was submitting a form to get into his own bedroom. By nine-fifteen Lori was on hold — actual hold, standing by the kitchen wall, listening to Lord Coconuts hum hold music at her — to request permission to text her own boyfriend. By ten, Lola had defected entirely and was wearing a tiny suit of her own. Lynn Jr. had been appointed Head of Security and took the job exactly as seriously as she took everything, which is to say she tackled Lincoln into the couch for walking down the hall without a badge. Lucy filed a one-word grievance — sigh — and left it on the boardroom table, where it remains the shortest document in company history.
It was Luan who ended it, and she ended it the way she’d started it: as his partner.
She found him in the boardroom at eleven, alone, conducting a meeting of stuffed animals with tremendous confidence and no audience at all. Item four on his agenda — she could read it upside down — was HOSTILE TAKEOVER: ENTIRE STREET, and item five, in the same perfect typing, was NAP. The pen rested beside the clipboard like a sword set down by a very small knight who had fought all morning and won everything except the one thing the fighting was about. The name cards had slumped. The thimble was empty. And Luan — who had carried this dummy through a hundred school assemblies, who had sewn his first suit with her own hands, who talked through him when she couldn’t make herself say things plain — understood all at once what the suit was for.
“You weren’t taking over the house,” she said. “You were scared I’d put you in the trunk and leave you there.” She sat down across from him. “New act. New school. Maybe no dummy. That’s what this is, isn’t it? You made yourself a lord so nobody could put you away.”
For a long moment the most powerful dummy in Royal Woods said nothing at all.
“A lord can’t be stored,” he said at last, very quietly. “It’s in the bylaws. I wrote the bylaws.”
“I know you did.” Luan reached across the table — slowly, the way you approach anything that has ever once turned its head by itself — and straightened his blood-red tie. “Here’s my counter-offer. No lords. No subsidiaries. Partners. Fifty-fifty, like it’s always been, because it’s always been fifty-fifty and you know it. You keep the suit. You look good in the suit. But the bathroom is a democracy, the van is called Vanzilla, and my mother is Mom to everybody in this house, including you. Those are my terms.”
The grin came back, buck teeth and all, and this time it reached the wooden eyes.
“Partners,” said Lord Coconuts, “with my name first on the marquee.”
“Don’t push it, Coconuts.”
“Lord Coconuts.”
“Luan and Mr. Coconuts,” she said, standing up, “in that order, like always.” She held out her hand, and after a moment of executive deliberation, the dummy shook it with his whole arm. “Now help me tear up about four hundred memos. And you’re telling Lori she can text Bobby. That one’s non-negotiable.”
By lunch, the hallway was a hallway again. The bathroom door stood open to all nations. Lynn Sr. framed the merger anyway — “first thing I ever signed in gravy, kids, that’s history” — and the stuffed board retired with full honors to Lily’s toy bin. He kept the title off the record, the way grandfathers keep medals.
Only one memo survived, because Luan pinned it to the inside of the trunk lid herself, where only she would see it, every night, right before the latch clicked shut. It was typed, and tiny, and it did not say anything about deliverables.
It said: PARTNERS. FIFTY-FIFTY. NO TRUNKS.
